Look at what arrived by special delivery today!

It’s an advance copy, meaning that for all of you who pre-ordered (and thank you for that, by the way!), yours will be arriving very soon.

If you haven’t already ordered it, now’s the time to get your very own copy hot off the presses! Just click that little book cover over there on the right to buy it at a discount (!).  It will be on your doorstep in no time. This book has got everything anyone working in fundraising needs to know about prospect research. You’re going to love it.

Thank you to everyone who was involved: those who agreed to be interviewed, who were the subjects of case studies, who provided quotes and who read (and re-read!) drafts and offered sage advice and suggestions. And the biggest thank you to my co-author, the awesome Jen Filla.

Want to listen to this blog post instead of reading it? Click this link to download the mp3 or listen live via SoundGecko.

As a professional researcher, I’m now officially and utterly fed up with Google. This week’s announcement that they are eliminating Google Reader sent me over the edge. From being a quality resource that researchers could trust, my team and I now have to operate so many workarounds to get the information we need that using it has become a chore.  But we can’t stop using it – it’s terrible but it’s the best there is.

To eliminate filtering, we need to use Verbatim.  They’re taking away iGoogle and Reader, and so we have to find alternatives. Personalized search means we need to empty our cache and clear cookies daily to avoid skewing our results.

Google’s emerging raison d’etre is clear: to be an ad-supported social search network. One that appeals to the 99% of the population who don’t care that what they see has most of the information filtered out. Information that’s sitting there in the vast Google cloud – and potentially useful – but eliminated, based on a person’s previous search history.

In fact, information personalization is exactly what most people want. And you’ve got to give the people what they want. But for me and others in my profession, Google has become the reality television of search, appealing to the most common denominator. With this latest announcement about Reader, like Fonzie on the television show Happy Days, Google has jumped the shark.

But I have a solution.

I want to give Google money. I want them to charge me to gain access to everything in the Google universe. Unfiltered. No ads. Just information. All of it – from Google Anguilla to Google Virgin Islands and all of the other country-specific databases in between.

I want them to let me pay for the ability to do advanced searches. Proximity searches. Date searches. Location searches. Boolean searches.

I want Google to do a deal with deep web sources like Lexis Nexis, Bloomberg, Factiva, Reed Elsevier, Bureau van Dijk, Dow Jones, and Highbeam. And federal, state, local and provincial governments worldwide. Also publishing houses, nonprofits, think tanks, trade associations and anyone else that has data of value that they want to share.

Google could become a true information hub for the future; they’ve got the brains, the money and the clout to do it. Think of it – research and information availability could go from so-last-century to the computer on board the USS Enterprise. Google Drive meets Warp Drive.

I want this for all of us professional researchers, Google. The ones who made you the number one search engine back in the day and who helped you become the behemoth you are now.

Give the people what they want.

Why reinvent the wheel? Prospect researchers the world over have created gorgeous pages of useful links to the best sites for finding information. There are more prospect research-centric pages out there, but the ones included on this list have been updated in the past year and seem to be well maintained. If you know of others please let me know by clicking on comments and sharing your favorites.

APRA Missouri-Kansas     http://www.apramokan.org/links.html

Michigan State University Library     Prospect Research Resources

Northwestern University     Research Bookmarks

Prospecting For Gold:      Recommended Reference Sources

Stanford University Development Research     http://www.stanford.edu/dept/OOD/RESEARCH/

Supporting Advancement     Prospect Research tab

University of Southern California, University Advancement     Selected Sites for Development Research on the Web

University of Vermont     Prospect Research and Reference Tools

University of Virginia     Portico – Web Resources for Advancement Professionals

Other useful links

CEOExpress

Our own great list of Wealth Lists from around the world

Tell me the top 3 things that you love about working here.

Now tell me the top three things you don’t like.

When I work with a client to audit their prospect research department, the answers to those two questions tell me a lot about both the nonprofit and the person I’m interviewing. When I review the answers of 10 or 20 employees, I start to see patterns of strength and gaps to be filled. Taken across several organizations, I hear a lot of the same things. From prospect researchers, I almost always hear

I wish they would let me work from home.

