There are many software tools for prospect research these days. Especially for newer researchers, how do you decide which one, or whether you should purchase more than one? The prices and offerings vary considerably and can make choosing feel random and confusing! There is a general rule that can help guide you and illuminate key distinctions between choices. It also happens to be very similar to a key distinction between what makes a good and credible information source.

But first, let’s talk cake!

As I was growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, my mother’s hobby was baking and decorating elaborate cakes. Sharks chased people, dolls wore cascading dresses of flowers, and cornucopias overflowed with abundance. And underneath all of the creative icing-packed designs was a delicious, moist and fluffy cake. People had to be coaxed to cut through her gorgeous designs – this demanded a great taste to complete the experience!

Did my mother bake her cakes from scratch, or did she use a boxed cake mix?

Why, she used a boxed cake mix, of course!

Her favorite brand was Duncan Hines boxed cake mixes. And the proof was in the tasting. She did bake some cakes from scratch and I could tell the difference. I know there are some amazing bakers out there who can make a moist, fluffy, delicious cake from scratch, but my mom could make one every single time — with the boxed mix.

Because boxed cake mixes are a lot like algorithms…

When you need a reliable outcome for a simple task, there is usually an automated solution available or on its way. Information solution companies can reliably give us the equivalent of a moist, fluffy, delicious chocolate or vanilla cake. The ingredients in a wealth screening, for example, are similar across products and the algorithms are always getting better. They give us a meaningful segmentation of our constituent base.

Then it’s up to us prospect research professionals to add the icing — the fundraising insight and action.

But the minute you stray from needing a simple cake, the boxed cake mixes fall short and we are back to baking from scratch with good recipes.

And herein lies the biggest distinction in and among prospect research tools.

When we use the boxed mix equivalent of a research tool, the algorithm makes the choices over what information is best matched to our prospect. This works really well, until it doesn’t.

For example, we know that a wealth screening typically underestimates the wealthiest, because the algorithm needs visible asset values to calculate a capacity rating. And yet we know that the higher the net worth the fewer the visible assets.

So, if we want to be sure we don’t underestimate our prospect’s capacity, we use the wealth screening to segment our thousands of constituents and then focus on a highly rated segment to manually research. And once again we are faced with which tool(s) to use or purchase.

If you are serious about doing serious research, you need a tool that lets you choose the ingredients for your own recipe. In other words, you need to be able to search the original source databases to craft your own customized profile.

A basic tenet of research is that you want to get as close to the primary or originating source of information as you can. Because we know that information can get corrupted as it passes through multiple sources.

Maybe your prospect uses a nickname or has other quirks that an algorithm isn’t trained to untangle. Searching through the database sources yourself will allow you to create a better profile than the algorithm alone.

As you might imagine now, hybrid opportunities for creating great tasting cakes and master piece profiles abound. But they don’t have to confuse you as you try to decide what to buy.

Many research tools offer you the option to use the information matching algorithm AND search independently within the same software platform. This is like having your boxed cake mix AND all the key ingredients available to mix and match with your mix (like chocolate chips or instant coffee, yum!).

If I drop the cake mix talk, here’s how I might lay out some of the products available to us along a normal distribution illustrated below.

This isn’t a perfect, or even scientific, illustration, but hopefully it helps you begin to sort the tools into different types. Once you are able to do this at the fundamental level of access to source information, you can now add different layers of evaluation.

You will want to do your usual assessment of items such as the following:

• How easy is the tool to navigate and use based on who will be using it?
• Can I manipulate the information the way I need to for the products I deliver internally?
• Does it have the source databases for the type of constituency we have?
• Does it test well when I enter our typical best prospects?
• Is the pricing structure a good fit for my organization?
• How responsive is their customer service?
• …and more

Machine learning has entered our field and that will add a layer of complexity to tool choices. I expect that algorithms or models created using big data will be offered for use to organizations with smaller data sets. And as this practice spreads and competition pushes prices downward, I’m going to have to eat my cake and come up with a new analogy!

As a fundraising prospect research professional, how would you approach this question:

Companies House in the UK was founded in which year? 1844, 2001, or 2015

Would you approach it differently if I told you first that Toby Savin had written on the Helen Brown blog about a fantastic resource in the UK? If you just said, “yes,” then you are in good company!

Now, just for a bit of fun, stop reading and go ahead and find the answer. Then come back to see if you’re right.

