Tag Archives: fundraising

Can You Trust Gift Capacity Ratings? 5 Things Fundraisers Should Know

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capacityGift capacity ratings were a marketing moment for wealth screening companies. Suddenly thousands of records could be matched individually to wealth records and assigned a score. Your constituents could be assessed by their potential capacity – in the form of dollars. And everybody loves money. Have gift capacity ratings lived up to the hype? Yes!
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With the sophistication of fundraising analytics we now have ever more ways to evaluate our prospect portfolios, but gift capacity ratings remain an important tool for the fundraiser. To get the most out of your gift capacity ratings, following are five things you should know.
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1. Prioritizing your prospect pool saves you from yourself.

We are all human and that means we prefer to call upon and visit people we like – people who are more like us. Unless you are a major gift donor yourself, your prospects are not like you. Assigning numbers, gift capacity ratings, to your prospect pool helps you overcome your natural tendencies and allocate your time based upon the impact someone can have on your organization.

You will spend as much (or more) time on someone who can give $10,000 as someone who can give $100,000 or $1 million. If you want to excel in major gifts, capacity ratings will help you focus.

2. Ratings and scores are never exact unless it’s the Olympics.

Gift capacity ratings don’t have decimal points! Or at least they shouldn’t. Typically a gift capacity is expressed as a range, such as $250,000 to $499,999. The range should clue you in that this is not an exact science. The goal is NOT to pinpoint a solicitation amount. The goal is to categorize your prospects by their capacity or ability to give.
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A successful solicitation strategy requires much more than a gift capacity rating. A $1 million+ capacity rating is exciting … until you visit and discover he believes philanthropy is bad for the economy. A $1 million+ capacity rating is exciting … until you discover she has been harboring fantasies of making a transformational gift to your cause. Then it’s a DREAM COME TRUE!

3. You must know your prospect types.

You and your prospect research professional are not usually high-net-worth-individuals (HNWIs). You are not usually doctors, lawyers, or investment bankers either. Recognizing and being able to categorize how different prospect types accumulate, manage, and give away their wealth is for you and your researcher to discover together.

Know that HNWIs are generally UNDER-valued by gift capacity ratings. The more wealth there is, the more likely that wealth is hidden from view. Prospects outside the U.S. frequently have wealth indicators that can’t be assigned a number.

4. Not knowing produces anxiety. Embrace the unknown.

Before you get frustrated with how little we can really know about the prospects we want the most – HNWIs – remember that gift capacity ratings were never meant to be the final word. As you evaluate your prospect pool by its capacity ratings and any other tools available to you, embrace what you don’t know.

Create a checklist of what clues you in to prospects of great wealth. Use this to create a strategy for your discovery and cultivation visits. Use what you don’t know as a roadmap to discover your prospect. If you know a fundraiser that came of age pre-internet, find out how s/he prepares for visits!

5. Your researcher is your best ally.

Prospect research professionals have as much fear of ambiguity as gift officers. Calculating capacity ratings fills us with anxiety and angst! This is also to your advantage. Engaging your researcher in conversations about gift capacity ratings, wealth indicators, and what you might discover in your visits will only make you both better in your professions.

Some of my best conversations have been with confident fundraisers who wanted to better understand how I arrived at a gift capacity rating or how a particular type of wealth factored in to the prospect’s ability to give. Prospect research professionals want the donor to give a major gift, too!

Gift capacity ratings are not going anywhere anytime soon. Learning to use them to your advantage will help you achieve success as a fundraiser.

Do you have advice for others on pitfalls to avoid, or tips on how best to use gift capacity ratings? I hope you’ll share!

More Resources You Might Like

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Join the Resource Collections online community to access this handout. Use it to facilitate discussion with prospect researchers, gift officers, and leadership

Net Worth: Nasty, Nice, or Neutral?

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cash-1169650_1280There was a cry for help on the PRSPCT-L list-serv: “I’m a new researcher and my boss wants me to provide net worth on a prospect. He says it was the previous practice to do this and I can get what I need to calculate it from Dun & Bradstreet.” What would your response be?

