Tag Archives: donor research

Do Your Own Research? You Bet!

4Fundraisers, Discussion, , , , , , ,

KeyboardCoffeeSXCsmOne of the hot topics in the prospect research field is whether we researchers are going to be replaced by all of the great software products out there. With the click of your mouse you can search multiple public records databases and spit a profile out of your printer. Even data analytics has become more accessible with easy software interfaces. When it’s that easy, you’d be crazy not to do your own research! Right?

Well, nothing involving people and the parting of their money is ever that simple, is it? Yes, you can find raw information about your prospects and have it formatted into a printable document or have key items seamlessly imported into the donor database record. No, a software program can’t verify that information for accuracy or provide useful insights into donor motivation and wealth.

But there’s way more to the fundraising role of prospect research than donor profiling.

Prospect research is about managing information in a manner that leads prospects toward a gift. In that sense, everyone in an organization plays a prospect research role at some level. Program staff record accurate contact and participation information. Gift entry records the gifts. Frontline fundraisers record information about face-to-face contact.

The professional prospect researcher uses her skills in process and analysis to corral all the information and produce actionable insights, leading to solicitations and stewardship.

Are you confused? Let’s use an analogy.

Fundraisers expect everyone in an organization to participate in fundraising and they work to create a culture of philanthropy. From the janitor to the program staff, all the way up through leadership, everyone is responsible for representing the organization and giving people the opportunity to give in a meaningful way.

The fundraiser uses her skills to coordinate all those messages and contacts with donors and prospective donors, leading to solicitations and stewardship.

Fundraisers focus on messaging and people-to-people contact. Prospect researchers focus on information. They both work together make sure fundraising goals are met.

So, should you do your own research after all?

Of course! In this world we have to be constantly learning and using new tools. There are very few excuses anymore for not making use of software tools that provide you with critical information on your donors at the click of a mouse.

But a professional prospect researcher can take you way beyond prospect profiles and into a world where the power of your fundraising information is harnessed and used to drive your fundraising up to a whole new level of success.

With a prospect research professional your fundraising “shop” becomes a fundraising “machine” – persistently methodical, lean, and more productive.

Care to brag about your professional research staff? Wondering what it takes to find a professional prospect researcher?

Comment below or email Jen at Aspire Research Group.

Other Articles You Might Like:

An “Insider” Peek at Executive Compensation

4Researchers, , , , , , , , ,

dollararrowup.thumbI thought it might be worthwhile (and fun!) to explore a well-known public company executive’s compensation package to illustrate a few of the many and creative ways executives are compensated. Sometimes I forget that the Wall Street world of finance and juicy executive compensation packages is a mystery to many, even in prospect research. My career began as a legal secretary and included editing proxy filings just as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) transitioned to its electronic filing system called EDGAR. Filings can be tedious, but that’s partly because they are packed with information.

Public Company Insiders

Carol Meyrowitz is the president, Chief Executive Officer, and director of TJX Companies, which operates stores like T.J. Maxx, Marshall’s, and Home Goods. TJX Companies’ stock is traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker TJX. Meyrowitz is both a top executive and a director, which qualify her to be a public company insider. If she owned 10% or more of the company’s stock, that would also qualify her. Any of those three roles qualifies someone as a public company insider.

For the most part, the only people who are required to report their stock holdings in public filings with the SEC are insiders. And when you stop to think about it, there are very few public company insiders compared to the large number of people who own stock. This means that many of your wealthy prospects who own substantial portfolios of stock will not be found in any SEC filings.

Incentive Plans in Public Companies

The SEC requires public companies to detail their compensation packages for top executives. Each company decides on its own how to reward executives for their performance. Especially since the 1970’s, theory has it that executives – and directors too – need much more than salary to keep them interested in the company’s success and achievements.

Below is a chart of Meyrowitz’ compensation in fiscal year  2013. We are going to walk through each type of compensation she received. Keep in mind that I am no tax expert! This is meant to be a big picture, brief explanation with tips on applying the information to fundraising.

Fiscal Year

Salary

Bonus

Stock Awards

Stock Option Awards

Non-Equity Incentive Plan Comp

Change in Pension Value & Non- Qualified

Deferred Comp Earnings

All Other Comp

Total

2013

$1,426,924

–

$10,872,000

$654,630

$6,050,370

$2,716,326

$48,550

$21,768,800

 Salary and Bonus

Just like you and I, insider executives receive a salary, paid in cash, for doing their job every day. They might also receive a bonus based upon their job performance, which may also called a short-term incentive. Notice how Meyrowitz has not received a bonus in the past three years? The word “bonus” took a real beating during the recession. Even though she didn’t receive a bonus, there are still some really big numbers in her compensation package.