If you were part of the #ResearchPride Global Scavenger Hunt this year, you’ve already been on this quest. And like it or not, many of you got the wrong answer. Hang in there! I’m going to share why that’s okay.

The ‘Year of the Founding’ Plot Thickens!

At first this really confounded me. People gave me three different answers: 1844, 2001, or 2015. I couldn’t figure out where some of those years were coming from. So, I asked one of the most precise and detail-oriented researchers I know – Bryan Campbell – who is a member of the Prospect Research Institute.

Bryan tackled this in classic Miss Marple style. Much like Agatha Christie’s fictional detective, he used his past experiences to approach the current problem. While Bryan never lived in Miss Marple’s St. Mary Mead, he did work as a librarian. And he had to manage the “stacks” and find missing items.

At the library, he had to think like someone harried and new to the classification systems. What are the common mistakes they would make in shelving the books? Tasked with helping me figure out where these unidentified years the Companies House was founded came from, he approached it much the same way.

What was his theory?

Bryan speculated that people started by going to the Helen Brown blog post written by Toby Savin. If you were viewing the blog post in search-engine-results-style you might see these clips:

…astonishingly popular across many sectors of the economy since being introduced in the UK in 2001,

What’s more, it’s free to access this data: in 2015, a Beta version of the register – freely available to anyone with an internet connection – was launched as part of the UK…

How often are we guilty of scanning the search results and not clicking through the links to fully read the reference? How carefully do we seek out corroborating sources that are unique and not simply citing each other?

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place to stop and take the search results at face value, but we aren’t finding a restaurant or birthday party venue. Researching gift prospects or finding scavenger hunt answers is not the time or place.

Because… it was limited liability partnerships (LLPs) that were introduced in the UK in 2001, and while internet access was opened up in 2015, Companies House was not founded in 2015. It was founded in 1844.

And really, if you stop for a second and think about it, as old and historied as the UK is, it would never have made sense for Companies House, a repository of company data, to have been founded after the year 2000.

Which brings us to Wikipedia, of all places! Wikipedia had a great article on Companies House, complete with the founding year and generous citations. And if you wanted to corroborate beyond Wikipedia, it gave you plenty of avenues to pursue.

Finding and Feeling the Research Pride

At first, I thought it was a bad idea to write about a common research error from the scavenger hunt. I don’t ever want people to feel stupid or inadequate. We researchers usually suffer from enough angst! Every one of us, myself included, make mistakes all the time.

I will never forget an exchange with a client in my first few years as a research consultant. I had delivered a profile with a pretty low capacity rating. He wanted to talk about it. He felt there was more money there. As we walked through the profile, he pointed out the very big mortgage. I had considered the mortgage as a sign of less wealth. He pointed out that the prospect had to have a pretty high income to get approved for that big of a mortgage.

Of course, he was right! I admitted as much and added another nugget of knowledge to my ever-increasing experience as a prospect researcher.

Research Pride isn’t about being perfect or 100% accurate. Research Pride is about belonging to a profession that mentors, teaches, develops best practices, and nurtures and encourages continual growth and improvement – a profession that fosters excellence.

We live in the internet age and it is both glorious and fulfilling, and also rife with misleading and inaccurate (dare I say dangerous?) information. Information technology introduces swift and significant changes to our tools and our work processes on a daily basis.

All of this can be disruptive and difficult to navigate. We need to own our mistakes, take time to untangle them, make changes, and share with others. Because we have Research Pride!

Thank you to everyone who participated in the 2021 Research Pride Global Scavenger Hunt, from the brains behind the event, to the clue holders, to the hunters. The talent in our field is jaw-dropping I am proud and honored to be considered a part of this profession.

Additional Resources

• 2021 #ResearchPride Scavenger Hunt | Learning Edge Blog | 2021 | The winners, the clues, and the answers are detailed here.
• #CareerCurious Interview with Helen Brown | #ChatBytes Podcast | 2021 | Helen shares her #ResearchPride story and more.
• Companies House: a treasure trove of info on UK companies | Toby Savin | Helen Brown Blog | 2020 | Find out about a UK research resource that might surprise you with its depth of information.

Does this statement make you cringe? “Hey! There’s a happy hour networking event in the conference center lobby tonight. Wanna go?” Or does it compel you to extend an invite to your friends? Or does it make you jump up energized and ready to meet new people?

Surprise! No matter what your answer is, you could be a networker.