To begin, a simple definition of net worth follows:

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth

The Three Common Responses to Net Worth

If you mention “net worth” in the prospect research field, you will likely hear one of the following three responses:

  1. Don’t do it! Or you will be voted off the prospect research island!
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    The argument against estimating net worth is usually this: If we cannot find or know the values of all assets and liabilities (which of course we cannot), then we have no business estimating net worth. This is often a strong, unequivocally held opinion.
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  2. Hide that you are doing it by using another term or keep it behind the capacity rating calculation.
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    This is the most common practice in our field. Instead of using the words “estimated net worth”, researchers rephrase with a term such as “estimated wealth”. Even more common is to use the results of wealth surveys, such as the chart on page 19 of the Capgemini 2016 World Wealth Report, to estimate net worth based on a known asset such as real estate and then take a percentage of estimated net worth as the gift capacity.
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  3. Boldly present estimated net worth.
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    There are researchers who feel comfortable presenting estimated net worth. Some provide disclaimers or educational explanations to communicate better generally or to clarify outlier situations.

Easy Formula, Tricky Calculation

Assets – Liabilities = Net Worth

The formula looks so simple, but this is deceptive. As prospect research professionals we know that we can’t discover and value all of a prospect’s assets or liabilities. It is the reason we use the word “estimated.”

Among the challenges in estimating net worth, there are two that jump out quickly:

  1. Many assets (and liabilities) are troublesome to value – none more than private company ownership.
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    I have discussed the difficulty of private company valuation before. A common route to wealth is to start a private business, and many of these successful entrepreneurs want to “give back”, among other motivations for giving.
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    And it brings us back to our fellow researcher’s list-serv plea. Dun & Bradstreet (DNB) sells data, including estimated values of a private companies. Assuming we know how much of that company our prospect owns, we could use the DNB dollar amount to estimate the prospect’s ownership value. Or could we? DNB uses its own formulas to estimate and can be very far off the mark.
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  2. Are we talking about titled ownership such as a name on the deed, or influence over money, such as sitting on a grant-giving family foundation board?
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    Our prospect could be a child of a wealthy family with very few public assets identified. And yet, we may find she has influence over millions of dollars in a family foundation. Estimated net worth and gift capacity clearly diverge at this point. You might estimate a low net worth, but still consider her to have a million dollar gift capacity because of her influence over grant giving.

Logic and Emotion – Let them Collaborate!

There is nothing simple about money. Money is one of the most emotionally volatile topics you can discuss, and those emotions flow into the workplace. Addressing your own emotions and biases about money is the first step.

You might want to seriously consider whether your difficulty imagining the wealth of multi-billionaires is affecting your ability to logically estimate net worth or gift capacity – and whether you have negative emotions attached to great wealth accumulation. Emotions are not your enemy. Ignoring them is.

Now you are ready to balance how you and your gift officers “feel” about your prospect’s potential wealth with the logical, quantifiable assets and liabilities found in the public domain.

Following are the most frequently used tools or ratings:

  • Estimated Net Worth
  • Gift Capacity Range
  • Affinity (how close they feel to your organization)
  • Philanthropic Inclination (do they give at all?)
  • Linkage (how are they connected to your organization)

When used responsibly, estimated net worth is one more tool prospect research professionals can provide to assist frontline fundraisers in creating major gift solicitation strategies. Don’t be afraid to use it!

More Resources You Might Like

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Join the Resource Collections online community to access this handout. Use it to facilitate discussion with your gift officers and leadership.

 

Fire your Prospect Researcher! Artificial Intelligence (AI) has arrived.

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For years now we’ve been told that Artificial Intelligence was going to take over prospect research tasks. Truth is, it has. Well, some of them anyway.

Consider wealth screenings. What used to take month after month of tedious, routine, baseline capacity rating work now takes less than an hour. Upload your file, it processes, and presto! You have gift capacity ratings on your prospects based on external wealth matches.

Or how about the user-friendly lookup tools, such as iWave’s PRO, that remove the first step of searching that prospect research professionals used to perform?

Does all of this mean prospect research is on the fast track for complete takeover by the machines? Should you fire your researcher? No way!

