Helen Brown Group

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The RiF Prospect Research Handbook is out today!

Lots of times we might have a brilliant idea to nudge forward (or perhaps even revolutionize) our profession, but then we think, ugh, is it worth it? That would take forever! And we go back to whatever it was we were doing before our daydream.

Fortunately for all of us that’s not what happened back in 2019 when Ben Rymer, then chair of Researchers in Fundraising (RiF), dreamed up the bold idea to create a soup-to-nuts Prospect Research how-to Handbook. In case you’re not familiar with RiF, it’s the professional association for prospect researchers in the UK. Just like Apra here in North America, RiF has a great conference every year (theirs is in November in London) as well as gatherings throughout the year.

The RiF Handbook (available today!), called Researchers in Fundraising: Best Practice Guide and Handbook for Prospect Research has been a labor/labour of love for many of us in the prospect research community. I was lucky enough to be one of the volunteer editors for a segment or two, and I was impressed at what a well-run machine it was, and what a great job that the project’s manager Ally Lee-Dudley, founder of Adcumulo, did of keeping the operation running so smoothly.

I was interested to learn more about the Handbook and the process of creating it, so I got in touch with Ben, Ally, and Chris Davis, RiF’s current chair, to find out more. Sincere thanks to Ben, Ally, and Chris for sharing these great insights!

Helen: Ben, how did the idea come about to do a Handbook for prospect researchers?

Ben Rymer: When I sent the initial proposal to the Chartered Institute of Fundraising (CIoF) in August 2019, I’d known for a while that a handbook/textbook/how-to guide was needed. My feeling was that prospect research was still something of a trade, rather than a profession or discipline. We have a huge amount of expertise, experience and goodwill in the community, but it had never completely crystallised into a finished product so we could build on and improve existing good practice.

HB: What was your initial plan for the scope of the project, and did that change at all as it evolved?

BR: All I knew was that the main areas of research practice should be included. Basically I wanted to create something that I would’ve found practically useful in my first job in the sector. We cast the net wide in starting, with plans for 23 chapters. The big trade-off since then has been in response to volunteer availability. All the content is crowd-sourced, and so we have to work in sequence with the expertise of volunteers who come forward … Also, Covid hit a short time after project kick-off, but we pivoted to remote working pretty well, thankfully.

HB: Ally, how did you get involved with the project?

Ally Lee-Dudley: My involvement with the project began in January 2020 when the Steering Group were looking for a Project Manager to move the Handbook from a great concept to a work in progress. At this time there were not yet any structures, processes, or resources in place so this really was the beginning of the Handbook as an active project.

HB: How many volunteers were part of it?

AL-D: To date around 90 volunteers have contributed to the Handbook, some as writers, some as editors, some as beta-readers, as some as micro-volunteers. Volunteers come from 3 different continents, and around a dozen different countries making the volunteer effort an international collaboration.

HB: How many chapters are there, and how was the decision made on which topics to include?

AL-D: At launch, 8 chapters are available for readers plus a Resource Director and Glossary of industry terms and phrases. There are another 7 chapters in progress which will be published as and when they are completed and a further 11 chapters that are yet to be started. Publishing content on a staggered basis like this means we are able to start getting useful content out and into the prospect research community far more quickly than if we wait for a ‘complete’ Handbook. The original list of potential chapters was developed through discussions between the volunteers who make up the RiF Committee. Over time several additional chapters have been added to that list as a result of suggestions made by volunteers involved with the project.

HB: Chris, as the scope of the project evolved, what changes did that cause you to make?

Chris Davis: As we added more chapters to the Handbook, we found ourselves looking beyond our immediate peer group for input and advice, to those with specific expertise or lived experience. For example, in our chapter on Strategic International Prospecting, we were aware that we needed to get as much input as possible not only from researchers with extensive knowledge of international prospect research, but also from those with experience of living or working in different countries and communities. This was definitely a challenge, but I hope we got the balance right! Similarly, when we start work on the chapter on Equality, Diversity & Inclusion in Prospect Research we’ll be seeking involvement from those who are experts in the ED&I space.

HB: What surprised you most about the process, or what created the most changes or opportunities as things went along?

CD: I think I was surprised by how much content we ended up generating! I knew that the prospect research community would be hugely generous with their time and knowledge, but I was still taken aback at times by the volume of work we ended up producing. At this point I’d have to give a big shout out to our beta-reading and editing volunteers, who were a major help in clarifying and refining the chapters and getting them to where they are now.

