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.

As I listened to my colleagues talking about what they were working on in our staff meeting last Thursday, it occurred to me that the varied nature of the work we do here at HBG is really interesting.  It reminded me that one organization I used to work for put on a yearly program for major donors called “A Day in the Life” that brought together these donors with key scientists, faculty members and researchers for a day of lab tours, presentations on new discoveries, and classroom visits where donors could sit in on a lecture.  Fascinated by a sneak peek into the cutting edge research, discovery and learning that was happening, donors truly felt a greater understanding of what took place there and how their involvement made a difference.

We’re certainly not a part of a formidable university, but we are a research, teaching and learning organization, and I thought that you might find it interesting to take a tour around our offices (both real and virtual) and get a sneak peek into what goes on during a typical day here at HBG.

Let’s start by walking out the door of my office and through the reception area.  Around an angled not-quite-corner is the office where Jennifer and Andrea work.  I see Andrea putting the finishing touches on a report to one of our clients that we just helped with an electronic wealth screening.  The client, a private school in the United Kingdom, wanted to know who their top 10 prospects are within their US-based alumni.  Our contact “J” plans to show the report and brief biographies Andrea created to their US support foundation board next week.  Andrea tells me they’ve got some great potential donors, and she’s looking forward to hearing how the results were received and how the meetings went.

Her office mate Jen is in a buoyant mood today (which to be honest is pretty typical for Jen – especially when Oreos are nearby, as they are today).  Jen just got off the phone with “C,” a fundraiser at a health-related non-governmental organization (NGO).  Jen provides dedicated research support to the NGO 18 hours per week, and right now they are building up their prospect pipeline.  Jen just found out that C got appointments with six of the people she recently identified, and that two individuals Jen previously identified just agreed to serve on a new advisory board.

As I walk out of Jen and Andrea’s office, I come to our common room.  This space serves as a meeting area and lunch room but since it has a bay window, a couch, a coffee table and a few nice chairs we tend to call it the “living room.”  It’s also home to the HBG candy dish, a group effort which currently features a selection of hard caramels brought back from Costa Rica.  Naturally, I have to make sure they’re still edible as I pass by to visit Maureen, HBG’s Director of Research.

Maureen’s office is on the other side of the living room.  She’s on the phone at the moment, interviewing a director of prospect research at a hospital who is kindly participating in a landscape analysis we’re doing on behalf of a client.  We have discovered through our work with this client that they are completely deserving of all the respect they get as a fundraising powerhouse.  Always eager to stay at the cutting edge, our client wanted to be sure they were performing well compared to their peers.  Maureen is responsible for interviewing prospect research leaders at four peer institutions and pulling together their information in a neat grid to share with our client and all the interviewees.

Moving out of the office and into the ether, Kenny, Rick, Elizabeth and Heather all work from their virtual offices.  As a group we communicate most often with each other via instant messaging when we have something quick to say or ask, so back in my office I get in touch with them via IM to find out what they’re up to at this moment.

Kenny reports that he’s just finished up and sent off two full profiles for the client he works with on a dedicated half-time basis.  His next project is an in-depth profile of a company, one of Kenny’s specialties.

Rick’s in the middle of a prospect identification project for a school of communications at a university.  The school is hoping to partner with high net worth philanthropists in their area with a demonstrated interest in investigative reporting, emerging media technology, sports communication, and science and health journalism.  Rick’s a crossword puzzle fan, and I wonder if projects like this provide him a fun puzzle with a meaningful solution.

Elizabeth and Heather are working collaboratively on a project to parse out the top philanthropists in a particular major US city and discover what these donors support.  They’re working together to provide dedicated full-time support to a major biomedical research center that uses their prospect research skills in a lot of creative and strategic ways.

And me?  I’ve just sent off a set of post-visit recommendations to one of my favorite new clients in Philadelphia.  They’ve just built a young (in experience) but intelligent and eager new prospect research and analytics team.  We’re working together to get them ready for some seriously transformational fundraising and I spent part of last week doing some training with them.  They’re quick learners and I’m really looking forward to visiting with them again soon.

So that’s the tour around the HBG offices today and a glimpse at what a typical day is like for me and my team.  We’re busy and enjoying the variety of projects we’re doing.  How about you?  What projects are you working on today?  We’d love to hear!

It is with great pleasure that we welcome our newest team member, Heather Willis. Heather was one of the first people I trained when I began my consulting business and I have always been impressed by her intelligence, professionalism and can-do attitude. Heather’s background in prospect research includes working for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and for Carroll College. For the past seven years, Heather had been a freelance researcher and owner of her own company, Willis Research Services in Buffalo, Montana.