Artificial Intelligence has had a lot of hype over the years and very little real action – until now. A few events have led to some breakthroughs:

  • The internet has made vast amounts of data available, which can be used to train computers.
  • Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), the specialized chips used in PCs and video-game consoles to generate graphics, have been applied to the algorithms used in deep learning, a type of Artificial Intelligence.
  • Capacity to run GPUs can be rented from cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft, allowing start-ups to innovate.

Self-driving cars may still be on the horizon, but the bots are on the road already! They can schedule appointments on your calendar, draft replies to emails, and even read radiology imaging studies more accurately than a radiologist. The Economist describes the opportunity and threat quite succinctly as follows:

 “What determines vulnerability to automation is not so much whether the work concerned is manual or white-collar, but whether or not it is routine.” (6/25/2016)

 

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It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that prospect research professionals will lose their jobs to the machine – much of what we researchers do is routine – but that would be forgetting how machines have changed the world in the past.

Across the centuries, people have feared the march of the machines. In the late 1700’s to early 1800’s the Industrial Revolution rocked our world. As recently as the 1980’s, the rise of personal computers revolutionized the way we work. And with every introduction, much hand-wringing and predictions of unemployment were had.

How will prospect research professionals likely weather the advancing army of machine algorithms and programs?

Much the same as we adapted to wealth screenings and tools like iWave’s PRO. We learn new skills that wrap around the new technology. We leverage the new technology to work for us and for our fundraising team. We change the tasks we perform.

Prospect research professionals have a unique blend of skills. We can scan mountains of information and pull it together in a way that is meaningful for your specific need, whether that is creating a $5M gift strategy or a $5B campaign. We recognize the opportunities for our organizations in the data patterns the machine discovers.

If you want your organization to keep in step with the advances of machine learning, do NOT fire your researcher! Instead, reassure your prospect research professional of her value and insist that she take advantage of training that will give her the skills to use new technology. If you do this, she will be better able to guide you into new worlds, such as fundraising analytics … and beyond!

More Resources You Might Like

 

3 Ways to Use Social Media for Smarter Fundraising

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Guest post by Kanwei Li, Double the Donation
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social media iconsHow often does your phone light up with a social media alert? Whether someone liked your picture on Instagram, retweeted that funny joke on Twitter, or commented on your latest Facebook status, you’re likely getting notifications of some kind.
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While social media is a powerful tool at the individual level, it’s also useful for organizations who are trying to raise more money.
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Gone are the days when all of your donors mailed in checks once a month. Many more are using technology like mobile giving and online donation forms to give to their favorite causes.

Check out the top three strategies for harnessing social media to fundraise more effectively.

And for more guidance on fundraising, check out Double the Donation’s Ultimate Guide!

1. Start asking for donations on Facebook.

Social media, and Facebook in particular, can be a great avenue to ask for and receive donations.

While you are likely already posting statuses to remind donors of how they can give to your organization, you can now receive contributions with a donation tab right on your Facebook page.

Of course, you won’t want to constantly be asking your followers for donations.

You should also use Facebook to:

  • Promote your events.
  • Let donors know about other ways to donate (like text-to-give).
  • Advertise for your upcoming fundraisers.
  • Praise your donors and volunteers.
  • Give updates about projects.
Asking for donations on Facebook is a great way to meet donors where they are. If you know that a majority of your donors use Facebook, encourage them to like your nonprofit’s page and interact with them on a regular basis.
According to a recent study, 84% of social media users share content on social media sites to show their support for a cause.
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With numbers like that, your nonprofit can’t afford to ignore Facebook and other social media sites as a way to ask for donations!

2. Use social media to stay in touch.

It’s vital that you use social media as a way to stay in touch with your advocates, donors, volunteers, and prospects.

It’s important to remember that social media is a dialogue, not a monologue. You aren’t just posting, tweeting, and commenting into a void.

Your supporters are interacting and talking to each other on these different platforms, and if your nonprofit wants to be part of the conversation, it’s crucial to be aware of what you’re posting.

