Tag Archives: major gift

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Upskill your Development Team with Research – Without Breaking the Budget!

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When people hear “prospect research” they often assume that prospect research is a software or using Google to find things like company bios or, sometimes, that it is an employee that creates prospect profiles. Usually, the definition relates to the kind and scale of development operations they have been exposed to. And, really, everyone is as correct as they are wrong!

When we consider the growth of an organization from start-up to raising billions of donor dollars, the core of prospect research is the act of better understanding your donors through data and information.

Even if you have the luxury of a full-time, prospect research professional, everyone on the development team needs to be good at some basic prospect research skills. And if you don’t have the luxury of having a prospect research professional on staff, there are great ways to upskill existing staff to provide additional research support.

Finding contact and occupation

When it comes to personally asking a donor for a gift – most often in a mid-level or major gift program – the first thing you need is contact information: address, phone, email, or social media.

Hand-in-hand with contact information is the donor’s occupation. Occupation is useful for a few reasons:

  • Finding business contact information is easier and usually more accurate.
  • Psychologically, at work we probably expect to be contacted by people we don’t know more than at home.
  • Especially in higher education, development officers can connect with donor prospects on LinkedIn, if appropriate.
  • Occupation is a quick and easy indicator of likely wealth.

Everyone on the development team needs to be good at finding basic information about donors and this is why Aspire and the Prospect Research Institute created the booklet, Search Tips for Fundraising Research.

Search Tips book cover

This 15-page booklet introduces the five fundamental building blocks for fundraising research and gives you tips, tricks, and resources to find what you need. Purchase your copy today!

Information is great – when it’s accurate!

Once everyone is upskilled on basic search —  from the president’s assistant to major gift officers to the database administrator and beyond – it’s time to address whether the information everyone is finding is correct.

The proliferation of misleading and outright erroneous information can be overwhelming. As anyone who has clicked through a scam email knows (and c’mon, we’ve all fallen for one at least once!), when you’re busy, stressed, or preoccupied, it’s difficult to maintain a critical, watchful eye for discrepancies or take the time to double-check information.

At Aspire, we were once asked to perform due diligence research on a donor prospect with whom the organization was in negotiations for a major gift. Beyond reputational risk, the question was whether he actually had the wealth he claimed to have.

It was super challenging! Why? Because the information we sourced seemed to be in a perpetually unconfirmable loop. For example, what appeared to be a published interview was really his own blog article. Live media interviews only seemed to cite information that he had seeded in his biographies and multitude of websites.

And the worst? He claimed to have bought out dozens of bankrupt companies – all incorporated in Delaware with no owner information published!

After hours of creative searching, we finally found the fatal flaw and it was in plain sight. If you tried to purchase any of the products or services on offer through the various companies there was either no option to purchase on the website or no physical address to visit.

Finding accurate information is so important, the Prospect Research Institute created a FREE course to educate your development team (and anyone really) – Solid Intel.

Solid Intel Course

Solid Intel is a multi-module course teaching you how to evaluate sources critically and feel confident in the accuracy of the information you present. Fun quizzes test your comprehension. Share with your team and Enroll Today.

Wealth and philanthropy indicators

If your organization needs deeper research to support major gifts and hasn’t had this support previously, you may want to upskill an existing staff member, such as a development coordinator or database administrator.

You probably have a few specialty tasks you’d like this person to accomplish, such as the following:

  • Identify major gift prospects from the database
  • Provide prospect profiles prior to solicitation
  • Help coordinate moves management for the team

Leveraging your existing staff member or hiring someone at entry level can be economical and helps build internal capacity for upgrading donors and moving toward major gifts. In the past, training a staff member on prospect research support for the growing nonprofit was challenging.

Prospect research industry conferences are expensive and dominated by sophisticated healthcare and higher education environments. Webinars and local conferences offer tidbits, but usually don’t give your researcher key skills with step-by-step instruction on how to apply the skills to their work.

Recognizing the need, Aspire developed a course at the Prospect Research Institute specifically for the nonprofit researcher that needs to do all the research things – and at an economical price.

The Essentials for Successful Fundraising Research course is at least 7 to 8 weeks of on-demand content with a downloadable textbook, homework feedback, ability to earn a digital badge demonstrating competency, and 12 months of monthly group coaching. Give your organization the research edge. Enroll Today!