Stock Awards

Stock awards represent the value of the stock Meyrowitz was given by the company when they gave it to her. The idea is that when she meets her performance goals, she gets to share in the rising value of the company through its stock. There may be all kinds of confusing language around this. She might be given restricted stock that do not vest (become fully owned by her) unless she meets certain goals. And she might be required to own a certain number of shares of stock as long as she is an executive.

HOT TIP: Just because this stock awards number is high, it does not mean that all of the stock is available to her to gift or sell. Her salary, the paycheck she cashes just like you, is $1.4 million. Some or all of the $10.9 million stock awards could be untouchable.

Notice how stock is the biggest part of her pay package? That’s no accident. Cash payments are taxed as income. Stock is not. When Meyrowitz sells her stock she will pay capital gains tax on money she makes as a result of the sale (the gain). Can you guess which tax rate is likely to be higher – income or capital gains?

Stock Option Awards

Stock options give Meyrowitz the option to buy stock at a future date. These options are valued in the compensation table, but that dollar figure is more of an accounting mechanism and is not the current value.

The idea is that Meyrowitz will be more focused on the company’s financial improvement if she stands to make significant financial gains if the company’s stock price increases. So she is given an option to buy stock at a future date (the exercise date) at a locked-in price (the exercise or strike price).

For example, today she gets an option to buy 100 shares of stock at $70 per share. The stock is currently trading at $62 per share. If she buys those 100 shares today, she would have to pay $70 but could only sell them for $62. She would lose money! But if we give her options today as an incentive, we’re going to tell her she can’t exercise her options until next year. Now she has a year to get the company’s stock higher than $70 per share.

A year later, she can buy the 100 shares of stock for $70, and hopefully, the stock is trading at $71 or higher. She spends $7,000 and can turn around and sell them for $7,100 ($71 per share), earning $100 on the sale. When the exercise price is lower than the market price and she can sell at a profit, we say her options are in-the-money. If we turned it into a formula, it might look like this:

($market price – $exercise price) x number of shares = $value
($71 – $70) x 100 = $100

HOT TIP:  When trying to determine if Meyrowitz might use her options to make a gift to my organization, I want to know when she will be able to exercise her options and if they are in-the-money. If she can’t exercise them yet or they are without value, we can’t get a gift.

Non-Equity Incentive Plan Compensation

Non-equity means that it is a non-stock incentive. For TJX Companies, this means it is part of its short-term cash incentive plan and its long-term cash incentive plan. So Meyrowitz receives cash for doing a good job in the current year, and even more cash if she keeps it up over a certain number of future years. It’s possible that she could get fired today and still be owed cash under the long-term incentive plan if the company continued to perform!

HOT TIP: You might be saying to yourself, “Cash incentive – isn’t that the same thing as a bonus?” Pretty much. But the word “bonus” has gone out of fashion.

Change in Pension Value & Non- Qualified Deferred Compensation Earnings

The IRS closely regulates retirement plans and there are many vehicles for stashing your cash for retirement. A pension is usually tied to the employee’s salary and years of service. I didn’t dig deep to find out details about Meyrowitz’ pension, but it’s in the SEC filings. Non-qualified money is money that does not receive tax-favored status from the IRS for retirement. Deferred compensation is owed but not paid to the employee until a later date, typically to reduce the amount of individual tax paid in a particular year. Changes in regulations have lessened its popularity.

All Other Compensation

These are the perks! And while some might seem extravagant to us ordinary folk, there are some good reasons behind a few. For example, having life insurance on a key executive provides a cash cushion if the company has to replace her on short notice. Very high-profile executives might need the personal protection a private jet provides. Below is a table from the SEC filing that gives us the detail behind the other compensation for Meyrowitz.

Automobile
Benefit

Reimbursement
for Financial
Planning and
Legal Services

Employer
Contributions  or
Credits Under
Savings Plans

Company Paid
Amounts for Life
Insurance

Total
All Other
Compensation

$36,594

$5,940

$4,881

$1,135

$48,550

HOT TIP:  Other compensation is not cash and that means it doesn’t factor in directly to the prospect’s ability to make a gift.