According to Marissa King who wrote the book, Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection, there are three main types of networks people form:

• Conveners: Deep, close connections to a smaller group of people who are all friends with each other
• Brokers: Not quite as deep of connections, but connections among different groups of people
• Expansionists: Shallower relationships, but with exponentially more people

And I couldn’t help agree with her that networking – professional or personal – was never really about going into big crowds of unknown, strange people and collecting business cards. Networking is about creating authentic connections with other people that you want to know better.

And if you jump at the opportunity to go to that hypothetical happy hour in the conference center lobby, it probably has less to do with whether you are an extrovert or an introvert and more about yourgoals.

Here are three examples to illustrate the point of who might want to go to that hypothetical happy hour:

• Recent college graduate headed into second year of first full-time career job who wants to move out of nonprofit work with animals and into nonprofit work focused on climate change.
• Parent who just had third child that doesn’t sleep through the night and really wants to get dressed professionally and talk to other adults about the work that s/he loves!
• Accomplished professional who is exploring going solo as a consultant and wants to find out what problems people have that s/he could solve at a price they could pay.

Network for Goal

Happy Hours are the quintessential networking event, but networking happens every day in a million different ways. There is every reason to ditch the cliched happy hour and focus in on the kind of people you want to meet and in places where you feel more comfortable.

Sometimes you can even create your own places!

For example, let’s say you need to become a power user of your Salesforce database, but you haven’t found people online talking about the prospect research topics you need to learn the most. You could volunteer to host a Salesforce working group for your association chapter (like Apra) that meets quarterly on topics you need to tackle.

Now the full organizing power of your chapter is available to you. Is this selfish? Heck, no!

If you have the time and talent to offer your association chapter to organize and facilitate meetings, it becomes a win/win, not a win/lose. And it can give you the opportunity to create a convener network as you seek the skills and confidence to move forward in your career.

As an adult, developing close relationships requires more effort over a longer time because the opportunity to interact frequently, such as when attending school together, isn’t as available. To add to this barrier, in the world of prospect research, many times the people we want to connect with are geographically distant.

Creating the group you need and want to be a part of can help to
overcome these barriers. In the Salesforce working group example above, you might find that you become close to a handful of researchers, interacting socially and professionally, and meeting up live at conferences.

If you don’t want to create your own group, you can always join somebody else’s group. The Master Classes and group coaching calls at the Prospect Research Institute provide adult researchers with low pressure opportunities to connect with peers.

At the Institute you can get to know other members through video meetings and on Slack. Meetings are monthly, small, and have guided discussion, making it easy for you to participate. You share common interests and there is an expectation that you will ask for help and share great resources.

If you find yourself benefitting from different networks at the same time, you might be a broker. For example, you might be (a) active in a vendor online forum where you meet peers, (b) volunteer for your association chapter where you meet fellow members from a range of organizations, and (c) attend a course where you interact frequently with other learners.
You may have career goals that have you looking for skill building opportunities or exposure to multiple industry sectors.

Most professionals probably don’t cultivate expansionist networks, but if
you have ideas to share with the world, social media makes huge networks possible. And if you are looking for more exposure, but to the tune of thousands, not millions, you can craft content of interest to the audience you wish to attract and expand your career options considerably.

Convener, Broker, Expansionist – or a Hybrid

As prospect researchers we know all about isolating key criteria to help us identify the best prospects. Same goes with networking. Your goals could be as simple as knowing and talking research with other researchers or as complex as identifying potential mentors so you can move into a specific role, such as prospect management or fundraising analytics, or something in between.

In fact, you probably have multiple and overlapping goals. Networking can help you learn new skills, explore your profession, build confidence, and gain access to career opportunities. Think through and write down your goals, observe and experiment in different places, online and offline, and network your way to professional and social fulfillment!

Additional Resources

• Book: Social Chemistry: Decoding the Patterns of Human Connection
• Personal Website: www.marissaking.com
• Discover your own network signature: www.assessyournetwork.com
• What kind of networker are you? | Marissa King on HBR Ideacast (podcast)

No matter who you are, whether you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or the development coordinator at a local animal shelter, there comes a time when you need to work with someone who is uncooperative. Maybe even someone who isn’t “nice.” (It could even be a donor – gasp!)

And, of course, this is usually the exact same person you have zero authority to bend to your will.