  • You should be responding to donor messages on social media in a timely manner.
  • You should be liking or commenting on donors’ statuses that mention your organization.
  • You should be posting pictures of your volunteers and donors during events.
There are endless ways to connect with your supporters on social media. Find what works best for your organization, and get to work!

3. Promote corporate giving programs on social media.

Some of your biggest supporters may work for companies that will reward their gifts of money and time with matching gift programs and volunteer grant initiatives.

But your donors and volunteers might not know these programs exist at their jobs!

Your nonprofit can help by promoting corporate giving programs within your social media posts.

However, just like you don’t want to bombard donors with donation appeals on Facebook 24/7, keep your promotions of corporate giving programs to once or twice a week. The more saturated the information becomes, the more likely it will be tuned out.

Social Media Affects Everyone

Social media isn’t just for teenagers and millennials anymore. More and more people of all ages are looking to sites like Facebook and Twitter to interact with each other as well as nonprofits. Make sure that your organization is optimizing its fundraising potential with social media!

About the Author

kanweiLi

Kanwei Li is the CTO of Double the Donation. He has over 10 years of software development experience. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science from Emory University and resides in Atlanta.

He is passionate about developing software to solve everyday problems.

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More Resources You Might Like

Prospect Research Perspectives on Social MediaEvery fundraising professional – whether a researcher, gift officer or vice president – needs to know how to harness information to achieve fundraising goals. Prospect Research Perspectives delivers the big picture and the details behind the ideas and trends in fundraising information.

Donor Research: A Two-Way Street

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motorway-1033322_1920Guest post by James Gilmer, compliance specialist for Harbor Compliance

Just as fundraisers research prospective donors and new sources of funding, experienced donors also seek out worthy causes and charities in their communities. Your donors care about where their money is going, and they do extensive research before making a gift. One clear way to demonstrate your charity’s worth is through fundraising compliance. By staying on the right side of the law, and having the right people on the ground, you may find greater fundraising success!

The first thing to remember is that your donors research your charity and mission as much as you scout them (and their capacity to give). Experienced and first-time donors alike want to know their gifts support the cause you advertise, and make a difference in the community.

In other words, while prospect research is vital, it may not be enough. Your nonprofit has to look its best to prospective donors.

Your success begins with your cause, your people, and your “pitch.” Your fundraising researchers have done their homework, created comprehensive donor profiles, and have many tools at their disposal. At the same time, your frontline fundraisers probably have a packet of materials with your nonprofit’s work in the community, history, and reasons to give. Chances are, these individuals are enthusiastic go-getters with compelling stories (and a heck of a sales pitch). This human element can certainly win donations and recurring gifts from engaged individuals, yet you could find yourself losing donations and not even know it.

Charitable solicitation compliance is the backbone of your fundraising efforts. Many fundraisers and nonprofit executives believe that being 501(c)(3) tax exempt is enough to fundraise limitlessly. This misconception can lead you to lose out on grant funding, corporate donations, and your credibility. Forty-one states require your charity to file an additional registration before you solicit donations. Without registering, you could find your charity in violation of state and IRS law, but also in hot water with your donors.

Most states have an online database of charities, where anyone can research registered charities before they give. Experienced donors will do their research, as will corporations making their planned annual gift. If they see your charity is not registered or is delinquent, your chances of earning their donation and trust are lowered. When you apply for foundation or government grants, you’ll have to submit proof of registration along with your grant application. Without it, you may find your grant application held up or denied.

Charitable solicitation compliance may not be sexy, but it will help your nonprofit look its best to potential donors. Compliance affects everyone in an organization, so if this topic is new, be sure to review this Fundraising Compliance Guide. Your state has unique requirements in place to protect its citizens from unregulated charities. By staying on the right side of the law, you make your donors research, and their decision to give, that much easier.

James Gilmer is a compliance specialist for Harbor Compliance, which establishes 501(c) nonprofits and helps them stay compliant. Harbor Compliance assists charities in every state and several countries abroad. James serves on the Board for two nonprofits in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Connect with us: @HarborComply

3 Steps To Social Media Major Gift Prowess

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Were you aware that social media is a competitive edge in major gift fundraising? You must have heard by now how organizations are leveraging giving days and crowdfunding as well as incorporating social media into annual fund drives – but what about major gifts?