Your Top 5 Take-Aways

If everything else about executive compensation was confusing to you, I hope you at least come away with these nuggets:

  • A public company executive’s total compensation is made up of many different items. The actual cash portion and number of shares of stock available for immediate gifting to your organization is likely to be much less than the total.
  • The current incentive plan fad is to not pay bonuses, and sometimes not even to pay a salary at all (see Meg Whitman), but you can bet the executive still receives hefty compensation in the form of stock.
  • Stock Options require the executive to shell out the cash to buy the stock first. The executive does not receive a profit unless she buys the stock at a discount and then sells it at the higher market price.
  • Stock Options might have zero value if the company stock price has fallen.
  • Other Compensation is not money available for gifting, even though it is reported as a dollar figure.

Do You Have a Proxy To Read?

Do you participate in a 401(k) plan at your work? Or maybe you own shares in a mutual fund. I hope this little bit of explanation has you really curious – curious enough to start reading some of the financial documents you receive in the mail. If you are new to SEC filings, the best one to read first is the proxy, also called SEC Form DEF 14a.

The proxy for TJX Companies is where I found all the information for this post. You can visit www.sec.gov yourself and look up that proxy online.

Do you have hot tips on executive compensation to share? Please add to the comments below!

Other Articles of Interest

Meg Whitman Agrees to Work for $1 – Or Does She?

US CEOs break pay record as top 10 earners take home at least $100m each

America’s Highest Paid CEOs

PRtakesWallStreet

Secrets of Top-Performing Major Gift Officers

4Researchers, Major Gift Teams, , , , ,

ShhhhDid you know that major gift officers who use prospect research raise more than their colleagues who go it alone? Prospect research is the secret sauce that has been helping some organizations out-perform others for years. Think about it. Can you name a higher-education fundraising powerhouse that does not employ prospect researchers? When I was working on the book, Prospect Research for Fundraisers, I had conversations with the very talented Nancy Lee, consultant and Executive Director for Donor Services at Thomas Jefferson University and Hospital in Philadelphia. She told me that fundraisers need to realize that it is the researcher who decides what goes in or stays out of a prospect profile, based on the request. Sounds kind of harsh, doesn’t it? But it fits right in with what we need most in this world of too much data – content curation. A good prospect researcher will sift through the overwhelming amount of information and give you what you need most. Or will she? The source of tension There is a natural tension between frontline fundraisers requesting prospect research and the researchers who deliver it. Requests for research are as varied as the organizations and the people within them. Requests might be emailed, left as voicemail or they might be a completed form or online request system. But even when requests are made face-to-face, there is room for misunderstanding. This causes tension. When you consider what is on the line – the success or failure of your major gift solicitation – it makes sense for you, the person talking with the donor, to take ownership of the requests you make for research. And you might be surprised how easy that can be. Two easy things you can do to get what you need 1. Be specific Any prospect researcher worth a grain of salt should be filtering prospect and donor data based on your organization’s mission, programs and overall culture. Beyond that you should be specific, regardless of what is or is not available on any form you are required to complete. By specific I mean that you should disclose what is worrying you, causing confusion, or has you excited. Let me give some examples.

  • I think she is related to the Moneybags family and could be a million+ donor!
  • I know he is a loyal donor to Knowledge University. I’m worried he has already made his stretch gift and there isn’t enough left to make a campaign leadership gift.
  • I have tried to figure out her interests, but she’s very reserved. Any clues on what might get her talking would help.

That’s not so difficult, is it? Recognizing why you decided to make the request and then clearly stating it to the researcher. If you do this you will get the information you need. Except that sometimes you still don’t get those info nuggets you were hoping for, right? It could be that your researcher needs more training, but you could try one more thing. 2. Feedback If you get a prospect profile that does not answer your questions, or that appears to be missing important stuff, take it back to the researcher and ask what happened. It might be that she could not find the information, but didn’t state that in the profile. There could be so many things going on. And the only way you’ll find out is if you ask. But you’re good at asking, right? Because it’s up to you to make the right ask to the prospect. Had any good conversations lately? It’s so easy for conversations between frontline fundraisers and prospect researchers to get negative. But I have worked with many frontline fundraisers who have helped me to help them. I love being part of the team that closes the big gift! If you have been reading this article and nodding your head the whole time because it validates what you have been doing so well already, won’t you comment and share your success? Need Help? Jen Filla helps fundraisers and researchers communicate and create process. Through Aspire Research Group she also provides organizations with outsourced prospect research. Call 727 202 3405 x700 or email jen at aspireresearchgroup.com

Other Resources You Might Like

Data Mining Resources

Fundraising Analytics, , , , , , , ,

I was poking around to see what I might find on the internet and thought I would share my favorite finds related to data mining. I hope you enjoy them too!

