Are you sometimes waiting (and waiting!) to have research requests completed for you? Or getting completed research *after* the visit? Frustrating, isn’t it? Wish you had a way to get your research requests done first? It can’t work all the time, but there is a way…

I read a blog post by Rajesh Setty the other day called “Help is on the way.*” Setty’s an entrepreneur consultant and writes for the business market. It’s not long, and it’s worth a read if you have time. If you don’t have time now, here’s my interpretation of what he wrote with regard to prospect research in a typical mid-to-large size development office:

Generally speaking, good help is scarce because:
• People that are good at their jobs are busy becoming even better at their jobs.
• People gravitate toward people who are good at their jobs and ask them to help with their projects …
• …which makes people that are good at their jobs even busier…
• …which makes good help even more scarce.

So what do these good, busy people do to cope with the increased requests for help? Setty writes:

“1. They eliminate meaningless requests.

2. They eliminate requests that were made because the requester was lazy.

3. They eliminate requests that don’t deserve to be fulfilled.

4. They eliminate requests that are not meaningful to them.

They look at the remaining requests and choose the ones that will provide the highest ROI for their investment of time…[T]he odds change significantly depending on ‘who you are’ to them. If you are someone special to them, the terms and conditions section suddenly disappears.

The objective decision making walks out of the door replaced by subjective decision making in your favor.”

Prospect researchers don’t usually have the discretion to eliminate requests for reports.  Normally it’s first come, first served… unless your job title gives you the cachet to jump the queue.  Requests – both worthy and worthless – pile up.  One person’s request for a full profile on a donor prospect they are merely curious about means that another’s truly hot prospect briefing goes further down the list. 

Would a researcher prefer to work with a major gift officer that actively sought visits with prospects that that researcher identified for them?  Sure.  Might that MGO’s requests mysteriously move higher in the research queue from time to time?  Mayyybe.

Would a prospect researcher work harder for a front-line fundraiser that came by their desk and said “Let me tell you about the great meeting I just had with that prospect you researched for me!!”  Absolutely.  Might that person’s requests mysteriously gain helium in the research queue from time to time?  Mayyybe.

I know that I’ve done it.  I worked with a fundraiser who made a fill-in appointment based on a gut feeling I had about a prospect I’d found.  I knew the prospect had their own privately-held company and there were rumors the company was going IPO in the next six months, but that’s about all I had.  Still, the fundraiser honored my gut feeling and set up the discovery meeting.  That act of faith (and the subsequent major gift donation of stock – I’m not kidding – yay!) forged a great researcher/fundraiser team that communicated often from then on.  I will admit to moving that fundraiser’s requests slightly higher in the queue from time to time because we were a team that was making things happen.

Research – good research – is a time-consuming job, and we all only have so much time.  All of us want our work to be for something – to know that what we do has meaning.  If you don’t have a fancy title after your name, consider internal stewardship to jump the queue.  You’re a fundraiser, after all.  You know all about relationship building.

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.

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

What's over the horizon? Image ©2010 Julie Kahn

Because most of us spend our time in the trenches researching, cultivating, asking, stewarding and reporting, it’s nice to spend an afternoon with someone who surveys the landscape from higher terrain and focuses in on objects and trends that we need to know about.

Last week Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, spoke at a Women in Development of Greater Boston (WID) event.  Palmer gave her picks for the “Top Ten Trends in Philanthropy” and predicted what we’re going to see more of in the months ahead.

Some things that captured my attention and imagination were:

The changing relationship between government and nonprofits regarding taxation…

With the recent strain on the economy coupled with consumers’ growing concern over the efficacy of nonprofit organizations, it was just a matter of time before government officials started debating a larger fee structure for PILOT (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) programs (or changing tax codes to include nonprofits).  In Boston, where over half of the land is owned either by nonprofits or the government, PILOT payments are an important source of a struggling city’s tax revenue.  There’s a good overview of the discussion here at the Inside Higher Ed site, and Palmer predicted more developments to come on this issue in the months ahead.

… and government investment in programs via social impact bonds.

A recent import from the UK is the creation of social impact bonds (brief article here from the NYT).  Social impact bonds work like this:  Private investors give the seed funding for a nonprofit organization/venture.  If the nonprofit meets its stated goals, the investors get paid back with interest by the government at the end of a designated period.  It’s venture funding with a social benefit twist, and it’ll be interesting to see if the program ideas being floated in New York City and Massachusetts get picked up.  If you’re interested, there’s more information about social impact funds in a white paper written by Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman.