Most of us understand the concept of reciprocity in relationships. If I do something for you, then you’ll do something for me. But knowing how to do that well in the (sometimes toxic) workplace can be really challenging for a lot of us. What works well in one workplace can bomb in another. And when the person you need to cooperate is hostile? Yikes!

What can you do about this? Go ask Deborah Drucker.

Deborah was a participant in the Prospect Research Institute’s Approach to Prospecting course and during a class discussion on communication with development officers she recommended the book, Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford.

(Nota bene: This often happens in the Institute’s class meetings. The robust life experiences of participants interact with course materials and discussion to create unique learning opportunities.)

I bought the book. It’s pretty dry. And yet, the first chapter has been revelatory!

Step one on being persuasive? “Assume all are potential allies.”

It sounds so simple. And yet, it felt like being cattle-branded!

(Disclaimer: I don’t really know what that feels like, but recognizing past mistakes can be acutely painful.)

One thing I had not considered before is that my failure to persuade an uncooperative person could have been my own fault. (Ouch!)

Here are some of the things that have gone through my head at various points in my career:

• She will NEVER help me with anything!
• How can he NOT understand that this has to be done? Is he stupid? Doesn’t he care about making this project successful?
• Look how she gives him whatever he wants, just because he flatters her. That is disgusting! I will NEVER do that.
• That report had NOTHING of value in it–just a pretty cover. Mine was full of real insights and actions to take. How could he fall for a pretty cover? That’s just ridiculous!
• I’ve seen him humiliate people who put ideas forward. My idea would work, but there is NO WAY I am going to say a word. It’s not worth it.

Every single one of those statements is pretty close to things I have actually thought. And hopefully it’s( painfully) obvious how I was the one standing in the way of getting what I wanted.

“Assume all are potential allies.”

How ambitious are you? How passionate are you about your mission or your career, really?

The next time you have to get a report from IT and the person is uncooperative, or you need another team member to step-up to complete a project on time who has sabotaged you before, seriously consider whether your attitude or perception of the situation could be the problem.

If you are able to set aside your emotions (don’t throw them away; they are still valuable) and become curious about what motivates the other person, you will have begun stepping out of your own way.

And if you are eager and in a good mindset to learn more about how to Influence Without Authority, Deborah and I highly recommend the book!

Additional Resources

• Influence Without Authority by Allan R. Cohen and David L. Bradford
• How To Influence When You Don’t Have Authority| Keller Institute | If you’re really into this, you can get use the Keller Influence Indicator to measure your influence
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working From Home|Jennifer Filla

You need new donor prospects. Every organization needs to acquire new donors and upgrade existing donors in order to sustain and grow its programming. If you don’t have a researcher on staff, or even if you do, at some point you may need to identify new major gift prospects at a greater scale than you have in the past. It could be a new project or campaign, or it could be an even bigger shift in program or mission implementation in response to a changing environment.

Whatever your situation, you are probably prospecting under pressure.

And that is how many clients find their way to me at Aspire Research Group LLC. You need to raise a certain amount of money and you want me to find the people who will make those gifts. How hard can it be?

To identify prospects, we could…

• Take the top-rated names from a screening and verify them [confirming the match is pretty quick, but confirming the rating takes deeper digging]
• Find out who gives to similar organizations and whip up a list [donor recognition lists don’t provide addresses; this is a time-intensive task]
• …and other tactics

Many times, I’ve received inquiries from fundraisers already in a campaign. They never included research time in their original budgeting, so exactly how low can I go on price?

Better, Faster, Cheaper. Pick Two.

Information technology has made it incredibly fast to sift through thousands of names at a time, with solutions such as prospect screenings. And over the years, the cost of these solutions has become very affordable for many organizations. But it can’t deliver the same level of accuracy as research done by a trained professional.

Sometimes the faster and cheaper aspects of a screening are enough to accomplish all or some of your fundraising goal. As long as you can contact a prospective donor, you have enough to get started. But when you need to raise more in a shorter period of time, you need greater efficiencies. You need to have prospects prioritized.

Is it okay for your development officer to call on five prospects who were mismatched and don’t have the ability to give, before reaching one person who is capable of giving the amount you need?

When you need more than an algorithm can provide, when you need the next step of deeper research, you need a person.

When you ask a trained person to research a name, it takes time.

Early in my career I wanted to know exactly how much time it took to do research. I tracked every single minute. If you’ve never done this, I recommend it–even if only for a day. Getting up for a glass of water. Bathroom breaks. Writing emails (and blog posts). It is very revealing how much time everything takes!