Growing your Fundraising with Research

When your development team has the information it needs, big things – and gifts – can happen!

  • Routine stewardship can happen with better contact information
  • Stewardship calls can turn into major gift prospect qualification
  • Donors can be moved more methodically toward larger gifts
  • Deeper information can give development officers greater confidence to ask for larger gifts

Upskilling your development team doesn’t have to break the bank. Aspire, through the Prospect Research Institute, has created a variety of training options to meet your needs at affordable prices.

What are you waiting for?
Visit the Institute now!

 

launch your prospect portfolio; rocket

Add Speed to Major Gift Portfolios with RPM

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When a current client created a job posting for a Research and Prospect Management position a light bulb went off!

Research and                                  Revolutions
Prospect                                            Per
Management                                   Minute

More frequently you’ll see this type of combined role posted as Prospect Management and Research (PMR). But if you reverse that to Research and Prospect Management (RPM) …can you get more speed into your major gift portfolios?

Which comes first – research or prospect management?

Unlike a similar question about chickens and eggs, there is a pretty definitive answer to this question. Research usually comes first in the form of prospect identification.

Most organizations grow into major gifts. A common nonprofit story begins with institutional funding, such as foundations and corporations, who want to support early and continued nonprofit growth. Along the way, nonprofits attract small dollar individual gifts and refine their individual giving program to the point where larger gifts receive more personalized attention and individuals are personally asked for larger gifts.

Usually with the first capital or other campaign, there comes a need to more methodically or reliably identify donor prospects who can give lead campaign gifts. Enter prospect research with major gift prospect identification!

When there are just too many donors requiring personal attention to keep track of in one person’s head, the CRM database comes to the rescue with prospect management. Prospect management provides a systematic way of tracking prospect’s progress from identification to a gift and stewardship.

But what happens to research when prospect management becomes a separate specialty in-house?

Sometimes research and prospect management get out of sync, prompting major gift portfolios to get as stubbornly stuck as a zipper out of alignment!

When research is disconnected from the management of major gift portfolios, various things begin to break down. Sometimes the criteria that research is using to identify prospects does not fit with the funding priorities or the development officer’s views on what makes a great prospect. Research might not be aware of specific regions or development officer portfolios that need more or different prospects than others.

When prospect management is disconnected from research, important information learned from development officers is not passed along. For example, a development officer might learn critical information about a wealth event for which research could provide capacity insight. Also, the prospect manager might not be aware of the criteria used to source new prospects and then they cannot explain it to the development officers.

Adding research in at the “front” of prospect management – the RPM perspective – recognizes that the smooth coordination of prospect identification with portfolio management is where major gift speed is generated.

When the zipper is not aligned, movement is difficult and slow. When there is alignment, the zipper zips easily and quickly.

Similarly, when research and prospect management are aligned, development officers zip through qualifying and disqualifying!

(This all assumes, of course, that development officers are trained in qualification techniques and have a disciplined work process. But that is a different subject!)

Major gift fundraising: Can’t have one without the other

Whether you like to call the work PMR or RPM, the bottom line is that you can’t have one without the other. Without research, pipelines eventually run dry. Without prospect management, development officers lack support to move prospects effectively and efficiently toward a larger, major or transformative gift.

Additional Resources

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How connected is your major gifts team to its donors – really?

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Do you really know how well your major gifts teams is performing? Maybe they are raising millions of dollars every year and hitting the targets set for them — but are those the right targets? Evaluating donor engagement could help you answer those questions.

If you are one of those organizations that fundraises your budget every year and has grown to command a major gifts team, you have my deepest admiration! Scaling a nonprofit organization is not an easy task. Neither is growing and scaling a major gifts team.

At Aspire, we work with fundraising leaders who are tasked with taking their major gifts team up to the next level of performance. It can be surprisingly difficult for even an experienced major gifts officer, trained at a larger institution, to make headway with a legacy major gifts team.

Donor Engagement as a Framework

Having major gift officers assign their prospects a donor engagement level is one way to find out what’s happening on your team and in their portfolios.

