Finding New Prospects: Is it just a matter of time?

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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!

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