Five ways to promote in-house data mining
by Kevin MacDonell

5 reasons every nonprofit should use analytics for fundraising
by Joshua Birkholz

From Stories to Evidence: How Mining Data Can Promote Innovation in the Nonprofit Sector
by Technology Innovation Management Review

Fundraising Analytics ABCs
by Helen Brown

The Do’s and Don’ts of Data Mining in Nonprofit Fundraising
by Daniel Neel

Getting Started in Data Mining (It's easier than you think!)

4Researchers, Fundraising Analytics, , , , , , ,

I have had a few requests for articles on simple data mining techniques and the related database maintenance necessary to make the results meaningful. Look for my upcoming companion blog post on data mining resources, too.

Before we get started, let’s talk a little bit about what might be holding us back.

  • Fear that it’s too complicated – Not much anyone can do about this one, except you. Jump in! The water is warm!
  • Assumptions that leadership will not invest and support it – Data mining and analytics are keyword candy to leadership. Leadership loves to get intelligent answers to questions like “What percent of donors rated at $100K+ gave at that level?”
  • No clear understanding of the pain/need/goal – What keeps your leadership awake at night? Is it prospect pools that don’t perform? Finding leadership donors for the upcoming campaign? If you don’t know, you can’t make a compelling case for data mining.

Donor Database Reports

Do you remember that scene in the Sound of Music where Maria is trying to teach the von Trapp children to sing? She stops singing “Do-Re-Mi” and says, “Oh, let’s see if I can make it easier”. We can do that in data mining too. (I haven’t come up with a song yet, but I’m working on it.) Here is an easy and fun way to get started in data mining – explore all the canned reports in your donor database. I’m not kidding! Even if you have no idea what deep, insightful questions you want to answer, you can begin with reports.

Consider these common reports:

  • Consecutive years giving – When donors give many years, especially consecutively, it usually means they really like us. Who are these people? Do they have high wealth ratings? Could they be good planned gift prospects?
  • Top donors – Are all of your top-giving donors getting regular attention?
  • LYBUNT, SYBUNT, & new donors – Within these reports you might find donors capable of increasing their gift, some major gift sleepers, and some new donors with wealth.
  • Lifetime giving and number of years giving – So many forgotten donors can be found in this list as well as some very good planned gift prospects.

Digging a Little Deeper

MS Excel is on most of your desktops. If you take a little time to learn to use it – I’m not talking complicated formulas, just tips and tricks – it will truly open the world of data mining to you. Imagine that you pull a report into Excel with all of the key fields in the above reports (last gift date and amount, largest gift date and amount, lifetime giving, etc.). Add in wealth ratings if you have them.

Now consider this scenario:

Custom sort:  First by largest gift amount (descending), second by lifetime giving (descending), third by last gift date (descending)

Analysis:  By scrolling down the list you can see if any donors who have made larger gifts (largest gift amount) and have lapsed (last gift date). Is there some high lifetime giving low on the list? Why?

Imagine sorting first by wealth rating and then largest gift. How about lifetime giving and wealth rating? This is fun! (I told you the water was warm.) Just be sure to watch your time. Prospect researchers have gotten lost in the data mining game.

The Secret Data Mining Trick

The secret trick to analyzing your donor information is to understand your fundraising fundamentals. Remember the fundraising pyramid?

The pyramid illustrates your areas of opportunity:

  • Occasional: Did that first-time $1,000 donor get personal attention?
  • Annual: Are there small annual gift planned giving prospects in there?
  • Annual: Can we motivate annual donors to move up a giving level?
  • Major: Do any of your major gift donors have unexplored planned gift potential?
  • Planned: Are there any planned gift donors who could make a cash gift?

Common Data Errors that Under-Mine Your Efforts (pun intended)

Now that you have the idea that you can sort on specific fields in your donor database, you will very soon realize that even sorting becomes problematic if the data is full of errors and omissions. Use your blossoming interest in data mining to clean up the database! Then when you are ready for more complicated data mining challenges, your data will be ready for you.

  • Data errors in any of the fields you pull – e.g., incorrect or missing dates or dollar values
  • Duplicate records – often happens in gift entry or multiple hands in the database
  • Deceased or bad address – if you don’t mail to your list, you probably aren’t getting your list cleaned; if you are mailing, you might not be getting a file back from the printer to update the records

What can you do about problems like these? People don’t usually like to hear this, but you need some documentation.