It has been a common practice to focus on portfolios through the lens of the gift cycle — identification, qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. And this works very well for gift proposals, but human relationships don’t fit very well into those process-oriented terms. Donor engagement is different.

Many major gift officers intuitively view their portfolio through the lens of donor engagement – discovery, early cultivation, and deep cultivation.

It also fits the rule of three, which means when major gift officers show up to work, they only have to remember three categories of donors in their portfolios. This can help them manage their time and prioritize the right people.

Honest Discussion Leads to Real Change

When you ask each major gift officer to assign a donor engagement level to every person in their portfolio, surprising conversations may arise and lead you to what’s really happening.

For example, you might learn that someone on your team is struggling to find contact information, leaving them with only snail mail letters to communicate. You may also discover that some team members don’t know how to build a deep relationship with a major donor, which is why they have stagnant, lower gift sizes.

To create fertile ground for these kinds of discussions, it’s important to clearly define the donor engagement levels. It’s also important for each major gift solicitation to be recorded and tracked as a proposal or gift opportunity on the donor record.

Major gift officers also need routine portfolio reviews. This is time-consuming, but it’s where all the stories start pouring out. And when you combine portfolio reviews with monthly team meetings, now you have a platform for coaching and developing process and policies.

Which Comes First – The Process or the Outcomes?

If you are like most fundraising leadership, you need more dollars raised and now. Using donor engagement as a framework isn’t for every organization, but it can help you assess the reality of your team’s performance while you are working to identify and assign new prospects.

And there is an added bonus with this framework. It is within the full and complete control of each major gift officer to categorize their relationships with the donors in their portfolios – as it should be. When major gift officers have ratings of all sorts assigned to their donors it can feel like their relationships and the information they have gathered are ignored.

With a donor engagement framework, it’s about the relationship first, ratings second.

The Path(s) to Major Gift Fundraising

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The Path(s) to Major Gift FundraisingI will admit to being fascinated by, if not obsessed with, the path that leads to a major gift program for smaller nonprofits. What I hear and read about the most are large nonprofits, most of which are in higher education.

This frustrates me. It’s akin to walking into retail stores only to find nearly everything is focused on the top 1% ultra-high-net-worth individual. What about the rest of us 99%?

With the cost of research tools going down and their quality and usefulness going up, the world of major gifts is beginning to tempt the masses of nonprofits serving our communities. Whether it’s a wealth screening, look-up tool, or a database with CRM capabilities and built-in ratings, the small nonprofit can see those major gifts on the horizon.

But what is the path between starting and arriving in a major gift program?

Assuredly there is no single path to a major gift program, but research can provide illumination along the way. Over the past couple of years my consulting practice has become more focused on helping the smaller nonprofit – inside AND outside of a campaign.

The first step to major gifts is having a development officer who embodies relationship fundraising and has experience asking and receiving large gifts. Previous experience where there was access to and good use of research means things will move along much faster.

Start with the Data

The foundation of a sustainable major gift effort, whether that is larger annual solicitations or multi-year leadership gift opportunities, is good data practices. It really doesn’t matter how big or how small the development shop, without good data practices there is no sustainable progress.

Sometimes organizations are ambitious and reach out to hire a prospect research professional hoping that by using research early they will get a head start. But once hired they discover that the researcher must spend the first year or so doing nothing but getting the data practices in order. This can be very frustrating for both parties!

A well-run development office demands good data. Gifts are properly recorded, acknowledged, and thanked. Direct appeals are regularly mailed and emailed. Sponsors and guests are invited to a signature event. Grants are tracked and program results reported. Volunteers are tracked and supported.

Leverage the Data

Once you have good data practices, you can avail yourself of affordable research technologies such as wealth screenings. For quite a while now I’ve been helping nonprofits with wealth screenings in two primary ways:

  1. Screening the active donor base to assess fundraising potential for goal-setting and to prioritize the best prospects.

Many times I get called on by a fundraiser who has taken on a new development officer position. She wants to really organize and grow the nonprofit’s fundraising and puts a high priority on relationship-building with the best donors and prospects.

But working through the screening process is a big distraction. I help her get the screening results and understand the picture painted by those results. We walk through what kind of fundraising potential is there and how she can most effectively apply the results to her existing fundraising program.