I would like flexible hours.

When I bring this up with their supervisors or leadership, I often hear “Yeah, yeah. Employees always say that. It’s never going to happen. They’re not living in the real world.”

Here’s Real World: A recent survey by career-management firm Right Management found that 86% of the people they polled said that they planned to actively search for a new job in the coming year, up 26% since 2009. A combination of work-place stress and doing more for the same salary were the major contributing reasons.

The reality of a typical prospect research professional’s work environment is that it’s a 90 percent computer-based job. If researchers and front-line fundraisers in medium to large shops communicate, it is mainly through email, forms, or on the telephone. Face-to-face time is generally a very small part of the relationship, maybe a couple of hours a week.

Research requires concentration – a lot of it. Have you ever tried to add up a column of figures while someone else is carrying on a conversation in the next cubicle over? It doesn’t matter if they’re discussing a work project or dishing about Downton Abbey, a constant background hum like that is distracting. The more distractions, the more on-the-job stress there is.

On Marketplace Radio, Stephen Dubner, the Freakonomics co-author, told the story of C-trip, the Chinese equivalent of Expedia. In order to save money on expensive office space, the C-trip CEO, James Liang, PhD (Economics, Stanford) decided to try an experiment. C-trip allowed 255 workers that wanted to work from home to try it out for 9 months. The company figured that they would save money on office space and attrition, but lose money on productivity. They hoped that those factors would balance each other out.

What they found was that productivity from the work-from-home group was actually 13% higher than their in-office peers. Employees’ stress from commuting was eliminated, they took fewer sick days and they got to work on time more often than their office-commuting colleagues.

In fundraising, we all know that it’s always cheaper to retain a donor than it is to acquire one, and the same is true for workplace talent. Some people prefer (and thrive in) an office work environment, and working from home is certainly not for everyone. At-home workers have a responsibility to track and maintain their same (or increased!) productivity levels, and the arrangement does require a commitment to communicate well. But for the manager of a valued, reliable prospect researcher, the flexibility of offering that worker the opportunity to work from home even a few days a week might be just the perk that not only retains them, but increases their job satisfaction, their loyalty to the organization, and their overall health.

Here at HBG, we have a new and beautiful main office where I and two other colleagues work most days, but the rest of my senior staff work from home. It works out well for all of us, and I think it’s one of the reasons why my staff work hard, produce great research, and stay with the company.

Does your nonprofit allow you or others to work from home? If so, what are the positives and negatives that you’ve found?

For further reading:

The Brown university white paper on the C-trip experiment can be found here.

Richard Branson’s recent blog post: Give People the Freedom of Where to Work

Forbes blog guest post by Gary Swart, CEO of oDesk: Marissa Mayer Is Wrong: Freedom For Workers Means Productivity For Companies

I hear a lot of comments from fundraisers at small shops that they simply can’t afford prospect research. I participated in a terrific Twitter chat for fundraisers earlier this week on the topic of prospect research where a few folks underscored this refrain: “We’re small, we have no money, and prospect research is just too darned expensive.”

But isn’t that like saying “That Maserati is one sweet ride, but it’s too fast and expensive so I’m going to walk instead”?

Not all prospect research costs like a Masarati. Some of it does, but most of it doesn’t. If you work in a small organization, you probably don’t need the Masarati research anyway. But it’s hard to know what to purchase if you don’t know what you need. And there are a lot of tools available in prospect research that can help, from prospect identification to profiles to relationship management to data mining and more. Lots more!

Knowing what kind of research you need and using it smartly and efficiently will get you to success a lot faster. And by success, I mean that you’ll be able to draw a direct line from research well used to increased dollars and pounds in the door.

So here’s one solution: If you’re a fundraiser who isn’t sure what prospect research can do for you, or if you think that the only thing it has to offer is expensive profiles or databases that cost a lot, then you really need to read this book. If you don’t find that it gives you solutions that help you increase donations, let me know and I’ll refund the money you spent on it.