HB: Ben, what do you think are the top 3 things that readers will find that might surprise them?

BR: 1. Reach: it is a big thing! Chapters I’ve worked on have ended up being 10,000-20,000 words long. We also have a very broad range of topics, so I think readers will be pleasantly surprised at that.

  1. What’s still to come: by the same token, there are some big chapters in the pipeline, so reader may be left waiting for those. If anyone has suggestions, please feel free to get in touch via the Handbook website, www.rifhandbook.info.
  2. Quality: we’ve put a lot of effort into making the content as good as it can be. For a wholly volunteer-generated initiative I think it is a solid product, but I’m biased of course!

HB: Chris, what do you think are the top things that you think readers will find most useful in the Handbook?

CD: I think that will be different depending on the needs and experiences of readers – throughout the Handbook we’ve tried to ensure that content is relevant for both those who are new to prospect research and for experienced researchers who are looking to innovate and upskill.

For early-career researchers or those who are setting up a prospect research function, we hope our New Researchers Guide chapter and the chapter on The Prospect Research Role will be invaluable. Within the Data & Skills Domain of the Handbook, there is some very detailed, nuanced, and in-depth content on estimating wealth and assigning capacity ratings – topics that we know are of eternal interest to prospect researchers and fundraisers alike!

Finally, we’ve made extensive use of case studies throughout the Handbook, drawn from the real-life experiences of researchers. We hope these will really bring the content the life and illustrate how the principles and techniques outlined in the Handbook can be applied practically.

HB: Chris, what did you enjoy most about the process?

CD: I’ve really enjoyed the experience of being involved in creating content for the Handbook, especially the early stages of this where you are exchanging knowledge with your peers. I’ve been working in prospect research for over a decade, but being involved with the Handbook has absolutely encouraged to rethink some of my settled views about the work that we do, and how we do it. I think the Handbook does reflect this process of peer exchange, and I hope that everyone who uses it will find something new and different in there that challenges their assumptions.

HB: Ally, What tools did you use for collaboration on this massive project and how well did they work? If you had another large collaborative project to undertake, would you use the same tools?

AL-D: The Handbook was always intended to be primarily a remote project, so in that sense we were lucky and the pandemic didn’t significantly affect our plans. In order to help ensure both accessibility of tools at no cost for volunteers and to help embed project sustainability by keeping the financial burden of the project low for RiF, we’ve largely drawn on tools that are available for free. As a Steering Group, our project management hub is a tool called Freedcamp, and this enables us to plot and track actions, deadlines, and milestones and assign task accountability at a strategic level.

For the Handbook’s wider volunteer community, the free version of MS Teams is our collaborative workspace. Teams provides us with a place to create, share, and store documents such as meeting agendas and action plans, and to work collectively on producing and editing content in real-time whilst being able to communicate quickly and easily with each other. Within Teams volunteers can access the web versions of MS Word and Excel so we’re all using the same tools to ensure compatibility plus there is in-build versioning history and storage back-up for those ‘just in case’ moments.  We’ve recently made the switch from using Zoom for our regular meetings to using MS Teams’ video calling service; it doesn’t quite have all the same features as Zoom but it does come at zero cost rather than requiring a subscription to hold meetings for small groups for up to an hour at a time.

The Handbook itself is created using a custom-made WordPress website. We chose the route of e-publishing over hard copy for several reasons and the WordPress platform, with its almost unlimited flexibility and versatility, is the best fit to meet the Handbooks needs both now and in the future. As an e-publication it is not only much easier to keep the Handbook content up to date, it is also far simpler to ensure its availability to readers around the world who can access the content from any device with a web browser.

Overall, aside from the usual occasional IT glitch, (we’ve done the equivalent of turn it off and on again once or twice), the tools we’ve chosen have been effective and created not only a conduit for remote productivity and development, but also a space to come together a a community and experience that sense of being part of a team working towards a common goal that is so important to the Handbook.

Many thanks again to Ben, Chris, and Ally for sharing the inside scoop on the RiF Prospect Research Handbook, and for all of the hard work and coordination that went into creating it! Check out the Handbook website at www.RiFHandbook.info. If you would like to be a volunteer writer or editor for future chapters, please visit this page to learn more.