  • Your database probably has some maintenance reports. Set up a schedule to run them and fix the errors.
  • Do you need to run a report of all changed records daily or weekly?
  • Gift entry staff should be trained to search for the donor name first, instead of entering a new record. As in, create your own training manual for how gift entry is performed in your organization.
  • Someone should review all gifts entered, probably daily.

Robert Weiner is a consultant with some excellent free articles about keeping your database up to snuff. You can find his articles here: http://www.rlweiner.com/articles

Taking Data Mining to the Next Level

Once you have your data in order, some understanding about how the information is stored, how you can retrieve it, and what kinds of things it can tell you about your donors and prospects, I suspect you will be a lot more likely to sign up for that data mining webinar or take advantage of the APRA Analytics Symposium. It feels good to be ready, doesn’t it?

Get Worried! About Asking for Too Little

4Fundraisers, Focused Fundraising, Major Gift Teams, , , , , , , ,

When was the last time you had a knot in your stomach because you were worried you were going to ask for too small of a gift? If you are like many fundraisers, the answer is not often enough!

  • $8 Million gift from Glenn Korff to University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Music.
  • $2 Million gift from Gene Feaster, an inventor of Superflab to the University of Kansas.

How badly do you want gifts like these?

The wealth screening companies tell us – perhaps with some bias – that organizations which raise more money and get whopping big gifts, screen their donor database for wealth regularly. This does not surprise me. Does it surprise you?

Bias aside, large organizations are much more likely to worry about asking for too little. It’s a high-pressure, go-get-the-gift environment and the winners are those receiving the largest gifts. And large organizations invest in fundraising, including prospect research.

Research gives them the facts that can validate what they suspect, or disqualify a prospect, or find new information that impacts gift type and size.

But what can I do?
Hey! I heard that! “But we have no money for a screening.” “We can’t hire a prospect researcher anytime soon.” “Our leadership won’t invest in research.”

And I have a response! (It wouldn’t be much of an article if I didn’t, would it?)

Whether you are a smaller organization dreaming big or one of a hundred gift officers, you are in control of your own behaviors. And here’s a few winning behaviors to adopt – and maybe even influence others, like your leadership.

Get worried about asking for too little.
Words matter. When you talk strategy for a gift, state your target ask amount and then say, “But I’m worried that might be too low.” (That was easy!)

Get wealth-educated.
Pay attention to articles, blog posts, studies and conversations about wealth. Because when someone asks you – “why do you think that ask is too low? – you will need an answer.

  • He sold one company. Could there be others?
  • He seems like the kind of guy to have a vacation home, but I don’t have the tools to find out.
  • Jane board member says he owns a number of restaurants, but I don’t know for sure.

Get search savvy.

No, you don’t have to be a full-fledged prospect researcher, but every fundraiser should be able to find key information online about prospects. When was the last time you visited your county tax assessor’s online database? How about Zillow.com? Do you have rule-of-thumb formulas to create capacity ratings?

Wealth screenings are one tool in the research toolbox. Even so, I hope you are actively thinking about a future budget that includes a screening. You might not need it now, but you will need it sometime soon.

Your mission and the people and causes you serve deserve funding. And if for no other reason, that should get you concerned about asking for too little.

If you want help finding information about your prospects, click here to contact Aspire Research Group.


Other Resources You Might Like:

Fall Fundraising Trends by Preeti

Filla Fast Favorite Links – a categorized list with wealth studies at the bottom

Watch out Prospects! Got a Photo? Gotcha!

Profiles, Prospect Research, Resource Links, , , , , , , , , ,

Do you know how it is when you find a new tool and suddenly it appears EVERYWHERE?! This is how I feel about relationship mapping. Ever since I purchased a subscription to Prospect Visual, I have started to notice different relationship mapping techniques and applications all over the place. My recent quest for facial recognition searches on photos is a case in point.

My typical nonprofit client doesn’t have a huge warehouse of internal data and often feels an urgency to add to its current donor pool to meet special fundraising initiatives. Relationship mapping holds such promise for identifying prospect gold in uncharted territories! Or does it? Yet?

My feel for the technologies involved is that it is early days. Some of what is currently being commercialized could be easily disrupted by what we might now consider ancillary or “extra” services. Facial recognition is a good example.