And research does take time, which can be averaged across a task, such as prospecting. If you are employing someone to perform research for you, or if you are employed to research, and you are not aware of the actual hours it takes to accomplish the research tasks required, how can you know how much this should cost or whether you can reach your goal on time? You don’t know.

Embrace the numbers.

It’s true. You might call that billionaire, catch her on the phone, and she says, “I’d love to give $5M even though I have never heard of you before!” Heck, MacKenzie Scott wasn’t identified or asked by many of the organizations to which she made gifts. But hope isn’t a strong strategy.

Once you understand what kind of time is involved, you can begin building that simple, but oh-so-useful, campaign-style gift table. The following gift table extends to include “outside the box” prospecting to bridge a gap in the base of donors for our fictional scenario. Read the table from left to right.

With your assumptions plainly placed in a spreadsheet like this, research and frontline fundraising can have meaningful conversations about the kind of effort–and cost–it is going to take to reach goal.

For example, the above table assumes that the lead gift will come from a board member. It also assumes that the donor base contains more than 156 donor prospects capable of a gift of up to $125,000. That leaves a gap of 8 gifts/40 prospects to be filled by external prospecting (the gap numbers are highlighted in red in the table).

Our fictional organization decides to use small events to engage people from the community. The assumption is that 200 people will need to be invited to these small engagement events to ultimately yield 8 gifts. If it took an average of an hour per name for a researcher to source one qualified name from outside your donor base, that would be 200 hours of work. No bathroom breaks or email writing included. 200 hours of prospecting research.

Assumptions can go wrong – positively or negatively. You might get an unexpected million from MacKenzie Scott, or you might stall during a pandemic. You might find a board member willing to work closely with you to leverage his network and need fewer research hours. But if your assumptions are based on your organization’s past performance or other likely scenarios, you are much more likely to reach goal.

Work with researchers who care about your success.

Time is expensive. What if you sign a contract with a researcher and discover that the prospects you want just don’t exist? Or there aren’t as many of them as you need? What if your needs change or you run out of money or lose a key employee? Things happen.

Working with nonprofit organizations as part of the development team has been an amazing experience that I am deeply grateful for. Fundraising is built on trust and at Aspire that extends to the consulting relationship.

If you need to reach your fundraising goals, why shouldn’t your research team be just as committed to reaching those goals? It’s not about getting paid to deliver a certain number of prospects each month regardless of whether you can use them. It’s about getting you the right prospects, on your schedule, and at your budget pace.

And that’s how I figure Aspire can deliver on all three improvements: Better, Faster, and Cheaper. Because there is nothing cheap about research that never turns into donors!

Additional Resources

• The Results are in! Common Wealth Screening Questions| Elisa Shoenberger at Aspire Research Group| 2019
• Relational Mapping with Wealth Quotient| Prospect Research Institute | 2020
• When Should You Look For Cold Prospects?| Jennifer Filla | 2013

“There is no health without mental health.”

-Center for Workplace Mental Health, Canada

When I worked in an office all day, I would come home and want to stay home. When I started working from home, by Friday I needed to escape the house. I learned to create room in my schedule for networking with colleagues and to enjoy my lunch outside on the balcony. Little things!

Six months into the workplace shutdown caused by the pandemic, many people were able to create a new schedule working from home. Now August brings the new school year and the chaos of children returning to school, or not, threatens to upend any calm that may have been found.

In the first four parts of this series, I talked about the opportunity to adjust how you provide online training and data security in the virtual office, and being mindful to protect your career aspirations and your physical health.

Disruption, while uncomfortable and sometimes tragic, can provide opportunities to create change. For your nonprofit, it could be the moment where you can mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this post, I’d like to suggest how you might use social connection and proactive communication to protect your mental health and that of your employees – and even your family members! But mostly I want to give you lots of resources.

Create Social Connections

“Keep in mind that social distancing does not mean social isolation.”

-Center for Workplace Mental Health, U.S.

If you were working in an environment where you interacted routinely, if not daily, with your team members and others, socially and professionally, working from home doesn’t mean you have to stop being social. But it often means you have to be deliberate and creative about how to have social connections.