  1. Screening all or a portion of the database and verifying the top-rated to identify major gift prospects.

Outside of a campaign, most often I do screenings and verification for newly hired fundraisers who are dedicated full or part-time to raising major gifts. The record count is manageable and I deliver new names monthly while reviewing past outreach.

With a skilled relationship-based fundraiser, this kind of project yields exciting results! Donor connections are made on many levels with leadership, board members, and staff. It’s an intense period of time, but once the list has been worked through I’m usually finished. Strong fundraising results mean staff is often added to assume some research duties.

Create New Procedures

With good data underpinning fundraising efforts, most organizations benefit next from slightly more formalized procedures. For most of the nonprofits I work with, even with some impressive total fundraised dollars each year, they are operating with skeleton staffing and very limited external resources.

Working with nonprofits to develop new procedures is one of my favorite activities. It’s a messy business as they try to figure out how to make things work best inside their organization and also with their constituents. I like to stick with them as they begin really calling on and building relationships with donors and prospects.

We work out what a good prospect looks like, talks like, is motivated by, and where a good prospect engages with the organization. Then I get to translate that into replicable procedures. I outline the way we used multiple data points to segment donors. I document how decisions were made about prospect assignments. And I offer advice and resources whenever appropriate.

Slowly a major gift program takes shape and begins performing.

Inform Cultivation and Solicitation Strategies

By far my favorite activity is researching prospects and having strategy conversations with the development officer. The bigger the gift opportunity and the deeper the research the more fun it is.

Doing this kind of work is like taking a tangled mess of jewelry and carefully and methodically unraveling it and polishing it until a glinting, sparkling necklace is revealed in all its glory!

This is the work and these are the conversations that can’t be completed by algorithm or otherwise mass produced. It’s wonderfully and deeply personal for the development officer, the organization, and most of all, for the donor prospect.

Sometimes the development officer might be intimidated by the prospect, and I can offer validation, encouragement, and confidence. Sometimes the development officer is optimistic and ambitious, and I can offer grounding and multiple scenarios – just in case the biggest number isn’t possible.

It All Starts with a Relationship

Prospect research has been a good career fit for me. There is a wide variety of tasks to perform and being methodical and analytical just makes me happy. But understanding the importance and practice of relationship-building has come more slowly to me.

After being a research consultant for over a decade, I incorporate the tenets of relationship-building into my research approach to the best of my abilities. I have also learned to recognize development professionals and organizations that value relationship-building and those that don’t. These days, I only work with the former.

There are many paths to a sustainable major gift program, but every one of them requires a skilled relationship-builder.

Additional Resources

Not asking for Millions? Why should you care about HNWIs?

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NOT ASKING FOR MILLIONS? WHY SHOULD YOU CARE ABOUT HNWIS?I get it. Your organization is not going to ask for millions even if the prospect could give millions, so why should you spend your limited emotional energy trying to understand HNWIs (high net worth individuals) and global wealth trends? The clear majority of nonprofit organizations in the U.S., around 80%, have operating budgets of $1 million or less.

Nevertheless, there are three very good reasons why you should care.

1-Mission

I’ve been a consultant for over a decade and no matter what the mission, every organization is sure that fundraisers with a different mission – children, animals, environment – have it easier. That somehow someone else’s mission is easier to raise money for. The truth is that every mission has passionate donors, but it takes careful, skilled fundraisers to understand the donor base and position the messaging and gift opportunities to match.

Sure, you might not have the budget or opportunities to attract million dollar gifts now, but isn’t your mission worthy of receiving million dollar gifts? Aren’t you working together with leadership to grow your organization’s impact?

If you don’t know anything about HNWIs how could you possibly position your organization’s messaging and gift opportunities to grow into million dollar giving?

2-Career Growth

Especially if you are working for a small nonprofit on a thin budget, you need to be in command of your career training. With rampant content marketing your free learning choices can be a bit overwhelming. You’re reading this blog post so I know you care about sharpening and growing your skills. The next step is to find and manage learning sources that are related, but outside the boundaries of fundraising.