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Getting started with corporate philanthropy research

Happy February! This week HBG’s Monique Miller shares her insights on researching companies and the various ways that they incorporate giving and philanthropy in to their community and global strategies. She found some useful resources as well, so if you research companies or engage them as philanthropic partners, you’re sure to find this week’s article helpful. ~Helen

Monique Miller

Ever since I was little, I’ve been interested in processes and complex problems – how things work, how people think, how to understand the world, and how to make it a better place for everyone. So it makes sense that I ended up working in this field, making use of various kinds of information to help mission-driven organizations do their great work.

Soon after arriving at HBG, I started on projects that involved researching corporate philanthropy such as creating company profiles, and prospecting for companies whose missions and interests might fit with those of clients. As I got deeper in, I realized corporate philanthropy is a unique creature and one that would require strategy and focus to yield useful results.

While I’m still refining my approach and tools – and I’ve found these vary depending on the organizations I’m researching and working with – I thought I’d share a few things I’ve noticed about my evolving process in case it’s useful in your work. Maybe it will further conversations at our organizations and beyond around company giving.

Starting with the organization(s)

This is pretty common sense, but I’ve found sometimes that in my excitement to get to work I can be at risk of forgetting why I’m doing this in the first place. This is especially the case when I find myself dealing with a lot of information about a particular company or companies. I’ve found it helpful to ask as a start: What kinds of information are important to my organization? How do my clients like it organized? What kinds of prospects are they looking for? Local, national, particular industries? Understanding who your organization or client is makes for much more effective work. Beyond that, I’ve found profile and prospecting templates can also be really helpful starting places to guide my thinking, especially if I keep them brief at first. I’ve noticed that, ultimately, each research product ends up being a little different depending on the context.

I also take a long and deep look at corporate websites. For me, this can be a fairly daunting experience particularly when looking at large well-established national or international companies. I’ve sometimes found it helpful to go to some trusted resources, such as Inside Philanthropy for guidance. The good folks over there have already sifted through a lot of information for us, and they provide helpful corporate and foundation summaries that have given me threads to follow.

Some other things I’ve noticed:

 Corporate Social Responsibility statements can be helpful

According to Harvard Business School, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) refers to the idea that a “business has a responsibility to the society that exists around it” (Stobierski, April 2021). These statements can be helpful in determining whether a company would be a good fit with your organization. I’ve noticed that sometimes, a company’s strategy is clear and their philanthropy clearly aligns. Other times, it seems there is poor coordination or there isn’t a coherent strategy at all. This, compounded with vast amounts of data dispersed in different places, can make it hard to make sense of what you’re reading. This is where I’ve found conversations with clients can again be helpful. Are there particular types of gifts they’re interested in, say, by dollar amount, by topic, or certain years? Giving patterns can help you deduce a strategy when one might not be explicit.

Corporations can have more than one giving vehicle

  • Foundations

According to Inside Philanthropy (2022) a corporate foundation is a private foundation whose money is contributed by a for-profit business. They rarely have an endowment and grant-making is often tied to the company’s geography or target market. Corporate foundation giving can be very focused, particularly when tied to a philanthropic strategy; sometimes company foundations have a formal grant application process and sometimes they don’t (or it’s not clear or available). Sometimes grants are administered through a donor advised fund (DAF) housed at a community foundation or other sponsoring organization such as a bank.

In researching foundations, I noticed that gift reporting in Form-990s is always a few years behind. I’ve tried to fill those gaps by doing web searching or looking for gifts from a company foundation that are reported in grantees’ annual reports. This has impacted my ability to be conclusive about giving strategies when I can’t find one on the web. I couldn’t conclude, for example, based on a few gifts I found in the news from 2020 that all corporate foundation giving was to X organization or in support of X type of organization for that year.

  • Corporate Giving Programs

Corporate giving programs seem to take the shape of grants/gifts, employee matching, company sponsored employee volunteering, event sponsorships (get ready to get cozy with your favorite web browser to find these!), and more. These programs can sometimes align with a stated philanthropic strategy or CSR statement (where they exist), but oftentimes I’ve had to try to deduce a strategy based on the philanthropy I find from a company. And sometimes that’s not possible because of the large number of varied gifts and I have to be strategic about what gets reported/analyzed. Again, checking in with my team helps here so I avoid going down a rabbit hole and potentially inundating my readers with information.