Prospect research is useful for all sizes of organization, from teeny tiny Mini startups to super huge land yachts, like Harvard. Read the book and network with researchers to help draw up a plan to include prospect research in your budget.

As the new year builds up a good head of steam moving toward February, now is a good time to take stock of your prospect research department, whether it is you, or someone else, or (lucky you!) a department you supervise.

Today I was thinking about what makes for greatness in a prospect research department. Here are the components I’ve noticed from the organizations I’ve worked with, learned from and mentored over the years.

They know what their research is for

Great research departments understand the nuances between what is needed for identification, cultivation, solicitation and stewardship research. They work closely with fundraisers to target how much time to spend on a request, and they stay focused on exactly what is needed.

They know the priorities for today, 6 months from now, a year away, and 5 years out.

Great research departments work closely with peers and managers to develop an operating plan that helps them stay on task – geared to what the divisional priorities are. They use metrics to communicate their impact on the bottom line, and to make sure their work remains relevant and aligned.

They embrace innovation

Whether it’s creating new report formats or ways of delivering information, learning new research methods or investigating a new trend, great research managers embrace change and innovation. They go beyond reading trade journals to read books like Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit by Leonardo Inghilleri and Micah Solomon, the Go-Giver by Bob Burg and John David Mann, or Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh of Zappos to see how innovation and ideas from allied fields can elevate their department’s quality, productivity and visibility.

They stay current on resources, trends and skills

The best research teams regularly attend continuing education conferences and web seminars, benchmark with peers and take advantage of free learning by following people on Twitter, blogs and other social media. Some of these smart and generous folks include bloggers like the collective at APRA Mid-South, Chris Cannon, Chris Carnie, Mark Egge, Jen Filla, Kevin MacDonell and Liz Rejman, just to name a few. You can find these folks on Twitter, as well as others well worth following – visit this list to see the prospect research tweeting superstars. (If you’re a blogging or tweeting prospect researcher and you’re not on this list, please let me know!)

They believe in the mission

Great teams consist of people who get paid for the privilege of working somewhere they would care about even if they weren’t on staff. There are over 1.5 million nonprofits in the United States, and life is too short to be unhappy at work. Great researchers find a mission to believe in and give it their heart and soul. They also believe in the mission of prospect research as a profession, and are proud to be “out” in the community representing what we do best: helping nourish, protect, educate and grow our communities and our world.

What other key features of great prospect research departments do you think are important?

I spend a lot of time in my web browser, and I’ll bet you do, too. With the amount of time I spend there, I need widgets and add-ons that make my life easier and add value.I wanted to share these four time-savers and life-enhancers with you. They take just a few seconds to click and download – enjoy!

CLICK&CLEAN
Clearing your cache, cookies and browsing history is something we all know we need to do regularly, but unless you’ve clicked your settings to do this automatically, navigating through a bunch of windows to clear your cache means it doesn’t happen very often. Free add on Click&Clean lets you do it all with one easy click.

GHOSTERY
Everything you do on the web is being tracked. The pages you look at, how long you stay on each page, and where you move on to based on what you learn. Those sidebar advertisements that have the very shirt you just searched for an hour ago aren’t just a happy coincidence. As a professional researcher working with confidential data, I have to protect my client’s information. So I use Ghostery, a free add-on doesn’t allow sites to install web bugs, cookies or other tracking devices unless I exempt them. Ghostery works in the background and shows me who would have tracked me if I didn’t have it. When one of my usual go-to sites generated a list of 14 trackers and web bugs, my eyebrows nearly hit my hairline.

SENDTOKINDLE
I love my Kindle, but sometimes it’s a real pain to get non-Amazon things on it. Enter SendToKindle, a Firefox add-in that allows you to grab blog posts, articles, and other web things onto your Kindle for easy reading when you’re on the beach, a plane, or anywhere else that doesn’t have web access…yet.