We’re delighted that Heather is joining our team and are excited about the addition of talents she brings to our Group and our clients.

I’ve been thinking about Chris Cannon’s blog post “3 Solutions to Prospecting Problems” ever since I read it earlier this week.  Chris’s solutions to common issues we face in the development office are these:

• We need to respect our colleagues, honor their experience and their contributions…
• …come up with a good plan …
• …and stick to it.  No personal or organizational distractions (to the degree that they can be avoided).

It’s not rocket science, but it’s true.  We lose our tempers, we lose our focus, and then we lose our way.

Don’t we accomplish so much more on a personal level when we stick to those three things?  Imagine what we could do as a development team.

For me, a lot of wasted potential I see in development shops comes down to communication and training. 

“I’ve stopped requesting research,” said one fundraiser to me recently. “It just takes too long to get it back and by the time I get the profile, the visit’s already happened.  It’s just too frustrating.  Google’s my researcher now.”

“I don’t get it,” said a researcher. “I’m working for four fundraisers and each one asks me for full profiles on people they’ve never met.  It takes me two days to do each full profile along with all the other stuff I’m doing, and then when I finally give it to the fundraiser I never hear anything back!  It’s frustrating!”

“The researchers don’t understand what I need,” said another fundraiser. “I work with a very specific group of high-level donors in a particular industry.  I get profiles back on people in the same industry with wildly varying capacity ratings.  I know what people make in this industry and every rating is wrong!  I need consistency from profile to profile and an understanding of this industry and what people make.”

“Sure, I would love to go to a training seminar on private equity compensation/lawyers/oil & gas futures” said a researcher to me recently. “We just don’t have the budget for training right now.”

There’s one really simple answer for each of these frustrated people.  Do you see yourself in one of them?

Great teams communicate well together.  We’re in the communicating and relationship building business, and the communicating and relationship building needs to happen both externally AND internally.

Talk to each other.  Respect each other.  Make a plan.  Do it.

Update:  Great infographic on exactly this subject:

Elevate Communication Between Your Colleagues

Let me tell you a short story:  Back in the 1980s there was a pseudo war, and it was a big deal at the time.  Named the Cola Wars, it was a knock-down, drag-out to decide which of the two mega brands of cola was better, Coke or Pepsi.  Both felt that neither could survive while the other lived, and you, the consumer, had to choose.  Which did you like better?  Side-by-side blind taste tests were done in supermarkets, on beaches, Main Streets and college campuses.  It was the Duke-Carolina and the Yankees-Red Sox of marketing wars rolled into one.  It was huge.

Then Coca-Cola, in a moment no consumer could figure out (and no company should ignore), decided they would ditch their cash cow and make a whole different product.  “Old Coke” was gone overnight.  “New Coke”  was the Coke to beat Pepsi, and it was no contest:  nobody liked it.

It was awful.  New Coke tasted terrible and there were practically riots in the streets.  People started hoarding “old” Coke when they could find it.  If you weren’t around then (and I suspect most of the Google decision-makers weren’t) I know it’s hard to believe that consumers actually rose up and made such a stink that a mega company completely reversed course about something, but they did.  In a matter of a few months, New Coke was gone and “Coke Classic” was resuscitated.

So now we’ve got the New Google and for professional searchers it tastes about as good as New Coke.  Here’s the vanilla article from Lance Ulanoff at Mashable, announcing its birth:  Google Merges Search and Google+ into Social Media Juggernaut.  He says:

“Now we know Google’s master-plan for integrating Google+ ever more deeply into the Google ecosystem: Pour the whole thing into Google search. Starting today, Google+ members, and to a lesser extent others who are signed into Google, will be able to search against both the broader web and their own Google+ social graph. That’s right; Google+ circles, photos, posts and more will be integrated into search in ways other social platforms can only dream about.”

Short version: when you type a search into Google, what you’re going to get for your first results are everything you or your friends have ever written or shared publicly on Google Plus on anything related to the item you’ve just searched.

If you’re on your mobile device looking for a restaurant in San Francisco, you’re treated to a gold mine of your friends’ and acquaintances’ recommendations.  Nice!

If you’re a professional 9-5 researcher like me using Google it’s another layer of non-relevant stuff to wade through before you get to what you need.  We’re not “social” searchers, we use these tools to provide reliable answers to others.  Relevant search is our job.  And Google has always had the largest database of legitimate, relevant resources that professional researchers need and use every day.

THE EXPERTS WEIGH IN

Here’s a professional searcher’s take on it:  Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land wrote an article in response to the flaws (and potential legal issues) he saw called Real-Life Examples of How Google’s ‘Search Plus’ Pushes Google Plus Over Relevancy.