As a fundraiser who asks wealthy individuals to make gifts to your organization, deliberate and professional use of social media will not only separate you from the pack, it could put you in league with your prospects. It’s time to own your participation in social media!

Start with Prospect Research

If you have a prospect research professional on staff, it’s time to have a talk about social media. Agree on the social media sites you want to know about and ask your researcher if channel participation and user ID can be added to the profile, or better yet, put into a database field that can be pulled into a report.

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To get on the same page with your colleagues, you could order copies of the Prospect Research Perspectives: On Social Media and have informal discussions about articles over lunch or coffee.

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Every organization has a unique constituency. Global and national statistics on social media use may or may not apply to your donors. As your prospects get researched, you will begin to see which social media channels are preferred.

Audit Your Personal Social Media Presence

You are probably on social media already. It’s time to audit your presence. Accept that there is no privacy online, no matter how diligent you are with your privacy settings. Decide how you want to be perceived – what your personal brand is – and make that uniform across every platform from LinkedIn to Facebook and beyond. Don’t underestimate the power of a professional head shot.

Consider what would happen if a seven-figure prospect invited you to connect on Facebook. What will your Facebook presence communicate to the prospect? You should also expect that prospects will explore your work history in places like LinkedIn.

You can get ahead of the requests and craft an action plan that will best demonstrate your personal brand and interests and your organization’s brand and giving priorities.

What does that mean? Take one channel at a time. Following are two easily accomplished examples that demonstrate channel-appropriate activity:

  • LinkedIn: Liz picks two days a week when she catches up on industry reading, posts about something she has read, and links to the article or commentary. Whenever she learns new information about a giving priority, she shares the related press release, video, or other content. She decides to write a short article this year about integrity in major gift fundraising to post on Pulse and have it show on her profile page.
  • Facebook: Liz uses Facebook to connect with friends and family, but colleagues and donors have requested to friend her. She’s a foodie and a country music fan so she decides that each time she goes out to eat or hear music she will find something unusual about the experience to share on Facebook. She also shares related articles, videos, and pictures on those topics. She still shares things like family and vacation items, but she’s careful not to share deeply personal information, saving that for offline. She posts occasional pictures from work events and office fun, too.

Now Get Your Edge On!

Once you know which social media channels have a critical mass of your prospects and donors, make sure you have an account on those social media sites. You can’t be everywhere, so choose carefully based on the data.

Now you are poised to use social media for cultivation. Many fundraisers successfully reach prospects through LinkedIn, but you could do much more.

When you discover a prospect is very active on one or more social media channels, connect with him or her there and regularly post content that is of interest to the prospect, as well as engage the prospect by sharing his or her content and making comments. This builds trust and rapport through genuine interactions – and all from your laptop, tablet, or smart phone.

Social media isn’t the way to reach out to every prospect, but if you polish your online brand and use prospect research to guide your social media activity you can sharpen your major gift edge.

#ResearchPride, Advocacy, and Me

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researchpriderainbowAre you proud of the work that you do? Do you get excited about solving information challenges at work? If so, why not take the opportunity this month to share your #ResearchPride?

Because I am proud of the work I do to support not-for-profit organizations, I advocate for the profession in many ways. But I wasn’t always an advocate. It happened over time. My hope is that by sharing my advocacy story with you, you might realize that you, too, have been an advocate for prospect research – probably without really thinking about it. And just maybe you will be inspired to share some #ResearchPride this month with all of us!

I am a Professional

Prospect research has given me a profession where I can utilize the variety of skills I have acquired and apply them to making the world a better place. I have been able to hone my talents with the help of fundraisers and prospect research professionals around the world. It has been extremely rewarding and a tremendous amount of fun!

Being a professional is about more than excelling at work, though. It’s also about being prepared for work and keeping up with trends. I consider myself a fundraiser who specializes in prospect research. Because of this it’s important for me to understand what is happening in philanthropy around the globe and the many ways that impacts my work in research. I also endeavor to keep up with information technology and the changing attitudes to privacy.