(ALMOST) AWESOME SCREENSHOT
This app is called Awesome Screenshot, and if it was working perfectly at the moment it would be completely awesome. Once you load the app, Awesome Screenshot allows you one-click access to grab all or part of a web page to highlight sections, draw arrows and circles around text or pictures, blur out sensitive or confidential information, and save a copy of the image. Normally it allows you to save a copy of your work right to your hard drive, but until they upgrade it you will need to save your work at their site. You simply visit the link they provide and right-click on the image to save it. It’s a small workaround for such a great, free app. I used it to capture the screenshots of add-ins for this blog post.

What’s MY NEW CRUSH?
You’ll have to visit HBG’s Facebook page to find out! If you’re a Google Reader or iGoogle fanatic like me (and even if you’re not), I think you’re really going to like it! (And speaking of ‘Like’ing things, why don’t you ‘Like’ our Facebook page while you’re there? We use our FB page to post quick tips, useful links and other great stuff!)

I was recently asked by a client if there were a few simple things I could recommend that would help them re-energize their prospect management system – even if it meant they had to do something scary and daring. Sometimes just making a change of any kind can be daring, but we usually only regret the things we don’t do in life, not the things we try to do to improve things. I hope these 3 ideas give you something to dare to do in the new year!

The Conundrum: strategy paralysis

My client had a lot of prospects that were in the discovery stage – those still to be met for the first time. It was a great problem to have, but it was creating systemic paralysis – who should they see first?

The Solution: un-frieze the system

Each of these new prospects was not equal in his or her capacity to give or in their feelings of affinity to the organization. Leadership was shy of doing an electronic screening because the last one had just sat on the shelf and so they felt it was a waste of money. We helped our client re-screen the group and verified the results for them. Together we set up a rating system and  ranked each of the new prospects. The fundraisers could then start from the top and work their way down the list.

The Conundrum: cultivating overly fertile fields

In addition to all of those great newly-ranked prospects, there were prospects who had been in our client’s relationship management system for at least 2 years with no forward progress. These constituents were being invited to dinners, lunches, and other events but they had not converted as major donors. Leadership was starting to ask the chief fundraiser questions about justifying the expense of all of these activities.

The Solution: some fields just need to lay fallow for awhile

Although changing out portfolios is hard, we can’t keep cultivating people forever, especially if there are higher-rated prospects waiting in the discovery stage. We recommended that our client switch any prospects who had been in the system for over 2 years without progress to a new prospect manager for 6 months to see if someone else would have better luck. If there was still no forward progress, these non-donors needed to be moved out of the major donor portfolios to make way for better prospects.

A larger organization might be able to move these prospects into actively-cultivated annual fund officer portfolios.

The Conundrum: moving targets

As we looked deeper in our client’s relationship management system, they asked for an idea of how many cultivation moves each fundraiser should realistically be expected to do per month.

The Solution: targeting moves

Since this was a relatively young program, we suggested a goal of 2 completed moves per day. Each month, fundraisers would have a result of 40 moves, and should be able to have at least one meaningful contact with everyone in their portfolio every quarter. The result would be 480 great moves per fundraiser for the year.

To recap, three quick and daring solutions to improve your prospect management system:

1. Prioritize and make a plan to involve the best brand-new prospects
2. Keep the pipeline filled with people who want to be there
3. Set a daily goal for prospect moves and watch annual totals beat expectations

Resolving to make better use of prospect research in 2013 – or just interested in some new ideas for the coming year? Here are some suggestions to inspire you!

January

Are your organization’s fundraisers taking trips to warmer climes for events and meetings with snowbirds next month? Now’s a good time to do some simple data mining to find great prospects for fill-in visits while there.

February

Now is a good time to do an electronic screening of some or all of your organization’s new donors from the previous year. Which ones have the most potential to be major donor prospects? Develop a strategy to engage newly identified prospects by May.

March

What did your fundraising division do exceptionally well in 2012? Where do you need to do some work? Use analytics in-house, or have an independent audit done to measure last year’s fundraising/research performance. Set targets for using research throughout the year based on the priorities and needs you identify.

April

Tax season is here! Which of your prospects have giftable stock options? Several free and fee-based sources allow you to create alerts to keep current throughout the year on directors and executives of public companies who are required to report their stock and options holdings and sales.