From networking to connecting with your team, the alternatives to face-to-face meetings sometimes requires a bit of extra structure to engage people, especially when it is all new. It’s not enough to have everyone on video on Zoom for a happy hour. There needs to be a game or a more formal sharing of something specific and tagging the next person.

For example, I attended a Happy Hour with my association chapter and our host customized a “Family Feud” style game using information from a popular industry report. We divided into teams and competed. It was really fun, brought up some good conversation, helped us to get to know each other, and yet was relevant to our work.

Being social online requires adapting the tried and true activities and games for the online world and for you. Likewise, it means accommodating the communication styles of others. If you’re not sure, test things out. It’s okay if it isn’t a glorious success first time. Just try again.

If people are awkward on video, use online meetings to share a game screen and let people participate via audio. If your group is large, create activities that leverage the chat or breakout rooms. If you have people who love video, create activities that emphasize the visual, such as using props.

Can’t figure it out yourself? Hire a creative concierge like Jackie Botelho! My alma mater, Neumann University, had Jackie create an online alumni networking experience. It was the first time I could ever participate in such an event from Florida. She guided us through introductions, breakouts to discuss a question, and encouraged us all to share connection information, such as LinkedIn. I connected with more people than I usually do at a live networking event!

The U.S. Center for Disease Control has a great recommendation: “Try to keep up with regular routines. If schools are closed, create a schedule for learning activities and relaxing or fun activities.” Just realize that while it sounds simple, it’s not always easy to implement and you might need to be persistent to find a schedule and activities that work for your group – whether that is your children, family, or co-workers.

Don’t Wait! Now is the Time to be Pro-Active

“In these stressful times, it is not enough to post benefit information on your company website.”

-National Safety Council

If your organization does not address mental health currently, this could be the best time to have the discussion. With most people experiencing some kind of stress, people are less likely to feel stigmatized by having a problem.

Right now, we are being faced with such a variety of stressful challenges: sudden routine changes, a barrage of new software to learn, children at home, isolation from family and friends, racism and resulting unrest, and so many more.

What elevates your stress levels might reduce someone else’s. High stress levels, especially over an extended period of time, can have profoundly negative effects on physical and mental health – which of course is going to affect work performance.

As a manager, you can proactively and frequently communicate the mental health and other services available for your employees. Even if you don’t have formal benefits like this, you can help your team create a collection of resources available. I’ve given you a head-start on that in the additional resources below.

When you ask “how are you doing?” be sure to listen carefully to the response. If you ask the question routinely you are more likely to notice changes over time. Managers and co-workers are not therapists, but proactively communicating how to access help, asking, and listening can make a difference.

There really is no health without mental health. You work for a nonprofit on a mission. Proactive communication and staying socially connected are just two ways you can help fulfill your nonprofit’s mission by taking care of your employees.

Additional Resources

• The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 1 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• 10 Tips to Manage Re-Entry Anxiety Related to the COVID-19 Pandemic | Anxiety and Depression Association of America | 2020
• How to Soothe Your ‘Re-Entry Anxiety’ as COVID-19 Lockdowns Lift | Time magazine | 2020
• How Nature Can Make You Kinder, Happier, and More Creative | Greater Good Magazine
• 10 Team Building Games for Remote Workers | ConnectTeam.com
• Working Remotely During COVID-19: Your Mental Health & Well-Being | Center for Workplace Mental Health, U.S. | Specific suggestions and common-sense advice for employees and managers.
• Helping Children Cope [with COVID-19] | U.S. Center for Disease Control | This is a surprisingly readable and helpful article that helps to give parents perspective on their children’s behavior and includes a list of resource links
• There is No Health Without Mental Health | Poster | Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, Canada
• The Employer Role: Mental Health During COVID-19 | National Safety Council, U.S.
• Working With Benefits Providers: Mental Health Issues Checklist | National Safety Council, U.S.
• How to Collaborate Effectively If Your Team Is Remote | Harvard Business Review | 2018

How is your work from home transition going? Has your organization been able to re-think and re-route some of its processes and procedures to reflect your new reality? As I mentioned in Part 1 of this blog series, COVID-19 could be your great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this five-part series, I’m examining some of the hidden costs of working from home. My goal is to give you – an individual, or a manager, or a leader – the opportunity to recognize and begin to address these hidden costs.

As an individual, as a manager, or as a governing board, crisis is your opportunity to get it right. Now is the time to think it through and be the shining role model you always knew your nonprofit could be!

Protect your Career Aspirations!