Local and global economics, including HNWIs should be on your list. Following are three really good (and very readable) resources with a hot tip from each:

Capgemini World Wealth Report

Besides having a fun-to-navigate website that lets you dig in to the data, you can download the report to take advantage of the table of contents and the executive summary. But it’s the attractive charts on pages 17-19 that I want to highlight for you here.

Figure9-CapgeminiWWR-2018

For the HNWIs that participated in this study in North America, 12.4% of their wealth is held in real estate. This percentage is excluding the primary residence, which is helpful because individuals who own multiple properties are more likely to be HNW. We don’t want to use our “back of the envelope” calculations on just anyone – only those that have investable assets of at least $1 million.

So, if you have someone who has multiple properties you can now perform some eye-opening “back of the envelope” calculations:

Real Estate ÷ 0.124 = Estimated Net Worth
Estimated Net Worth x 0.05 = Low Gift Capacity
Estimated Net Worth x 0.10 = High Gift Capacity

The New York Times – How to Get the Wealthy to Donate

Did you miss this article on “How to Get the Wealthy to Donate?” Did you hear about the underlying scientific research anywhere else? If not, you may find yourself frustrated and unhappy with the results of your conversations with HNWIs. It is squarely on your shoulders to understand and relate to donor prospects – in situ!

In this consumer-friendly world of content marketing, you don’t have to have a subscription to benefit from great resources like The New York Times. You can usually find a free e-newsletter or mobile app that will tease you with headlines. My favorite way of keeping up with multiple resources like this is to create a Twitter stream in Hootsuite of various topic lists I create from Twitter accounts that I follow.

Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy – Current Research

At Indiana University’s School of Philanthropy, the list of research projects creates a wonderful feeling of abundance! From Giving USA to the Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy to Women Give you can’t go astray.

“Nonprofit boards that include a higher percentage of women tend to have board members who participate more in fundraising and advocacy. Members of these boards also tend to be more involved in the board’s work, new research shows.” –Indiana University

The next time you attend a strategic planning session or any other leadership meeting, you now have scientific research at your fingertips to help your organization continue to grow and expand its reach.

3-Success = Preparation x Opportunity

Notice how I changed the formula adage slightly from “Preparation plus Opportunity” to “Preparation multiplied by Opportunity”? I wanted to emphasize how rare and transformative Opportunity is in this world. According to the Urban Institute, as of December 2016, there were more than 1.2 million public charities and private foundations in the United States. That is a lot of noise! How will donors and prospects hear you?

When opportunity does come, will you recognize it?
Are you prepared to seize it?

If you wanted to compete and win at the Olympics, would you wait until you passed initial qualifying tests before hiring a coach? No way! You would have had a coach from when you were a mere tot expressing interest. Don’t wait to get a fundraising mentor or coach. Regularly consume information about communicating with all kinds of people, including HNWIs.

Sales training abounds and one of my favorite resources is Sandler Sales. They have great white papers, articles, and newsletters. Do you have any kind of commute to the office? Visit www.sandler.com or search on iTunes to find their “How To Succeed” podcast, which is about 15 minutes per episode.

One of their recent episodes was how to make “touch calls.” This translates easily to fundraising! After all, we want to retain our donors and becoming more systematic about it is part of the preparation that leads to success. In the episode there is a reference to the DiSC profile and how each client personality is likely to respond to your call, which you might decide to investigate further.

You can create a personalized coaching team by pulling together key resources, like a podcast, and having the discipline to schedule time every day to learn.

Why am I focusing on Wealth instead of Philanthropy?

It is easy to argue that if you needed to focus on only one thing, it should be philanthropy first. After all, a person can have great wealth and refuse to part with a penny. Hands down, if you are in a smaller nonprofit, focusing on philanthropy first is a winning strategy. I’m not suggesting otherwise.

What I am suggesting is that it is important to focus on philanthropy with wealth. Your organization needs dollars and is worthy of money to pay the electric bill, hire competent staff, and deliver programs that are making our world a better place.

It’s important for all of us to assess our feelings about money and any bias we may have about wealth accumulation so that we don’t neglect our education and skill building around philanthropy with wealth.

Additional Resources

After the Wealth Screening: Taking a New Direction

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Higher education and healthcare dominate the field of prospect research – and for good reason. They have income well above the funds they raise and these big budgets attract correspondingly big gifts. But those industries no longer dominate wealth/prospect screenings. Or at least, they don’t have to.