My work is more than a j-o-b, it’s a profession. When I am excellent at my work I am advocating for the profession. Staying interested and informed also makes it easy to engage with others about what I do.

I share and engage with the public about my work

When I first began speaking in front of fundraising groups nearly ten years ago, I made a habit of mentioning the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement or APRA (pronounced “APP-rah”). I would ask the room if anyone knew about it. Rarely was a hand raised. When I moved to Tampa Bay, Florida from the mature fundraising environment in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I was challenged – not only did people not know about APRA, but most fundraisers didn’t know what prospect research was either. Yikes!

Those were the pretty early years of electronic screenings. I often think of those first vendors such as P!N, Blackbaud, and WealthEngine as early advocates for the prospect research profession. Their marketing efforts were very successful. Suddenly fundraisers had heard about prospect research – and they thought it was a software product!

While that was annoying, at least it opened the doors to better conversation. I love what I do and enjoy telling people all about it – anyone in fact! People greet my explanations with curiosity and frequently more questions. Sometimes they share stories with me about their interactions with a charity of choice. By sharing my profession with others, I’m also encouraging people to have positive relationships with not-for-profit organizations. Advocacy is awesome!

I collaborate with and support the growth of my colleagues

While I was growing Aspire Research Group, I volunteered with APRA Florida, including serving a term as president. I would also volunteer at APRA conferences and it was a great way to meet new people. All of that felt pretty comfortable – almost easy. But then two big choices came my way that threw me out of my comfort zone and changed the way I viewed my role as an advocate for the profession.

First, two people at my local Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Suncoast chapter encouraged me to answer a call for authors to write about prospect research for the Wiley/AFP Fund Development Series. This was an amazing opportunity to share my profession with the more than 30,000 members of AFP. It was also quite terrifying. Sure I was an excellent researcher, but I had very little experience with really large organizations or higher education.

That’s when I decided I would collaborate with someone. Although I barely knew her, I called up Helen Brown. She was the biggest name I knew in our profession and she had the complementary experience. She said “yes”! We had some of the best discussions as we aligned our experiences under a shared philosophy about our work. As we each wrote our chapters there was continued discussion. It was an exhausting and exhilarating experience. And eventually there was a book, Prospect Research for Fundraisers: The Essential Handbook.

The second event was as the result of success. Aspire Research Group was growing and I reached out to other independent and freelance researchers. It didn’t always go well. Sometimes I knew things they didn’t, sometimes they knew more than I did, and often they did not have access to the paid tools needed to do their best work. Should I invest in those relationships? Should I share knowledge and tools with -gasp- my competitors?

What would you do?

Recently I saw something like this on social media:

  • CEO: We need to get training for our employees
  • CFO: But what if they get the training and then leave for our competitors?
  • CEO: What if they don’t get the training and they stay?

That captures my final decision. I did share knowledge and tools with colleagues that I developed a close working relationship with and I have never regretted it. A small group of us are now exploring ways in which we could more formally work together and retain our autonomy.

I want our profession to be full of highly-trained, well-resourced individuals! Prospect research professionals are some of the most intelligent, creative, and collaborative people I have ever had the privilege of working with.

A big THANK YOU to Helen Brown for launching #ResearchPride month two years ago and for inviting bloggers to share the love!

Now it’s your turn… consider engaging with the #ResearchPride hashtag on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or any other social media platform where you participate. Comment on this blog post or visit the other blog posts listed below and share your thoughts there.

But most importantly, find your voice and speak. Practice your explanation of your work. Test it out on everyone who looks remotely interested. Share your #ResearchPride!

Other #ResearchPride Articles

3 Steps to Building a More Comprehensive Prospect Profile

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By Jill McCarville, Marketing and Communication Manager, iWave Information Systems

head-746550_1920It’s almost lunchtime when a fundraiser comes to you with a new assignment:  They have a meeting with Suzie in two weeks and need to know who this person is – does she have a history of giving, does she have a connection to your cause, how much does she have to give?  Next stop, your prospect research tool.