Due diligence continues to be important, possibly even more than ever

Like me, you may have noticed that the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with increasing discussion of systemic inequalities, may be pushing companies toward greater commitments to social justice causes and positive social change. These commitments inspire hope that a better world is on the way. At the same time, this moment may require us to scrutinize potential donors, ourselves, and our own organizations even more than ever before. As others have suggested (for example Scutari, June 2020), this moment of great financial vulnerability and strong need for change will require that we have thoughtful conversations and ask difficult questions. We will need to make decisions about where we want to draw the line on accepting gifts from particular donors (corporations or otherwise). My sense is that this is best done collectively and thoughtfully, and, thanks to our colleagues in prospect research and nonprofits, these discussions have already been happening. My hope is that we can keep this going and play an active role in positively shaping the future of the nonprofit world and beyond for everyone.

A couple of other resources

 

References

Inside Philanthropy. (2022, January 24). IP explainer: What is a corporate foundation? https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2022/1/24/ip-explainer-what-is-a-corporate-foundation

Scutari, M. (2020, June 25). Scrutiny of donors and ‘reputation laundering’ is growing thanks to COVID and protests. Inside Philanthropy. https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2020/6/24/scrutiny-of-donors-and-reputation-laundering-is-growing-thanks-to-covid-and-protests

Stobierski, T. (2021, April 8). Types of corporate social responsibility to be aware of. Harvard Business School Online. https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/types-of-corporate-social-responsibility

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How much is that private company worth?

Finding information about public companies is so easy! Unfortunately, the majority of companies in the world are privately-held, so finding information about them – especially how much a company is worth – is a daunting task. Thankfully, today my colleague Grace Chandonnet provides a huge hand up for those of us who aren’t professional company valuers with this enormously helpful article. ~Helen

Grace Chandonnet

                Grace Chandonnet

It’s an age-old prospect intelligence challenge. Especially if you’re new to our field, placing a value on a privately held company, and on your prospect’s stake in that company, can seem daunting. Publicly traded companies are required to report their financial information to the SEC, and that information (things like market capitalization, revenue, number of employees, and insiders’ stock holdings), is then available to the public. Privately held companies are not under the same legal obligations, so getting at their financial information is a bit trickier and less straightforward. The good news is that there are some pretty simple tricks that can help a researcher arrive at a reasonable guess as to the value of a private company.

You will need a couple of pieces of information, and the fact is that sometimes you will not be able to know enough information to make a realistic estimate. But there are some resources to help.

If you can uncover a reliable estimate of the company’s revenues, that’s a great start. The unicorn is to find a news article, often published in business or industry publications, that is talking about the company’s industry and uses your prospect’s company as an example. In this article, the exact amount of revenue is not reported, but enough information is provided about the company, a provider of solar energy, to figure it out. The company “reported a 124% gain over 2018 gross sales – an increase of $42.4 million” – when you do the math, you will arrive at 2019 gross revenue of about $76.6 million.

If I have information like this, the first thing I will do is try to find one or more publicly traded companies with a similar line of business and similar revenue, and then compare the public company or companies to the privately held one that I am researching. To find similar public companies, I use a stock screener like this one, which is a free resource.

Select Create Custom Screen and then pull down on Select Category to Current Financials and select Revenue. Enter the revenue criteria (I use a range of values, in this case between $60M and $80M). Once you’ve entered that and clicked in the box to activate the search, go back to the pull-down menu. Pull down to Company Overview and then click on Industry (scroll down in the box, it’s slightly hidden). For this example, I picked “Alternative Electricity”. As you’ll see in the image, there is only one search result, but it’s a good one – click on View Screen Matches to see results. The piece of information to look for in those results is the market capitalization or market cap, which is the total value of the publicly traded company because it is reasonable to assume that there is some similarity between the market capitalization of the public company ($373.1 million) and the value of the private one.

If I have multiple companies in my search results, I will use the average market cap for the companies in the list that are the most similar to my prospect’s company. When doing this, I leave out any outliers – where the market cap is a lot lower or higher than most of the companies in the list.

If, however, you know that your prospect is trying to sell her company or that she already has, the value you want to look for is the enterprise value rather than the market cap. Enterprise value is the amount that a company could fetch in an acquisition. You can find this number by looking up the comparison public company or companies at any number of free sources. I like Yahoo Finance, where you can find the enterprise value under the Statistics tab.

Of course, a good deal of the time, you won’t find an article that tells you exactly what your prospect’s company’s revenues are or there just won’t be good comparison public companies in your search – sometimes a close industry match isn’t available or (if you do have an estimate of revenue), there won’t be any companies with revenues in that range.