Technologies like facial recognition are both shockingly advanced and woefully inadequate. Most things start out expensive and, especially with technology, can become affordable in a remarkably short period of time. Here’s hoping that happens with facial recognition. Unless of course you are searching on me!

Here’s how my facial recognition quest began. I was working on a difficult prospect assignment. Not many donor lists out in the public domain in this particular city, and board members with limited profiles and middle-income wealth. And then I stumbled on a Flickr account with gala pictures from a past event of a similar organization. Eureka!

But no captions on the photos. And I am not personally familiar with the who’s who of that city. Bummer! Or is there a way? To find out I consulted the best talent around – the research list-serv hosted by APRA – and received two good sources:

Google Images

Did you know that you could search for other images using an existing image? You can! And it did make good *exact* matches to find pages where my picture was located (because, of course, I tested it on myself first). But when it came to similar matches…wildly differing pictures appeared. But, ahem, it did find one of Julia Roberts, which I agree is very similar to mine.

TinEye.com

This site seemed so promising, but it didn’t find any matches on my photo, which was disappointing.

These sites were not enough to help me identify the pictures on that Flickr account. But apparently there is some seriously powerful software available that has the potential to make a prospect researcher’s dream come true and find out way more than just linkage or connection.

Social media maven and all-around talented researcher, Lori Hood Lawson, pointed out a 60 Minutes episode that demonstrated the power of some maturing technologies – and has me even more determined to vote at every possible opportunity!

Check out the 60 Minutes episode here: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50153673n

With the proliferation and popularity of photos and videos all over the public domain, it creates an opportunity not currently considered in the text-based products such as Prospect Visual and Relationship Science that are on the market for nonprofits right now.

Relationship mapping and other prospect research techniques often follow behind competitive intelligence and other for-profit efforts. The uses are similar, but not the same, and as prospect researchers, we often find ourselves getting “creative” to make products work for us. However, with the nonprofit industry growing to such a powerful size, we might see a shift.

But don’t worry donors, prospect researchers have a code of ethics we take incredibly seriously!

Other Articles You Might Like: Relationship Mapping for New Prospects

Join the Relationship Mapping Workgroup:  Click Here to Sign Up

Questions? Want to talk about this post? Call Jen Filla at 727 202 3405 or email jen at aspireresearchgroup dot com.

Re-Wiring the Trusty Profile

4Researchers, Focused Fundraising, , , , , , , , , , , ,

There’s a bit of buzz about whether prospect research is going to get dumbed down by smart software products or if it will get lifted into the realm of strategy and management. The reality is probably a bit of both. Today I thought I’d bite off one little piece of the bigger conversation. I want to take a tried and true prospect research task – the trusty profile – and toss it up in the air to discover a new perspective on its utility and value.

Conversation Starter

Sabine Schuller jump-started the dialogue on the PRSPCT-L list-serv with an article,Is a Googlized Workplace Replacing Dedicated Competitive Intelligence Resources? Substitute “prospect research” for “competitive intelligence” and you can join in the exchange. Helen Brown did! She opined on the topic with a blog post, Prospect Research’s Strategic Advantage, suggesting that prospect researchers offer “experience, context, and strategy”. Mark Noll and Chris Mildner commented about the need for prospect research to concern itself with ROI. They told us we have to demonstrate how research translates into increased gift levels.

Can We Re-Wire the Humble Profile?

As you might have noticed, the topic has many layers of discussion points and profiles are somewhere amongst them. Can we re-wire the humble profile to make it more strategic and cost efficient? What does that mean?

I’ve heard conversations along these lines:

  • The paper profile is dead. It should all go into the database.
  • Research should be finding the basics – ability, inclination, linkage/affinity – and spend not a minute more.
  • My gift officer was struggling to connect with a prospect and I dug deep and found some nuggets of interest that helped him to solicit and receive a multi-million dollar gift.

My two cents? They are all correct! Prospect research is positioned differently at each organization depending upon the structure and culture of its fundraising operations. But sometimes people are so excited about their success with their hammer that they begin to view every problem as a nail, even if it’s a screw.

My favorite type of client to work with has no research staff and is tasked with raising million-dollar gifts. She relies on the paper profiles to give her really deep insight into what makes this prospect tick because the pressure is high to get the largest gift possible for her organization. She doesn’t hesitate to call me and question the information so she can feel confident in her ask amount.

It’s my job to know how much and what kind of detail to include.

