You may remember a few months ago I talked about how Brown University got a 500% return on the proactive research they did for the Boldly Brown campaign.  One part of that was successfully integrating the results of several wealth screenings that they did.

Because some of the vendors are offering database screenings at a deep discount this quarter, a number of our clients are taking advantage of the savings … which means that it’s screening analysis season here at HBG!

Andrea, Jennifer and Maureen have been collaborating closely as a unit and with our clients on these screenings, and I’ve been really interested as I listen to them share ideas over lunch or at our afternoon tea breaks.

There’s a lot of delight and excitement when a screening is returned, but also some regret when they find an opportunity that was missed.

What I hear from their conversations underscores that how you approach a screening really makes a difference in the end result.

So I thought I’d ask them to share their top tips for making the most of an electronic screening so that we can all boost our return on screenings to Brown proportions.  If you have more tips to share with readers, we’d love for you to add them!

From Andrea:

I’ve become a big fan of wealth screenings lately.  I’d say my top three tips are:

• Include as much information as possible: middle initials and spouse names are particularly important in helping save time later.
• Don’t trust the database’s judgment: verify everything! Screenings are a good jumping off point but the human element of analysis is important.

• Once the data is returned, try several different sorts to see if there are any trends.  I generally start to look for patterns sorting by confirmed assets, then by identified assets and filtering by state, zip, and past giving.  It’s really interesting what you can find!

From Jennifer:

• Pay particular attention to high net worth individuals in New York City – chances are if they own a co-op apartment that the entire co-op building is being counted in their assets.
• Cleaning the data beforehand is well worth the time investment. Fix any typos and check to be sure addresses are consistently entered – bad data is the #1 way why matches aren’t made. Time spent on this in advance can save lots of time (which is money!!) confirming later.
• Don’t include anyone that only has a PO Box address.  Either leave them out or find their street address.

From Maureen:

• Purchase an address update (NCOA) as part of the screening if you haven’t done one recently – a significant match point for assets is address.
• If your budget is tight, don’t waste it on screening donors that you already know well.
• Depending on the size of your screening, make sure to allocate at least one staff member to do the analysis when the results are returned.  Screenings are expensive and you don’t want the results to just sit there gathering dust.
• Don’t screen if you don’t have the front-line fundraising staff to follow up on the leads that are produced.  Be strategic in the number of prospects that you screen and consider doing rolling screenings.

Stuff gets filtered to suit our particular likes and dislikes all the time.  It’s why I don’t get any catalogs for fly-fishing lures or (alas) equestrian apparel.  Once I randomly got put on a list for private-plane owners, which was fun for a time (and then slightly depressing).  I have long appreciated this filtering for the recycling-center trips it saves me.

However, last week Sacha Dichter wrote an interesting blog post about information filtering that kind of disturbed me.  In the article, Dichter discussed a related phenomenon that concerned him:  news outlets and information sources becoming so polarized that we have to remind ourselves to specifically seek out opinions that differ from ours in order to be well-rounded people.  We need to purposefully consume sources that strive for balance or seek out those that challenge our thinking or opinions. It’s really good advice.

It wasn’t what Dichter wrote that disturbed me, though; it was this jaw-dropping TED Talk by Eli Pariser that he embedded, talking about online filtering:

If you can, and especially if you are a professional researcher, please take nine short, engaging minutes to watch this video.

How do we avoid missing the important stuff?

It’s not like tailoring information is new.  But for those of us who provide information to others for a living, the reality that our web search results are abridged based on what we’ve clicked on previously should make us extra diligent.  What are we missing?  And how can we avoid myopic results when what we hope to provide is the best-researched information possible?

HAL may have thought of itself as incapable of error but we know how well that turned out
for Dave and the rest of the crew.

A few suggestions

I say this a lot because it bears repeating: if you want the most complete results when you search, you *have* to use more than one search engine.  Search engines index many different things and many things differently.

Also, for all kinds of reasons it’s a good idea to empty your cache/browsing history and delete cookies frequently.  If you can’t remember to do it every day, set a reminder to do it every Friday at quitting time.  Besides unloading your computer hard drive of a lot of junque that you just don’t need clogging up space on your hard drive, there will be that many fewer sites tracking what you are doing online…and remembering those preferences to edit what you are seeing.

For the casual searcher, the rewards of filtering are probably as many as its penalties.  For professional searchers, though, having the full array of options to choose from is key.

Gushing Firehose. Image by Joseph Robertson

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about content curation – ways to corral the rushing river of media coming at all of us.  Because we are all drowning in too much information.

Information is a fire hose blasting at us full bore.  If it’s not email, it’s Facebook.  Blogs.  White papers, professional journals and newsletters.  RSS feeds and search alerts.  Some of it we read, most of it we just don’t have time for.

It’s just crazy.  New resources, new services, and even new data-stream-tamers are popping up every day.  It can be overwhelming just deciding which filter to use.

Marketing ninja Mark Schaefer’s recent blog posting about hot new Q&A site Quora elicited this comment from Paul Gailey, another digital consultant:

Observations like that make me feel – ugh - overwhelmed for a second.  It’s true – the information is only going to keep rushing at us.  But there are LOTS of solutions.  We have to filter out the noise, but we absolutely cannot afford to filter out the information that we need to see.

Here at HBG my team and I use several free and fee-based tools to help ourselves and our clients deal with the digital firehose.  I’d like to show one of those easy-to-use free resources that I think you’ll find helpful.  Maybe best of all, you’re not meeting some hot new untested thing.  It’s familiar.  It’s…

Your old pal, Google

You probably use Google every day, but do you have an iGoogle account?  If not, you are truly missing something.  Signing up is easy and free.  Just click iGoogle on the top-right corner of your Google main page and sign up.

Now you can personalize your home page.  Or, if you don’t want to, just skip to item 2.  This is my personalized page with a beach theme at sunset (hey, it’s February.  I live in Boston.):

There are a zillion themes from which you can choose – from beaches, Italian gardens and English lakes to [*ahem*] scenes that are clearly NSFW.  <–(You don’t need to click that if you know what it means).  Click “Change theme” (1) to select your choice.

Once you’ve done that click “Add stuff.” (2)  That’s where you’ll find goodies called ‘widgets’ that add personalized news feeds, weather forecasts, stock market updates, Twitter, Facebook, and lots of other tools.

You can also set up web and news search alerts and have the alerts sent to your iGoogle page via an RSS feed.  That way you’ll be the first in your office to know when a company goes public, someone’s portfolio soars, a foundation you’re tracking announces grants, or the $100-million gift across town gets announced.

But it gets even better.  See on the left where it says “Edit this tab”? (3) (I clicked on the down arrow next to ‘Home’ to show you that pull-down window).  If you select ‘Add a tab” you can create a new tabbed page – just like tabs on your web browser – and name it whatever you like.

I created this tabbed page for fundraising blogs I follow.  You can create tabs by theme, geography, key influencers you’re following …and you can add or delete feeds easily as you find new thought-leaders to follow.

The information you need, curated for you

A ten-minute scan of your tabs first thing in the morning will get you up-to-speed on all the news.  You’re not rooting all over the web to find the information you want; the content’s all coming to you.  You can add new must-see sources as you find them.  Most importantly, you’re not left unaware of critical information that you can’t afford to miss in this busy digital world.