My second go-to in cases like this is the Business Reference Guide, which is a paid resource, but not terribly expensive. This resource is available as an online subscription, a book, or both. It is focused on pricing businesses and franchises and is geared toward entities that are seeking to buy a company or franchise.  It is chock full of industry benchmarks and trends, rules of thumb when assessing certain industries or franchises, and ways to assess a ballpark figure for what a company is worth using a host of different data points that you may have. If you have an estimate of the number of employees a company has, for instance, you can often find a simple multiplier to use to estimate a company’s valuation.

This of course brings us back to whether you have that information and where to find it. I like to look at my prospect’s company in several different resources, including Dun & Bradstreet and ZoomInfo, both of which are included in a Lexis Nexis for Development Professionals (LNDP) subscription, and see how these resources’ results compare to one another. If you have access to LNDP, you not only have access to both of these resources, but also to a host of others, including Gale Group Company Briefs, IAC Company Intelligence, and Lexis Nexis Corporate Affiliations.

iWave is another great source of aggregated company information. Dun & Bradstreet has often been maligned in our profession for not containing trustworthy information because its data is frequently based on self-reported numbers and/or modeling, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve been finding lately that ZoomInfo often returns data about revenues and number of employees that seem pretty accurate to me. With practice, you will be able to identify which information is probably wildly inaccurate versus information that seems quite reasonable. D&B Private Company Insight (also available in LNDP) often has information about what percentage of the company is owned by whom, and this is great to know. Estimating the value of a company is one thing, but knowing how much of the company your prospect owns is the next (and important) step to including these numbers in your capacity score.

The more you do this kind of research, the more you will trust your instincts about what seems to be relatively accurate numbers, both for revenue and number of employees. There will always be things we can’t know abut a privately held company, such as the value of inventory or machinery and other hard assets, and debt/liabilities, but I believe that we should at least attempt to understand what a privately held company could be worth when assessing a capacity rating for a business owner, and I also believe that these relatively simple calculations can result in a strong estimate.

Some additional things to consider:

  • What percentage of the company does your prospect own? If you don’t know, estimate conservatively – I like to use 10 to 25 percent ownership.
  • Is it a multi-generation family business? This could indicate that there are minority shareholders (family members) and should be taken into account when assessing your prospect’s true stake.
  • Did your prospect found, grow and continues to head the company? This could indicate 100 percent ownership for your prospect.
  • Is it venture funded? Investors will own some stake in the company if so. Sometime the percentage of company owned by the investors can be found in a news search, but not always. If not, be conservative when estimating what your prospect’s ownership percentage is.
  • A company’s valuation is not a liquid asset for your prospect until/unless she sells it, but it is an asset that should be included in your capacity rating, just as real estate values are.
  • It is conventional wisdom that privately held companies are often not as valuable as publicly traded ones, so as for all the other steps, be conservative in your estimates.

Good luck – and remember: sometimes you just will not have enough information to make a reasonable guess about a company’s valuation and this is not a bad reflection on you or your research skills!

 

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December edition – Who’s Doing Well Now?

It’s been eight months since I did a blog post on the topic of “Who’s Doing Well Now” and I thought the end of the year – giving season – might be a good time to revisit that question.

If you read that original blog post and the follow-up white paper, many of the industries from that period remain at the top, but over the summer innovation (and pivotation) pushed a few other companies and industries into the spotlight. I wanted to share my resources to help you dig a little deeper to find prospects that might be flying under the radar a bit.

For example, it’s not a secret that puzzles and games are doing well, so of course we should look into who makes them. Manufacturers like privately-held (and very diversified) Allied Materials and Equipment Co. of Kansas City, MO, whose subsidiary Allied Products is the maker of Springbok puzzles, are doing well this year. According to their website, Allied also makes American flags that fly “over some of our nation’s most important institutions as a result of contracts with the United States Senate, Department of Defense, and GSA recipients.” Those flags are also used for military (and veteran) keepsakes and burials, which unfortunately have seen an uptick this year. Allied’s DOD contracts also extend to military equipment, such as chem/bio life support systems.

Want to find more suppliers with US government contracts? There’s a database for that: https://www.usaspending.gov/. You don’t have to know the name of the company, either. If you’re prospecting, the surprisingly well-built search tool allows for a large array of filters, including recipient (awardee) type, NAICS code, state, zip code, and congressional district.

Specifically interested in companies that have received contracts for COVID-related purposes? You can find that on the USASpending site, but ProPublica has also created a very search-friendly tool at https://projects.propublica.org/coronavirus-contracts/ for finding companies that have recently increased sales due to government contracts.