That’s a big sentence. And it leads me to an interesting interaction I had recently with another client. We were talking about her need for corporate research. She wanted all the usual info, but they had specific strategies they were focused on for corporate prospects. My profiles are typically organized to best present the information collected, but what I was hearing was that she wanted to know exactly how to approach the company for each strategy.

So I reorganized the profile to highlight info relevant to each strategy first and then other sections to hold traditional, but necessary, information second. I did the first couple of profiles to be sure it worked and, well, it felt awkward. It took extra effort to parse the information into the right spots. I truly had to think first about the strategy and second about the information I was scanning. But it kept the profile laser-focused on what was most important to creating the cultivation and solicitation strategy. That felt good!

But, What About You and Your Office?

When deciding how much and what kind of profile types your prospect research department should be producing, I recommend engaging your fundraising staff in dialogue around these big questions:

Does everyone understand…

  • What the three main functions of prospect research areas are? (Prospect Identification or proactive, Prospect Profiling or reactive, and Relationship Management)
  • How those functions affect and support their specific specialty (events, annual fund, major and planned gifts, alumni relations, etc.)?
  • Where they fit within the strategic goals for the organization’s overall fundraising?

(Just remember that, as in search technique, less is often more. We’re not talking two weeks of training, but a simple, framework discussion.)

With everyone on the same page, now you can begin to have a discussion about things like if and when prospect research should be doing in-depth, six to twelve hour individual research profiles or who should be preparing bullet points for major gift prospects at events.

Now everyone knows where the priorities lie and how prospect research is going to be used to support them. It might not make everyone happy, but hey, happiness is a personal journey, right?

Onward to the Future!

Yes, the world is a-changing. We need to have the confidence and courage to re-engineer our services. We need to become more competitive and tie what we do to its impact on giving. And as we pursue big-picture discussions about the future of our profession, we need to recognize the diversity of our experience, context and strategies to create best practices focused on problem-solving.

With professionals like Sabine Schuller, Helen Brown, Mark Noll, Chris Mildner and You, I have no doubt we can ride these waves of changes with aplomb. I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

Yikes! Donor Personality Traits Can be Predicted?

Discussion, Focused Fundraising, , , , , , ,
Who’s watching your brain?

Wouldn’t it be great if we could discover the personalities, values and needs of our donors and prospects? Now we have access to demographic information – things like age, sex, marital status, residence, average income. But what if we could really *know* what makes our prospects tick?

Of course, businesses would love this deeper layer of extremely personal information too. And a group of researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California are getting much closer to making this information accessible. How? Well, just for fun, let’s use the current buzzword – Big Data!

But it’s a little more nuanced than that. Really it’s social media. That’s the place where we bare ourselves the most. We talk with our friends candidly and share our feelings along with facts. Led by Eben Haber, the IBMers are capitalizing on research done by Tal Yarkoni at the University of Colorado on how certain words correlate with certain personality traits. Dr. Yarkoni looked at blogs. Dr. Haber and crew are looking at Twitter.

What do you say in your Twitter feed? A new product created by Dr. Haber and his team is being tested by a financial services company. The claim is that in just 50 tweets it can describe your personality reasonably well. In 200 tweets it gets uncomfortably accurate.

The big question is: Could we use information about personality traits to raise more money?

Up until now, the big data sets have been pretty exclusive to higher education and sometimes other large institutions. This is not because they have so many individual records (although they often do), but because universities have so many pieces of data on each of their alums. They keep track of things like what clubs they belonged to, how many degrees received, events attended, participation in directories and more recently, online alum communities. The local food bank is not likely to ever have that much information about each of its donors. But could organizations have more information in the future?

Multi-channel fundraising – print, email, website, Facebook, Twitter, etc. – means that organizations have access to multi-channels of data. This data is attached to specific individuals. Before you can blink your eyes, the software to ride the big social media data beast will drop in price and become more accessible to the masses of nonprofit organizations. Okay, maybe it will take a few eye blinks, but if the past is a good predictor of the future, it is definitely coming.

Right now the most common piece of data we use to determine whether someone has an affinity (likes our org) is giving. We want to see things like frequency, recency and longevity. We can do a wealth screening to identify people capable of giving a lot, but that does not help us turn them into donors – into people who have an affinity for our organization and its work.

Now close your eyes and imagine … wait! read this first before closing your eyes … that you can run your database through a screening that assigns rated personality traits to each constituent record. Ahhhh! Now you can group people by personality traits and create messaging that resonates with who they are – resonates with the core of their personality. WOW! People would convert to donors at amazing rates! Right?