Prospect research tools such as wealth screenings have become affordable and accessible to the vast number of smaller budget (but not necessarily small) nonprofit organizations serving our communities, nationally and internationally. As I work with three intrepid beta testers in the new Essentials for Successful Fundraising Research course, it’s becoming clear that prospect research is changing shape and diversifying.

We can and should start talking about screenings differently.

It’s about time we recognize that one size does not fit all and the methods and practices of higher education and healthcare do not serve the majority of nonprofit organizations.

Misdirection #1:  Screening results should always be verified before being disseminated to development officers.

The very nature of the constituent records for the majority of nonprofits in the U.S. screams against this guidance. A local food bank has a much different relationship with its constituents than a university or hospital – and usually many fewer constituents overall. They may be attracting more people with mid-level income levels (net worth below $1M), who are local, and who may be very receptive to a phone call.

Screening information combined with a development officer’s knowledge of the community is frequently enough to start making phone calls. The development assistant or prospect researcher, if there is one, can help by looking up contact information as needed and making suggestions about what internal data pieces could be combined with the screening ratings to better prioritize the list.

Misdirection #2: Wealth screenings benefit major gift initiatives the most.

Smaller nonprofits usually know the wealthy people in their community. There might be a few hidden gems in their donor files, especially if the nonprofit is reaching a national audience through social media, but the real value in screenings is often the way the ratings can be used to improve the performance of nearly every fundraising activity.

When development staff numbers from one to ten, everyone in the office multi-tasks, so why should your screening results behave any differently? Your best donors are probably involved with your organization in multiple ways: volunteering, sponsoring, giving, and serving in leadership roles. Your screening ratings can help make your efforts more efficient.

For example, if you can only make phone calls to 50 or so people for a special campaign, or if you need to call people who haven’t RSVP’d for a big event, now you can go beyond past giving and also look at capacity to make a gift. You almost can’t help but raise more money by adding additional filters or prioritization to your efforts!

Misdirection #3: The more in the results file, the better.

A recent conversation with a screening vendor made me examine my own bias about the deliverables for smaller organizations. Overworked and underpaid development professionals take one look at that impenetrable spreadsheet or overwhelming software interface and go hemming and hawing into complete inaction. There is only so much the human brain can absorb in any one day, month, or year.

There are key data points in every screening that are very valuable. The various ratings are top among those. So why are they often buried? Why can’t you get more than one file from your vendor? How about a simple one for import and a more complicated one for your development assistant or prospect researcher to dig into?

If you can identify the key data points from the results and get those imported into your database – well, that’s the only way you are really going to be able to use the screening to improve your fundraising results overall.

Want to get the most bang for your buck out of screenings? Communicate!

Your screening vendors are nimble and eager to hear and listen to how their product could make you more successful. Tell them you want to import the ratings but don’t have dedicated IT staff – can they help? Tell them you need to start making phone calls immediately – can they give you a simple file you can work from?

Even better, your vendor likely has worked with many organizations just like yours. Do they have any success stories to share? Any innovative uses for the screening data? Any common pitfalls to avoid?

Where is Prospect Research in all of this?

Of the three participants in the Essentials for Successful Fundraising Research course, only one has “research” in his title. Nevertheless, these are the intelligent, resourceful individuals tasked with finding and understanding the data. Their organizations are going to have capital campaigns and all sorts of other fundraising initiatives no matter what title they give to these intrepid data explorers.

As part of their training, I created an “After the Screening”reference sheet that you can find in the Prospect Research Institute’s learning community. The reference sheet represents the beginning of the conversation. Once you’ve taken a look, hop into the Everything Prospect Research forum and let me know what you think about it!

Additional Resources

Lowering the Prospect-to-Donor Ratio

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Do you dream of creating the perfect prospecting system? A system so flawless that the ratio of prospects to donors drops to 2:1 or even (gasp) 1:1? I do! And yet, barring advances in ESP, a 1:1 ratio feels quite out of reach. We simply don’t have access to people’s complex, internal motivations for giving until they get visited and share. Even so, we still have plenty of room to achieve better prospect-to-donor ratios.