In the Washington, DC area, it would be natural to think that the fastest growing company would be a government contractor. Holistic Industries, which has grown 447% over the past three years and is considered an essential business will probably not be a DOD contractor anytime soon, though. The cannabis retailer reported growth over 30% for the first quarter this year and beat estimates for Q3 by $3 million. CEO and University of Maryland alumnus Josh Genderson has hopes to double sales next year. Cannabis retailers can’t use traditional banks to park their money, and they frequently donate to local nonprofits to prove their place in building up community. If your nonprofit doesn’t include cannabis retailers in your due diligence ‘no-no’ list, you may want to check out your local retailer’s leadership.

With the disruptions in the supply chains over the past several months, grocery retailers have needed to utilize more cold storage facilities to keep things fresh and relatively close-by. Two companies control nearly 60 percent of all of the cold storage in the US – Lineage Logistics and Americold Realty and both are growing quickly, according to The Wall Street Journal. The CEOs of both companies are graduates of Midwest universities that mention nonprofit interests on their LinkedIn pages.

I found the three specific company examples mentioned above by searching for “companies doing well” and limiting my search dates, but there are other resources (stronger than a search engine) that you can use to prospect for successful industries and companies (and the people who are doing well because of them) right now.

One of my all-time favorites is an expensive resource that used to be found only in hard copy in business libraries: ValueLine. Imagine my delight when I learned earlier this year that not only is ValueLine online and searchable, but my library card to my little local library gives me free access to it. (Maybe yours does, too?) ValueLine gathers information about 6,000 publicly-held companies and 18,000 mutual funds (as well as other invest-ables) and provides insights on which companies and industries are “timely” (how they’re doing as compared to others in their industry) and “safe” (the likelihood that the company will continue to do well over the coming months – or not) at the current moment.

My search in ValueLine this week showed that 26 companies are at the Venn diagram nexus for both growth and safety. The list includes several you’d expect like Clorox, Costco, General Mills, Home Depot, JM Smucker, Procter & Gamble and Walmart, with a few interesting ones like Jack Henry & Associates (payment processors for the financial services industry); Landstar (shipping and logistics); and Synopsys, an electronic design automation company focusing on silicon design, verification, and intellectual property and software security and quality.

Another resource to check for companies doing well right now is the Fortune Global Fastest 100, a listing of the fastest-growing companies in the world. I like to break their list down into industries to get an overview of sectors that are growing quickly in order to spot trends and outliers. This year the top three categories for growth are commercial banks; homebuilders, engineering, construction, and building materials; and internet services and retailing.

One last resource I wanted to mention is LinkedIn. Since it was first published on March 31, senior editor Andrew Seaman’s article, “Here’s Who’s Hiring Right Now” has been regularly updated. Its long list of companies that are doing well enough to be hiring this year is worth a look for prospecting ideas.

What places are you looking when you’re prospecting these days?

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What on Earth is a SPAC?

A few weeks ago I was doom-scrolling Twitter and saw a link to yet-another article about SPACs and thought, “I really need to know more about these things.” My colleague, Kenny, has been casually dropping the term in our team meetings for a while, while talking about research he’s been doing, and I realized it was about time I stopped faking that I knew what he was talking about.

So I did a search and got lots of articles about Space-X, because “SPAC” and Twitter’s sub-par search engine don’t mesh. Sigh.

My bad…

If you’re looking for a lost shoe, chances are good it’s not in the refrigerator.

So I stopped being lazy and did the smart-researcher thing, which was to go directly to Investopedia. I knew it would have the answer, and who has time to waste? (Well, me apparently, because I fell through the prospect research rabbit hole and spent another two hours learning about SPACs!)

There are lots more resources I’m going to link you to at the end of this article that explain things fairly clearly including a fascinating, detailed, inside-baseball explainer from Bill Gurley, a venture capital deal-maker in Silicon Valley.

But first, I’m going to share the basics.

A SPAC is a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. Anybody can start a SPAC. You can start a SPAC. You don’t need a special license or anything. You just need to be able to raise money. (Hmmmmm)

A SPAC is a publicly-held shell company formed by an investor or group of investors, also known as sponsors. These sponsors usually have knowledge or expertise in a certain industry sector.

The ultimate purpose of a SPAC is to merge that shell with a promising privately-held company in order to take that company public without the hassle or cost of the traditional IPO process.