The 3 fundamental steps to building a prospect profile remain the same: Create, customize, complete.  Okay, so those may not come as a surprise to you.  But from a software company’s point of view, there may be some profile building features within your tool that you haven’t been leveraging.  Use these features to gain deeper insight into your prospect and make your job easier. At iWave we recognize that there are many different research tools, each with different functionalities.  However, some of the features highlighted below may exist in your tool and you just didn’t know about them or haven’t had a chance to try them.  Try these steps to make your profile building easier and faster and -who knows- maybe even in time for lunch.

Creating

Our data tells us that the majority of users begin with a general integrated search (360search) across all datasets at one time.  In fact, in our tool, there were over 1.3 million 360searches done last year alone.  This broad search will help you identify which datasets/categories contain lots of information on your prospect and in which datasets you’ll need to dive deeper.  Now you can start painting the picture of your prospect’s employment, income, real estate holdings, board affiliations, net worth, stock holdings, history of charitable giving and political giving, etc.  Simply start selecting the records that you know, or are pretty confident, are your Suzie and add them to her profile.

Now, you might be saying, “But what if it’s a common name?”  No problem.  Once you’ve done a broad search across all of your tool’s datasets, you can narrow your search to find more information about your prospect, their spouse, and even their private companies or trusts. Exploring individual datasets with additional filters might even uncover key information you weren’t able to find using a broad, high-level search.

For example, if you’re trying to find Suzie’s real estate holdings, but your initial search didn’t turn up any property, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t own real estate.  As you know, it’s much more likely that she does.  After all, real estate accounted for about 20% of a HNWI’s total assets globally (CapGemini World Wealth Report 2013).  It’s possible that the property is listed in someone else’s name, a trust, or LLC.  Time to check the real estate database.  Try reverse searching by Suzie’s mailing address (rather than her name) because in many cases people link all of their properties to a primary residence for billing and other mail.  You can find additional search tips for other datasets here.

As you explore each of the datasets and “tease out” real matches to your prospect, select those records and add them to the profile you created in the broad search.  But first, ensure your tool automatically filters out duplicate records to maintain the accuracy of your scores and ratings.

Customizing

A common perception we hear in the industry is that profiles must be created externally because tools simply don’t deliver the quality of profile you need.  For some tools though, this isn’t the case.  In our tool alone, researchers create over 40,000 profiles each year containing over 1.8 million records.  One of the keys to creating so many profiles is customizing your research tool.

In the first step, you chose which records to add to Suzie’s profile.  Now, you need to add and delete records as you validate them.  This will eliminate false positives so you can be confident in the accuracy of the profile and the scores/ratings within it.  Depending on your tool’s features, you’ll also want to select your own capacity ranges (used to determine Suzie’s capacity rating), and the proper affinity ranges (so the score accurately reflects Suzie’s connection to your specific cause).

Completing

Almost there!  Once you’ve sketched out the prospect profile, it’s time to add the finishing touches.  Consider adding Suzie’s picture to the front for easy identification.  Then add any articles you may have found on her from other sources.

Jen Filla, along with other industry leaders, also suggests you add additional value to a profile by synthesizing the data you’ve gathered.  As a researcher, you are the expert on your prospects.  This is your chance to analyze the records and provide observations.  For example, what do Suzie’s SEC transactions tell you about her?  Do you see any patterns or trends in her charitable giving?  What clues can you find from her board affiliations?

Use the front page lead summary section to summarize your prospect’s current situation and provide recommendations.  In fact, in our tool, this lead summary was created based on the requests of researchers. A front and center spot to highlight the one thing the fundraiser needs to know about Suzie.  You can then use the built-in notes sections to tell the full story about Suzie as a prospect – who she likes to give to, when she likes to give, and how much she can give at one particular time.

Many people like to create and use the profile, score, and notes built within the tool.  However, this isn’t the only option.  Feel free to export the profile in a Word document for further treatment, or print a short summary profile to share right away.  And don’t forget to set an alert on the profile so you receive updates when there are any changes to Suzie’s records.