May

Take a lesson from political fundraising: Targeted emails based on click-throughs and web usage have meant huge gains in involvement and donations during the last two presidential campaign cycles. Can you use market research techniques for prospect research purposes to discover what your annual fund donors are specifically interested in supporting?

June

For many educational organizations, June is the time to research parents of incoming students. How well do your data transfer systems integrate for ease of access to allowed information? Do you have a plan to manage this time-sensitive research? Create a process document for this important activity so that your best practices are repeated every year.

July

This is the month to declare independence from all of the prospects in your tracking system that have not budged (despite your best efforts) on the pipeline in the past year. All of the great new prospects you identified back in February should now be in your relationship management system. Draw up plans for new ways to engage them in the fall.

August

The beautiful waterfront of Baltimore, Maryland will be the location for the annual conference of the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement on August 7-10. The APRA conference is the place to be for prospect researchers and front-line fundraisers who want to learn cutting edge techniques and resources. Come prepared to learn – this is a no-fluff conference, and every aspect of research is covered, from the ABC’s through complex algorithms.

September

Back to school means making sure you have up-to-date information on your very top prospects, and on all of the new prospects you’ve identified over the year. Get ready now for those year-end solicitations so you’re not faced with a December research profile queue crush.

October

Find creative ways to use social media and relationship mapping to identify potential board members and other top volunteers. Who amongst your constituents have high Klout scores? Which ones are hubs on a relationship map? Find and use tools that help you pinpoint influencers who can be advocates and help you engage with a new circle of donors.

November

Does your organization put on a lot of events this time of year? If event briefings are part of the research priorities that you set back in March, now may be the time to update your event briefing template(s) and policies for information access – not overload. Plan now so that the right people are getting the right amount of information on time and within budget.

December

Before you renew research subscriptions for the coming year, take a look at the fundraising operating plan and talk with colleagues about priorities ahead. Will the chief fundraising officer be traveling internationally to meet with donors? Maybe it’s time to look into international research resources, training, or outsourcing options. Are you about to launch a campaign? You might need to budget for screenings or analytics now.

What resources will you need to be successful next year? Great success with prospect research is all about being prepared. Happy New Year!

This year’s AFP/Urban Institute Fundraising Effectiveness Project reported that for every 100 new donors that supported a small-to-medium sized nonprofit in the United States last year, 107 donors left. Even more starkly, “every $100 gained in 2011 was offset by $100 in losses through gift attrition.”

Every year small-to-medium nonprofits are working harder just to break even.

Overall the study found that the largest gains come from new donors and the largest losses came from lapsed new donors.

Lapsed new donors.

These are the friends that should be easiest to keep. You’re still in the honeymoon phase. They’re excited about your organization enough to make a first gift. Sure, some of them will have given because of a road race or a golf tournament or in memory of someone. But most of those new donors should spell opportunity, not the promise of future loss. And as we’ve been told a hundred times, it costs less to retain a donor than it does to acquire one.

For larger nonprofits (organizations raising $500,000 and more) the figures are very different. For the most part, the more money an organization raises per year, the less likely they are to have donors leave them. Their losses due to attrition are cut by half.

So what’s the difference between small organizations and large ones? How are the larger ones able to keep their new donors?

A stronger fundraising infrastructure makes a big difference; overhead isn’t a bad thing when it is used effectively. The report strongly recommends building internal capacity overall and then annually providing extra budget support to the areas showing the greatest opportunities and success. Most of the larger organizations use prospect research to identify the new and renewing donors that have the highest potential to be upgraded. If yours doesn’t do that already, now is a good time to start.

What can you do now?

We’re swiftly coming up to year-end and your organization will, with luck, have an influx of brand new donors that you don’t want to lose next year.

This January, use prospect research – do an electronic screening of those new year-end donors. Apply data analytics to find the hidden gems in your database. Research the ones with the most potential to find their interests and philanthropic capacity. If you don’t have internal capacity, hire a professional. Prospect research may be an overhead expense, but it’s more expensive to keep treading water year after year.

Resolve to keep more of your new donors next year. You can start now.