The sponsors will do a roadshow to institutional investors like family offices and private equity firms to drum up interest in investing in this shell company. You might see a SPAC referred to as a “blank check” company, because investors are essentially putting money toward something that doesn’t exist yet.

The sponsors might (or might not yet) have a few companies in mind that they will approach for a merger, and they’re not supposed to tell the investors even if they know – at this stage anyway (more on that in a minute).

Anyone can invest in a SPAC, too, including you and me. Shares traditionally open at $10 each.

Once there’s enough money in the pot, it goes into a blind trust. The SPAC has 24 months in which to acquire/merge with the target company. If they aren’t able to do that within 24 months, all of the money gets returned to the investors.

Now, once the SPAC sponsors have decided on a company to merge with, they can go back to the institutional investors and tell them (in confidence) about it, and ask if they want to put in more money. This is what is called a PIPE deal – a “private investment in public equities.” It sounds a little sketchy, but institutional investors are not allowed to share this insider information, and they’re not allowed to trade their shares for four months after the merger. Retail investors – you and me – can sell or buy anytime.

Who’s making money, how, and how much?

So let’s say the SPAC merges with a privately-held company. What happens then? Who makes money? How do they make money?

Let’s start with the sponsors. They make money in fees: 2% of the SPAC’s value plus $2 million for administration. Plus any profit off of the sale of shares or increase on money they put in.

The owners of the privately-held company make money when their shares increase in price and/or they sell them. In addition, they save money because the IPO process is expensive, with lawyers and investment banks and lots of other people to pay. By merging with a SPAC, they’ve avoided all of that payout.

The institutional investors make money when their shares of stock increase in price. In addition, when they originally invested they were likely also given a warrant to buy future shares of stock at a discounted price at/after a particular date. Assuming that the share price has gone up, that can make for a tidy profit.

So that’s the overview of SPACs. Don’t miss these articles and resources that fill in more of the gaps:

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Real Estate in the Age of Coronavirus

COVID-19 has impacted every single industry, usually for better or worse. But with real estate, the impact of the pandemic has been both better *and* worse, depending on the area of real estate you’re looking at. In today’s article, my colleague Josh Ostroski brings his deep knowledge of real estate to help us understand how our prospects who work in real estate (or who own well-placed properties) may be impacted now. ~Helen

There has been a lot of talk about real estate trends during the coronavirus pandemic. We have all heard about the urban exodus, housing prices increasing, and people working from home. I wanted to dig a little deeper to see if what we’re hearing is true or merely anecdotal and the reasons why.

The Urban Exodus

We have all heard that families are leaving cities to find more space in the suburbs. As the country was in lockdown, many people began to re-think what was important to them. With restaurants, bars closed, and shops closed, along with food delivery service expanding to more rural areas, there was less of need to be able to walk to amenities. However, according to a recent report by Zillow’s Economic Research team, they found that in most areas of the country “suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.”

There are some outliers, such as the Northeast, where new pending listings in urban zip codes re-accelerating more slowly than in the suburbs. “Some regions saw stronger evidence for a suburban-urban diverging trend than others. For example, in the New York City metro, home values in urban ZIP codes were decelerating in June relative to pre-COVID trends ( -0.2 pp) while suburban ZIP codes were accelerating (0.2 pp).

The same trend holds in Boston with urban home values down 0.5 percentage points and suburban homes values up 1.3 percentage points. However, this deceleration was already a trend (comparing February YoY to January YoY) in the Northeast Region overall, and the New York City metro.

Conversely, the Chicago metro area experienced the exact opposite trend with growth, decelerating in suburban areas while urban areas accelerated. And areas like Philadelphia and Miami saw accelerated growth in both regions, but more so in urban ZIP Codes.”

San Francisco is seeing a trend to becoming a buyers’ market, as inventory and days on market are up. According to Zillow’s report, “in San Francisco, list prices have fallen 4.9% year over year and inventory has risen 96% with a flood of new listings. Higher levels of inventory, up 96% year-over-year following a flood of new listings during the pandemic, are sitting on the market in the city proper, a significantly larger jump than the surrounding suburbs. In San Francisco, though, the softening is clear as sellers flood the market with their listings and buyers have not changed their pace to match.”

The markets where the largest share of renters in the center city would gain the power to buy if they looked outside city limits are San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Boston.