Until that magical day, let’s see if we can’t work on our current messaging. Little things like communicating with donors in the medium in which they like to give. No more of this sending paper to people who have demonstrated online giving. Many organizations are still struggling with what feels like “traditional” message segments, but are quite new to many. Messaging. It’s like exercise and good nutrition. There’s no magic pill (or database screening) that will ever replace it.

Which brings us back to the heart of fundraising – relationship building. Some organizations are better at it than others – regardless of budget size or the depth of data.

So although it is always fun to play with new technology and to imagine a day when science will turn “magic” into a software product, the feet on the ground (you and I) need to stay focused on what builds the best and most relationships with our organizations and missions. The right messages. The phone calls and face-to-face visits. Being real with real people.

P.S. Are you on Twitter? Let’s connect! You can find me @jenfilla I promise I won’t try to predict your personality!!

Other Resources You Might Like

Getting Real with Residential Real Estate

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This post debuts the InfoSeeking4Researchers series! I decided residential real estate would provide a great conversation starter. It appears simple, but is laced with multiple perspectives depending upon organization size, skill levels, prospect capacities and more. As in, a deceptively simple topic!

I have started the conversation here, but I’m expecting you to finish it. Each conversation starter I write will be emailed to InfoSeeking 4Researchers subscribers and posted here on the InfoSeeking blog under the 4Researchers category. You can subscribe to the e-newsletter to get extra tips and resources, or follow the blog category. Wherever you read it, I encourage you to post your experiences, tips, and questions as blog comments so everyone can benefit.

Residential real estate is one of the first things we researchers look for and yet sometimes we overlook the nuanced information it can provide. I was reminded of just how much it can shape prospect strategy as I was reviewing a prospect profile with a new client… but I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s discuss presenting the information. Second, I’ll give an example analysis. And third, I’ll start a list of examples that I hope you will add to!

Presenting Residential Real Estate

As the years roll forward, I have moved to presenting more of my researched information in tables. It ensures that no matter who does the work, everything looks the same, and it also helps me remember the pieces we need to check for. My real estate table looks like something like this:

Property Year Valuation
[depending on the level, I might include a picture here]

1234 Best Vista Drive, Indian Shores FL 33785

  • Pinellas County Gulf-front residence; 5-bed, 4776 sq ft interior
  • Purchased in 2002 for $8 million
  • Owned by Pillsbury and Jane Dough
  • Revolving line of credit recorded in 2007 for $1 million
 2013 $11 million

I choose to present an estimated market value, which I round so the end user doesn’t interpret it as an exact value.

  • Are you presenting your research in a document or does everything go directly into the database?
  • Are there places in your database to include the bullet points above that will print in a database generated profile?

A Quick Analysis

So what do I now know about Mr. and Mrs. Dough?

  • They own a big house on the beach.
  • They purchased before the real estate market tanked and paid cash (no mortgage).
  • They took out a loan during the recession, which happened to coincide with when Mrs. Dough launched her new and very successful business.

And that means…

  • They already had wealth when they bought the house and leveraged that wealth during the recession to launch a business when the business market was quiet. I’d say they likely have significant capacity.

Other examples of things I have learned through real estate

  • When the property is owned in a trust named after the prospects and listing them as trustees, I want see if the trust name on the deed record states exactly what kind of trust it is. Holding the family home in trust suggests to me that they have done some estate planning, which the gift officer will want to take into consideration.
  • One prospect held a property in trust in his name and yet he was living in a retirement home. When this was pointed out to the gift officer, he told me that he had heard the prospect’s daughter was having troubles and that this house was likely bought for her use. So it’s not likely the property is going to factor into a gift, is it? Good to know.
  • When a prospect has owned the property 10+ years and still resides in the home, even if only part-time, it suggests a different approach to life and wealth than someone who buys and sells the primary residence as often as you might sign a car lease.
  • When there is a mortgage, and especially if it is a large one, it suggests that there must be a certain amount of income to support those mortgage payments. A mortgage calculator is a handy tool to get an estimate.
  • There’s a big difference between a successful real estate investor who sits on vacant land through the downturn (because she paid cash) and one who is stuck holding vacant land (because she has debt)!

Now it’s Your Turn!

Our profession is rife with experienced, intelligent and very creative people who also share. Won’t you share too?

  • Do you have examples to share like the ones above?
  • What nuggets of info routinely gets ignored, but shouldn’t?
  • Or should we spend less time on real estate and more on something else?

Click on “Leave a Comment” below or any of the social media buttons.