Sullivan argues that besides making relevant search results harder to find for professional  searchers, the potential trouble on Google’s horizon is legal: if they highlight information (mainly) from their own properties – including Google+ and YouTube they could be charged with abusing their power as a monopoly.  Also, there’s that teeny little issue of privacy – what if something you thought you were posting privately to Google+ got shared without your permission publicly and then emerged as an answer to a search query?

FIXING WHAT’S NOW BROKEN

I’ve seen peoples’ comments saying “what’s the big deal, you can turn Search Plus off!” and yes you can, and here’s how.

And you can also turn Verbatim on, which forces Google to allow you to use your exact search terms instead of Google trying to correct them for you (in case you didn’t really mean what you meant).  Here’s how:  Do a search, go to the search options sidebar, click “show more search tools,” select “Verbatim” and Google will keep your search string like you wanted it to be.

And you can turn filtering off, too, so that your world on Google doesn’t keep getting narrower and narrower.  And yes, it does.  You don’t even know what you don’t know, but you will if you read this and watch Eli Pariser’s jaw-dropping TED Talk.

But all these turning offs and turning ons are a total hassle.  Just to do one search in Google the way I used to just last year, I have to turn off two things and turn one on.  Every. Single. Time.  This is progress?

I’ve read other comments saying, “Google’s free and they can do whatever they want to with their product.”  And that’s true, they can.  I’d argue that Google is “free,” but whatever.  We can vote with our feet.  And Bing’s the next logical choice for database size.

Mat Honan at Gizmodo has this to say: Google just made Bing the Best Search Engine.

Trouble is, Microsoft has always run hot and cold on search.  They kindasorta want to compete with Google, but Bing’s not their core business and it’s never going to be.  There’s no Coke vs. Pepsi thing going on here.  It’s Coke vs. Shasta.  Google’s still got the largest database lurking inside all that growing social stuff, and Bing just doesn’t.  It’s big, but it’s not Google big.

So will Google create two products – one for professional searchers and one for social searchers?  Or, in the words of the immortal SNL writers, is it just to be “No Coke! Pepsi!” for us?

Update:  More on this from Wired magazine’s Tim Carmody: Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search.

Every half year or so, some newspaper or magazine comes out with an article about how creepy prospect research is (last spring’s example: the Wall Street Journal in a May blog post by Anne Kadet called “Is your favorite charity spying on you?”) (and no, I’m not going to do them the favor of linking to it here).

Usually articles like these run the third rail of incendiary hyperbole along the lines of how we fundraising researchers are just one half-step up from digging through ordinary peoples’ trash to find their pay check stubs so that our conniving fundraising overlords can trick them into donating their hard-earned cash to our undeserving and overhead-bloated nonprofits.

Okay, maybe I’m going slightly overboard, but it gives you the idea of how offensive these articles are to me and my colleagues, most of whom are diligently, honestly and ethically trying to help our nonprofits help people.  Or animals. Or the environment.  Or whatever else needs taking care of.  It’s a long laundry list.  And to have a journalist from a respectable rag freaking people out to sell a couple of extra papers is insulting. I get it, the paper business is hard these days – but go pick on someone your own size.  Like politicians.

So when I saw the headline for last Friday’s New York Times article by Ron Lieber called “What Nonprofit Groups Know About You” paired with an article called “Taking Fund-Raising To a New Level,” I groaned out loud and thought “oh for pete’s sake, here we go again.”

But what do you know – I was pleasantly surprised.  As I read through, I noticed that Lieber did his homework.  He actually interviewed people – not something usually done in these types of exposes. And as I got further down, I realized it actually wasn’t an expose – it was a real education piece.  I sat there reading it, tensed in my office chair, waiting for the cringe that …never happened.

Granted, the article relies just a teeeensy bit too heavily on fundraising software megagiant Blackbaud as a source but the two consultants he quoted, Lawrence Henze and David Lamb, were two good representatives from our industry for Lieber to talk with.  Both are well-respected and Lamb is a former prospect research practitioner.

Commentary from a couple of experienced prospect researchers in the trenches currently would have been nice: I’m sure our professional group APRA (the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement) would have been happy to steer an enterprising journalist toward a pithy prospect research professional.

But, on the whole I was …well, I was going to say “impressed” or “pleased” but to be honest “relieved” is what I mostly felt (– isn’t that kind of sad?)  Lieber actually bothered to find out what sources we use and how and why we use them.  His article was even-keeled and informative to the point of telling people how to stay under the prospect research radar if they want to.  And fair enough – everybody should have that option.