Interview with a Donor

I had the joy of interviewing Tim Horton, a venture capitalist for the Prospect Research Institute’s #ChatBytes podcast. About halfway through the interview he shared some of his philanthropic motivations with me.
  • Childhood sentiment – He gave to the March of Dimes as a child and still gives.
  • Family culture of giving – He was taught to give while young and now gives his time and money to mentor youth.
  • Political passions – He feels strongly that Africa has been left out of the capitalist economy and wants to remedy this.

Mr. Horton is a very private person and his giving is anonymous. If you research him you will find all of the usual public information, especially businesses where he is a listed officer. Isn’t it natural for us fundraising researchers to consider that given his venture capital history he might view his giving as an investment or wish to be involved in giving to entrepreneurial issues or causes? And yet, if we deduced his giving motivations from the data collected we would be all wrong.

Insights and Integration

Whether we are sourcing a fresh list of prospects or taking a deeper dive to qualify already identified prospects, achieving a lower prospect-to-donor ratio requires insights and integration.
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As an instructor at the Prospect Research Institute I have introduced “insights” as a capstone project in any course where it makes sense – because crafting insights takes practice. Usually we researchers are happy to craft insights from community involvement information. We can look at patterns of giving, nonprofit board service, and family foundation histories and provide suggestions about where and how a prospective donor might want to make a gift. But we often stumble over providing insights from wealth information.
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And yet, wealth information is where we researchers can really shine a light in the darkness! When we begin to learn and imagine how wealth and assets could affect a prospective donor’s ability to make a major or transformational gift we offer a tremendous service to the gift officer. Suddenly the multi-millionaire with 85% of her wealth tied up in her business becomes recognized for life stage and likely liquidity, opening up a long-term relationship that yields some major gifts now and an eight or nine-figure gift fifteen years later.
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So if your gift officer comes to you asking for estimated net worth or a liquidity percentage on his prospect’s wealth, take a deep breath and resist the urge to say that it isn’t possible. Instead consider this the perfect opportunity to integrate prospect research into front-line fundraising. Open the conversation. Discuss how we collect wealth information and how we might better inform the gift officer. Look to other fields, such as financial services, to find out how they evaluate liquidity or other facets of wealth. And provide those insights in some evolving format.
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Because once you become part of the team conversation around how a prospective donor’s wealth impacts ability and motivation for giving, you are providing the kind of insights your team desperately needs to bring the prospect-to-donor ratio down and to build deeper and more respectful relationships with constituents. You begin to drop the “cost center” designation and become integrated with the “revenue center” designation.
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And even better, you get to learn. You get to hear what happened after that visit. You get to find out how right or wrong your guesses were and speculate with the team on why that might be. You get to discover great new ideas on how to perform even better in the future.
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It’s time to step-up and lean-in to a new relationship with your data, your fundraising team, and your profession. It will take some practice, and perhaps a few mistakes along the way, but you’ve got this!

More Resources You Might Like

 

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!

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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

4 Tips for Finding Major Donors for Your Next Capital Campaign

4Researchers, , ,

Guest Post by Ryan Woroniecki, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DonorSearch

Before we dive headfirst into tips for finding major donors for a capital campaign, let’s briefly back up and discuss capital campaigns on the whole.

On a very general level, “A capital campaign is a combination of fundraising and outreach strategies that is designed to raise money for a specific need.”

On a more practical and concrete level, capital campaigns are most commonly associated with funding such projects as:

  • Building renovations
  • Purchasing pricey equipment and/or supplies
  • Acquiring new land
  • Fresh construction
  • Adding to an endowment
  • And other similar, large-scale endeavors

Needless to say, you can’t really think about organizing a capital campaign without having a strong system in place for securing major gifts. And that’s when you need prospect research.

This site is already brimming with excellent information about prospect research, so we’re not going to retread well-covered territory here.

Instead, we’re going to propose four key tips to help your organization find and cultivate major donors for your next capital campaign.

The four tips are as follows:

  1. Look to your annual fund.
  2. Reach out to your feasibility study participants.
  3. Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign.
  4. Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates.

Let’s get started.

1. Look to your annual fund.

DS_Aspire_Look to your annual fund

For the first point on this list, we’re going back to the basics.