Another hidden cost of working from home is the damaging effect it can have on one’s career. According to one study, working from home lowered promotion rates by 50% (Stanford University, 2014). You need only listen to #ChatBytes episode 18 for how this issue plays out in the prospect research field.

The Stanford study did not have any data collected to conclude why or how working from home affected promotions. However, the researchers did speculate, based on comments from participants, that some of the negative effect on promotion rates could be attributed to home-based employees being ‘‘out of sight, out of mind.’’ Another theory was that the call center employees working at home in the study whose performance was high were well compensated, and this might make promotion less attractive.

The panel of prospect research professionals interviewed for the #ChatBytes podcast discussed the importance of communication, but also the challenges of being the only work from home employee or one of very few at home. For example, being able to communicate performance and achievements is related to promotion and positive performance reviews in the office, but has additional challenges or changes when communicating remotely. When no-one else is remote, this challenge is magnified.

As many companies and organizations consider a post-pandemic world where people work from home wholly, routinely, or partly, it presents a fantastic opportunity to re-evaluate your communications – as an individual, manager, and organization.

Decisions have to be made about things such as which software to adopt. The larger you are, the more likely there will be some who are unhappy with those choices, but even that doesn’t preclude your ability to consider how to train and use good communication strategies to help each employee achieve her or his potential.

When we choose software or decide on a process, we rarely consider how we humans will actually perform the tasks specific to our roles. For example, good communication practices are rarely taught as a component of software training. But even if you can’t impact practices organization-wide, you can impact yourself and your team.

Following are some examples of how you might communicate in different scenarios, especially if you are working remotely:

• Before we get started, could we add to the agenda? I’m wondering how folks are doing with the new login fix that got rolled out last week. (Ensure no-one is left behind or is implementing a DIY workaround that’s not secure.)
• Could I share a great tip I learned about this week? (Helping everyone get better at a new software or process and letting power-users shine.)
• Would it be okay if I added a #Friday channel to Slack so we can all share what we accomplished this week? (Encourages a level playing field for sharing accomplishments.)
• Manager: I’m considering implementing a new video-conferencing practice for all staff meetings. Everyone will login to the staff meeting from their computers, even if they are in the office. Thoughts? (Eliminates the side-lining of remote staff in favor of face-to-face staff.)

And you don’t have to make sudden, sweeping changes all at once. Efforts at better communication – anything really – takes practice and tweaking. Making fewer changes as part of annual strategies or goals will likely yield better results. It also reflects the concept that communication goes two ways.

Here again, crisis can help us step back and identify ways to improve. Recently, I experienced the magnification of intent that crisis can bring. It pushed me to focus on some newly acquired listening tactics that did not require meeting face to face.

If you want see movement in your career, hearing and understanding your supervisor’s or other advocate’s needs is critical. If you want to have your employee perform up to potential, hearing and understanding your employee is critical. Doing this without access to body language requires new skills.

Communicating effectively with your team remotely is not likely to happen without deliberate effort. Where will you and your team learn these new skills? There is no shortage of great free and fee opportunities to learn. I’ve included a few of my favorites below.

If you have great ideas and tips on how you have grown your remote communication skills, please share by commenting or emailing me so others can benefit from your experience!

Additional Resources

• The Hidden Costs of Working from Home: Part 1 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• #ChatBytes Episode 18: #CareerCurious Telecommuting: Prospect Research from the Home Office 2017 | Sandra Kent, Charity Jovanovic, and Lara Arlan-Wier share their tips and stories about telecommuting as prospect research professionals.
• Does working from home work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment | Stanford University | 2014
• 6 Communication Habits of Successful Remote Teams | Ian Giles on Medium | 2017
• How to Embrace Remote Work: The Ultimate Guide | Trello | Undated
• Influence Without Authority | Bradford and Cohen | 3^rd Ed. 2017
• Chris Voss Teaches the Art of Negotiation | MasterClass.com

By now you’ve probably read a lot of articles about working from home. At first it was a temporary, emergency reaction to the pandemic. Four months later, it’s beginning to feel less temporary. And people have adjusted to the most immediate changes. Now is when the hidden costs begin to emerge.

From an individual perspective, you’ve had to carve out a workspace at home, adjust your hours to accommodate children at home, learn to avoid the kitchen, and figure out how to stay focused and prioritize amidst the chaos. Bravo!