But philanthropy isn’t a game of cat-and-mouse.  At least, it isn’t for most professional prospect researchers and fundraisers I know.  The point is that we want to efficiently find prospective donors that want us to find them ~ and that want to work with us to (efficiently) change the world for the better.  Lieber’s article gets us one step closer to helping people understand that, and for that he gets my thanks and this blog post.

So let’s say you want to email a password-protected document to someone.  Or give them access to the back end of your website.  You need to send them the password to open it …but what if they’re half a world away, sound asleep?  Or they’re in a meeting, or just unavailable to take your phone call?  Emailing the word itself just isn’t a secure option, even if you are using your super duper top-secret spy subject-line code:

Trust me, the bad guys are going to figure it out – if they want to hack the document or your website, that would be the first email they’d look at.  And this is the second:

So here’s what you do:

Use a secret sharer.

One Time Secret

One Time Secret does just that – it allows you to share a secret just once.  It can be a word or a phrase that you want, or the site will generate a random password for you.  Just type in the word or phrase, click “Create A Secret Link” and an encrypted link is generated that you can cut and paste into an email.  You can set the period of time for the secret to expire – so when your secret is opened by your authorized person, it automatically disappears and can’t be accessed again.  Likewise, if it doesn’t get accessed within the allotted time, poof – it’s erased.

QuickForget

QuickForget does all the same things that One Time Secret does, but your secret doesn’t have to disappear after the first viewing.  So if you need to send the secret to more than one person, you can choose the number of ‘views’ the secret has as well as the number of hours it’s available for viewing.  There’s a handy email-it feature, too… (*cough*) as long as you don’t go with their suggested subject line…

He may be a marketing guru now, but Mark Schaefer’s background in journalism became clear to me a couple of weeks ago.

Despite the sudden blowout of power in the restaurant we were in and the three fire trucks that raced up outside shortly thereafter with alarms bwomping and red lights circling, Mark ran out to his car to get his video camera.  I say despite those thing because he wasn’t planning on shooting the smoke coming out of the bank across the street or the firefighters trying to figure out where the exploded power line was; he was listening to me getting animated about how – if you’re not careful – Google and other search engines decide for you what you want to see when you search.  And that’s what he wanted to film!

So despite all the hullaballoo, Mark started asking me questions that he thought the members of his loyal blog community might be interested to hear more about.  It’s a short video interview that Mark posted on his blog this morning – I hope you find it worth getting excited about too!

Next Wednesday, November 30th I’m going to be speaking at a conference sponsored by the Massachusetts chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals.

I mention this because it got me to thinking about what I like and don’t like about conferences. I like really meaty sessions at conferences, and I get disappointed when speakers are entirely theoretical or philosophical. I do like the theory and I do like understanding the context, but then I want you to show me how. Or at least give me a roadmap, inundate me with URLs, show me some first steps so I can figure out the rest.

It drives me crazy when the subtext of a session is if you want the real details, you’re going to have to buy my book / hire me to consult for you / buy my product.

Ugh. People come to a session to learn something, and to have practical take-aways that they can use when they get back to the office. Or at least that’s true for me.

So that’s what my seminars are – heavy on the take-aways. Sure, I’ve got a couple of the requisite cartoons and polls to get people chuckling, talking, and sharing. A lot of people in my sessions have cool tools and sites to share that I end up checking out when I get back to my office. Prospect research is like that: new tools are popping up every day, and we do love to share them! I think that’s what conference sessions should be about, too.

My session, Using the Web to Manage Information Overload is going to highlight handy web-based resources that will help fundraisers save time and get to the information they need more quickly. Prospect researchers are welcome too – come bring your best tools to manage information overload and be prepared to share and to take away.

Selected meaty take-aways if you can’t make it to the session:

A terrific research metasite from Northwestern’s prospect research department
Another one from Supporting Advancement
Prospect research Tweeters to follow

Jen Filla of Aspire Research Group and I have just signed a deal with John Wiley & Sons to write Prospect Research for Fundraisers; The Essential Handbook. We’re thrilled!

This book is going to be handy for every single front-line development officer, from the solo fundraiser in a one-person shop to the VP for Advancement overseeing a large university research department.

We’re going to highlight the successful partnerships, the innovative ground-breakers and the hair-tearing learning experiences, and our findings just may surprise you.

If you’ve ever wondered…

…then this book is for you!

We’re interviewing fundraisers and researchers to gain lots of perspectives, and the book will be chock-full of case studies and examples. We still have some space, so if you’d like to be featured for your great front-line/research collaborations, let us know!