We know that past giving is the greatest indicator of future giving. In fact, DonorSearch’s research found that a donor who has made a gift between $5k-$10k to a nonprofit organization is 5 times as likely to donate in the future as an average person is.

That correlation trickles down to donors of all giving levels, including your annual fund.

As you embark on your campaign’s quiet phase and attempt to secure roughly 70% of your goal before going public with your efforts, you should start your search by looking inwards. The proof is in the data.

Loyal, annual fund donors might be just the prospects you’re looking for. Cross-reference your list of annual fund donors with databases that can clue you in on donor wealth, and you could discover that some of your best major giving candidates were right under your nose.

For instance, someone who donates $500 regularly to your cause might have donated $5,000 to a political campaign. You won’t know until you look.

And once you find those donors, you can leverage the momentum behind your capital campaign’s timeline to encourage them to make those kinds of contributions towards your organization.

2. Reach out to your feasibility study participants.

DS_Aspire_Reach out to your feasibility study participants

A feasibility study is performed prior to an organization ever launching a capital campaign. During the study, the nonprofit surveys a group of around 40 community members to test the interest in and likelihood of success of their possible capital campaign.

What does this have to do with major donors?

A portion of the people you’ll be surveying for your feasibility study will be major giving prospects.

After the report is complete and you’ve decided to move forward with your campaign, consider reaching out to the study participants who:

  • Had a positive reaction to your campaign.
  • Are high-quality prospects.

In order to sift through the group and figure out whom your major gift officers should reach out to:

  • Perform a screening of your participants.
  • Find out who meets the wealth and affinity requirements.
  • Complete prospect profiles on those donors.
  • Pass the information along to the right fundraisers.

The donors on that list will have already given you affirmative feedback; don’t let their enthusiasm go unchanneled.

3. Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign.

DS_Aspire_Seek out donors whose interests align with your campaign

One of the biggest benefits of fundraising for a capital campaign is that you are fundraising for a very specific purpose.

That specificity can make a huge difference in your ability to sway donors to contribute.

Take stock of your major donors and prospects. Then, use the information you’ve collected about them to segment them into groups that would or wouldn’t be interested in supporting your capital campaign’s particular cause.

Once you’ve done that, solicit major gifts from those who are most likely to be open to contributing to your campaign.

There are two benefits to this kind of selective segmentation:

  1. You’re making better use of the limited time and resources of your major gifts team.
  2. You’re offering support opportunities to those who are most likely to want to hear about them.

If you study your donor data with an eye for past giving patterns such as:

  • Frequency of giving
  • Average gift size
  • Common reason for giving
  • And so on

You’ll be able to piece together a solid list of prospects for your capital campaign’s major gift efforts.

Just remember, in order for this kind of selection to work, your prospect profiles are going to have to be top notch!

4. Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates.

DS_Aspire_Come up with creative ways of engaging your candidates

The truth of the matter is, even when you find major giving prospects for your capital campaign, you’ll then have the challenge of cultivating and soliciting them.

You should certainly employ the standard solicitation best practices, but, as well all know, you really need to go the extra mile when it comes to major donors.

Especially with a capital campaign, where you’re under a strict timeline and chasing a firm goal, major gift solicitation is of the utmost importance.

That’s why this last tip emphasizes the need to find inventive ways of engaging your major donors.

What qualifies as creative is in the eye of the beholder, but suggestions include:

  • Asking your major donors to volunteer.
  • Seeing if they’re open to advocating for your cause.
  • Inviting them to special events.
  • And generally, any step you can take to make their time with your organization more meaningful.

When you go out of your way to engage with your major donors in a manner that other nonprofits aren’t taking the time to do, you set your capital campaign apart from the crowd.

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Capital campaigns take careful planning and a strong focus on the future. And your capital campaign simply won’t survive without a strong major gift showing during the quiet phase.

Take these tips, mix them with the ideas you’re already using, and go forth to secure that 70% of your fundraising total!

About the Author

ryanRyan Woroniecki is the Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at DonorSearch, a prospect research, screening, and analytics company that focuses on proven philanthropy. He has worked with hundreds of nonprofits and is a member of APRA-MD. When he isn’t working, he is an avid kickball player.

 

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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.

prospect-research-perspectives

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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.