You are the expert at creating prospect profiles for your organization, and hopefully these tips will help you leverage your research tool to build better, smarter profiles.  Happy profiling!

Now, what’s for lunch?

About the Author
jill color

Jill McCarville is the marketing and communication manager at iWave Information Systems, a company that delivers software solutions to education, healthcare and nonprofit organizations to help them raise more major gifts.  iWave’s solutions are an asset to fundraising departments of any size. From Ivy league schools like Yale and Stanford, to healthcare and arts organizations like Doctors Without Borders and the Smithsonian Institution, iWave has assisted organizations in the United States, Canada, and overseas.

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5 Reasons Public Company Insiders are Great Prospects

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Unless you are fundraising for a prestigious business school, you probably don’t come across a whole lot of private company insiders as prospects. Maybe you wonder what all the excitement is about. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings are complex. Why bother understanding that world if you have those prospects so infrequently?

Apart from the noble pursuit of continual learning, following are five reasons public company insiders make such good prospects.

Continue reading 5 Reasons Public Company Insiders are Great Prospects →

The Devil’s in the Data! When should you get an audit?

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binary-503598_1280Guest post by Darrel Spacone

Stop and think about the health of the data in your donor database.  When was the last time any cleaning or maintenance was done? Is it part of a normal routine?

We all run into situations on an almost daily basis that scream “Dirty Data”, “Duplicate Data”, “Useless Data”, etc.  But what are you doing about it? Do you know what to do or how to do it?  There are always issues with data that will creep up over and over again until they are addressed.

Your donor database is highly complicated and detailed. Over the course of time, how many staff and volunteers, with different skill sets, have been allowed to edit your data in some way and contribute to the less than stellar shape that it is in?

Most organizations face the same issues, but how they deal with or ignore them separates them. An audit is the starting point to finding out exactly what and how much is amiss, addressing it, and then making maintenance and cleaning part of your normal routine.

In my career I have had direct experience with wearing many hats and having heavy workloads thrust upon me as a nonprofit employee. Sometimes there is little or no time to navigate the data trail, finding and fixing common, glaring issues.

You know or suspect you have problems, but how and when can you tackle it?

If you don’t have someone on staff with the expertise to clean up your donor database, consider hiring a consultant to provide you with an audit. An audit will identify what you are doing right, what is going wrong, and what steps you need to take to get back on track.

So, when should you get an audit?  NOW of course!

Following are some of the benefits of an audit:

  • Mailings: An audit will expose missing titles, names, addresses, addressees, salutations.  Are you mailing to or soliciting minors? What about your service area or state? Do you target solicitations to certain counties? Is the county field populated?
  • Duplicate records: Do you have the same person with multiple records?  Are they necessary?  Are you mailing to spouses or other household members separately? Should you?
  • Duplicate addresses: Every time you add a new, preferred address, are you checking the address tab?
  • Merged records: Duplicate information can be copied over during this process.
  • Security: Are you lazy when it comes to security?  Does everyone have the same access regardless of their job function and capabilities?  Often this is the single largest problem and causes the most damage.
  • Deceased constituents: Are you mailing to or soliciting dead people? Have you overlooked the surviving spouse?
  • Record archiving: How long do you solicit a prospect? How long has the record been in the system without any activity?  Do you know how to keep your history, but remove from your mailings?

Data underpins all of your development efforts from gift acknowledgement, invitations, prospect identification, stewardship and beyond. When your data becomes a tangled web, your ability to fundraise suffers. Donors are not thanked and renewed. Major gift opportunities are lost forever. When you add up the losses incurred from bad data, the return on investment in your data skyrockets.

The Devil’s in the data! Make it Good.

darrel.spaconeAbout Darrel Spacone, bCRE
Darrel Spacone is the Chief Information Officer at Donor-Data-Done, LLC, a Blackbaud Certified Raiser’s Edge Consulting firm. With thirteen years of experience with Raiser’s Edge, he has helped healthcare, arts, child welfare and social services organizations identify problems and fix their donor databases. He provides audits and solutions, so that you can focus on your day-to-day tasks without missing a beat, saving you time and money while you are raising money.
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