The impact of technology in fundraising

From robot fundraisers on the streets like Don-8er and DONA to the use of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for interacting with our constituencies, there’s going to be a continuing explosion of new tools to engage and motivate donors, from small to large.  Think that online giving isn’t going to work for large donors?  Stacy Palmer told us that last year there were at least nine gifts of $100,000 made online, and that some high net worth donors she’s spoken with said that the only barrier they find to donating online like that is that most organizations’ websites aren’t equipped to accept large donations!  Even if you don’t think it’ll ever happen, doesn’t it make sense to act like it could?

Some of Palmer’s other top trends included:

• the consolidation/merging together of nonprofits to avoid closure or to gain access to collaborative funding
• the rise of giving by women and how the change in demographics is transforming our society
• the importance of continuing education, staff retention and morale for nonprofit success.

What trends in philanthropy do you see?  What do you think is in store for us?

Rocks, boulders and a few velvet-covered pebbles have been hurled on both sides of the James O’Keefe vs. NPR debacle earlier this month.  In case you’ve been living under one (a rock, that is), O’Keefe, a self-described journalist, hired two actors to pose as donors with $5 million in order to lure NPR executives to meet with them.  In exchange for an expensive free lunch, O’Keefe’s team fed NPR’s then-VP for Fundraising Ron Schiller and a colleague false information in order to entice them to reveal NPR’s ‘secret left-leaning agenda’ to a hidden videotape.  Schiller and his boss were subsequently fired in the recorded tape’s aftermath.

I have listened to a lot of the invective that has been thrown by people who are sure that in the same situation they would have acted better.  I don’t know that they truly know how they would react in that cushy restaurant chair.

What I do know is that I’ve got terrible aim when it comes to throwing stones.  Also, I live in a glass house.

I get nervous or angry sometimes and say things I don’t mean.  Sometimes things come out entirely differently from how I meant them.  I have been known, when pressured, to agree with (or smile woodenly at) people who are in positions of power over me who I may not actually agree with.

• In order to appease them.
• In order to shut them up.
• In order to move the conversation along to (please, God) any other topic.
• In order to represent my organization appropriately, even if it’s not my personal belief.
• In order to avoid an unnecessary fight.

This I have done.

There are lies to appease and there are lies to deceive.

Between white lies and damned lies it seems to me that there’s a line.  In order to maintain a civilized society, some small amount of lying keeps us from killing each other.  No, honey, those pants don’t make you look fat. Or from disappointing each other. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. Or from dinnertime inconvenience.  She’s not here right now, may I take a message?

In prospect research, our code of ethics is crystal clear about lying.  According to the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA)’s Statement of Ethics:

“Members shall be truthful with respect to their identities and purpose and the identity of their institutions during the course of their work.”

It’s more than just maintaining professional integrity, although that’s a pretty decent benefit.  The purpose is to protect our organizations’ reputations and help build strong and transparent relationships with donors.  Besides, we don’t need to misrepresent.  If we have to lie to get a piece of information, it’s probably not the kind of information we should hold in our files anyway.  Does it help build a stronger relationship between our organization and the donor?  If not, forget it.

But what if we’re pressured from our higher-ups to get the information anyway?  What then?  I have been in that situation.  Between a rock and a hard place.

Professional ethics are important to front-line fundraisers, too.  According to the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Ethical Principles, members are required to:

“…practice their profession with integrity, honesty, truthfulness and adherence to the absolute obligation to safeguard the public trust.”

But unlike prospect researchers, where the tools of our trade – the facts we seek – come from public sources, the tools of the fundraiser’s trade are relationships.  Built from the narratives they tell each other about their lives.

I find it hard to believe that in building those relationships people don’t tell white lies to each other sometimes.

• In order to appease them.
• In order to shut them up.
• In order to move the conversation along to (please, God) any other topic.
• In order to represent their organization appropriately even though it’s not their personal belief.
• In order to avoid an unnecessary fight.

That must be a hard line to walk, especially since AFP put both honesty and truthfulness in that one sentence as if to underscore that it’s a big deal.

The profession of journalism also has its code of ethics (a mighty long one, too, I might add).  The code put forth by the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) states up front:

“Journalists should be honest, fair and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.”

There’s that word again – honest.  Later the code says do not misrepresent.  Again, a concept voiced  twice.

Where is the line in the sand?

Ethics statements are the rules we craft to give ourselves a moral framework to work within.  They are the aspirations we keep in our hearts knowing that we are all human, ergo we err.

It’s a fine line.  Lies to appease over here and lies to deceive over there.  And ethics statements forming the immovable, unshifting framework that provides no wiggle room.

I hope the rock-throwing is through.  It has stalled at least two careers and I wonder if it will ruin others.  As a co-worker and consultant, I have worked with Ron Schiller off and on for over 10 years.  He’s a gentleman and a truly gifted fundraising professional.  I’ve never had cause to question his integrity.  But as a human being, I’m guessing he errs.  The way we all do sometimes.

Me, I’m keeping my stones well behind me.