But as the adjustment period wanes, the irritating and unarticulated issues arise–haphazardly and intermittently. It was Mark Zuckerberg’s callous remarks about Facebook’s impending work from home pay policy that got me thinking about the subject.

As an individual, as a manager, or as a governing board, crisis is your opportunity to get it right. Crisis is when your sins, inefficiencies, and weaknesses are bare for the world to see. If you relied primarily on in-person events, you are facing a cash flow crisis right now. If you lack equitable pay policies, you may face a moral reckoning with your employees and your donors.

From this context, if you are considering broadening your work from home policy long after the COVID-19 shutdown is over, now is the time to think it through and be the shining role model you always knew your nonprofit could be!

COVID-19 could be your great opportunity to mirror your mission through the better treatment of your employees.

In this five-part series, I’m going to examine some of the hidden costs of working from home. My goal is to give you–an individual or a manager or a leader–the opportunity to recognize and begin to address these hidden costs. And quick! Before the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world cut your pay!

Beware the Dual Dangers to Productivity: Training and Security

Technology and productivity can often be at odds of one another in any environment, but especially at home. At home, the trade-offs in technology choices are often not deliberated or voiced as frequently as in the office environment.

I might work with two monitor screens at the office, but prefer the one laptop screen at home because it means I can change rooms easily in a small space with children. Or I might be stressed and significantly less productive with a laptop and no-one has made it an option to take the office hardware home.

And then there is the reality that some of us adapt to new software and hardware much easier than others. Assuming that everyone will find the right YouTube DIY video for them and quickly learn is begging for a productivity dip!

Shortcuts to learning software are risky. Technology glitches always happen at the worst possible moment!

Managing software takes TIME. I’m not getting any younger, but I am on the receiving end of exponentially more software to learn. If you want people to work from home (or, heck, in the office), how can you better accommodate the learning needs of all ages and types of employees? You have the perfect testing grounds during a crisis.

Unfortunately, it’s also the perfect predatory playground for sinister, unknown forces just waiting to capture your organization’s data for ransom, or worse.

Don’t fool yourself that the risk is low. Digital Guardian examined the data of nearly 200 customers in its Managed Security Program and issued a Data Trends Report that will have you biting your fingernails.

There are plenty of resources and software solutions you can purchase to help secure your organization and its in-office and remote employees, but during shelter-in-place, you are in the perfect training grounds to realize that is not nearly enough.

Yes, of course, you need better passwords, but for example, have you given employees a password manager and created a culture of tip-sharing on how to use it well on all devices? Especially in chaos, something as simple as password protection will break down at the user level. When my dog is going bezerk over the doorbell ringing and I’m creating a new password before I answer the door, rest assured it will not be the best encryption effort.

Another example of how easily security breaks down is actual software use practices.

Sometimes these breaches are poor training, but sometimes it’s that the secure process is less efficient for a particular employee, or the hardware they are using does not support the software you want them to use.

When everyone is thrust into a new environment at once, it is the perfect time to uncover these hidden security breaches and create pathways to reduce the issues. Your solution could be better and more varied training. It could be access to IT consults to help employees configure (and use) their devices appropriately and securely. Or it could be as simple as having the conversation and explaining the risk. Behavior might be the biggest security risk–working from home or the office. Better communications go a long way to averting and solving problems, significantly lowering risk.

Summary

Working from home can lower costs for employer and employee, but if the hidden costs are not recognized and addressed, both parties might not realize some of those savings.

Many times, you can use free or existing systems, such as leveraging your internal intranet to create curated learning resources for different types of learners. If you use Slack for messaging, you can create a #SoftwareTips channel to help everyone stay safe and secure.

Like so many things, the solutions don’t have to be expensive. If you take the time out to plan, you can create a remote environment that provides significant autonomy and customization, with lower costs and higher productivity.

Additional Resources

• Your Career: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 2 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Physical Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 3 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Mental Health: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 4 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020
• Your Resiliency: The Hidden Costs of Working from Home | Part 5 of 5 | Jennifer Filla | 2020

• Data Trends Report| Digital Guardian | 2020
• Google will give every employee $1,000 to WFH. Its head of wellness explains why| CNNBusiness | 2020
• Best Password Managers for 2020| PC Magazine
• 3 Tools I can’t Do Without for Remote Working| Jen Filla at Aspire Research Group | 2020
• Real or Perceived? Risk! And What the Zoom to do About It| Jen Filla | 2020