Check Out These Market Trends

Zillow: 12 mid-sized markets to watch

Realtor.com: Hottest Zip Codes

Insurify: Cities with the greatest pandemic real estate booms

Housing Price Increases

Normally in an economic crisis, housing prices drop. However, in this pandemic, prices in many locations have increased. Part of the reason is the drop in demand was matched with a drop in supply at the same time, protecting prices. Then when people began to look to move, the lack of supply has created a seller’s market, increasing prices.

Historically Low Interest Rates

Interest rates are still at an all-time low, so buying a home is more affordable. There has also been an increase in homeowners refinancing, putting themselves in a better economic situation.

Lender Standards

During the housing crisis of 2008, the use of subprime mortgages and lenient qualifications caused homeowners that were not really qualified to purchase homes out of their price range. When prices plummeted, they owed more than the house was worth (became “upside-down” or “under water” on their mortgages). Since then, the government and mortgage lenders have become much stricter in their lending qualifications. That means more homeowners are qualified now. According to CoreLogic, lenders have tightened credit requirements or increased payment requirements, making riskier loans less common. This helps to protect homeowners in a down market.

Home Wealth Gains

According to the Federal Reserve, housing wealth is a major component of total household wealth in the United States. According to the National Association of Realtors, “as of 2018, a homeowner who purchased a typical existing home five years ago (2013) gained $79,488 in wealth (equity), of which $64,200, or 81 percent was from the home price appreciation ($197,400 in 2013 to $261,600 in 2018).”

Home equity is at an all-time high in the U.S., which has not only helped weather the economic downturn, but has allowed homeowners to use that equity to their advantage by having flexibility to be able to sell their home for something that works better for them, like investing in another property (which can generate rental income), home renovation (which further increases the home value), a child’s college education, emergency or major life events, or expenses in retirement. National Association of Realtors has calculated equity reports on 181 metropolitan areas.

Default rates have also remained low during the pandemic. According to ATTOM Data Solutions, “Equity-Rich Properties Continue to Outnumber Those Seriously Under Water by Four-to-One Margin; Portion of U.S. Homes Considered Equity-Rich Ticks Up to 27.5 Percent; Seriously Under Water Properties Down to 6 Percent.”

Second Homes

Another trend that we are seeing is people are moving into their second home and using it as their primary residences. According to an article in the Colorado Sun, schools in Aspen, Vail, and Crested Butte reported record interest in enrollment as part-time resident relocated to their second homes. At the same time, the market has seen increased home sales in these resort towns as people are wanted to get away from cities.

This is also happening in New York City, which was one of the hardest hit cities by COVID-19, where people are moving into their upstate NY, Hamptons, and CT homes.

Real estate agents are also seeing an increase in people that live in cities, but are renters, buying second homes outside of the city.

As researchers, we should keep an eye on surrounding communities outside of cities that were historically vacation areas to see if there is an increase in sale prices. This could also trigger people to sell a home in a vacation area to take advantage of the increased demand.

Commercial Real Estate

One industry that is struggling is commercial real estate. As many businesses struggle to stay afloat, they have not been able to pay rent and commercial real estate companies are feeling the effects. Also, since many companies are having their employees work remotely, they are finding out they don’t need all the space they have and once their lease is up, they are either looking for smaller space or going fully remote.

Physical distancing is also changing the physical layout needed in office areas, meaning that potential tenants are going to demand less open spacing (can this mean we can finally put a nail in the open workspace concept?), updated HVAC systems, and improved amenities.

There is an increased demand for warehouse and storage space, as e-commerce has surged. Biotech companies are also seeing increased demand for lab space.

I think it would be smart to look at a commercial real estate firm’s portfolio and see what types of companies are in their portfolio. Consider using the HBG Whitepaper on who is doing well to help you determine if the RE firm has any of those clients or companies in industries that are doing well. At the same time, if the portfolio is full of restaurants or retail it could mean lean times for the commercial real estate firm.

Also, be on the lookout for commercial real estate firms to take advantage of opportunities to acquire properties at a good price and build their portfolio. Here is a good place to keep an eye on commercial real estate transactions and news.

Working Remotely

Due to the pandemic, many people were forced to work remotely. According to Business Insider, following the pandemic more than half of Americans want to continue working remotely while two-thirds of companies may render their current work-from-home policies permanent. A few major companies have announced they will continue to have employees work remotely, including Google, American Express, Uber, and Airbnb. REI plans to have its employees work remotely indefinitely and recently sold its brand new headquarters in Bellevue, WA to Facebook for $368M.

The National Association of Realtors created a Work From Home Score that studied “3,142 counties that are best poised to provide a supportive environment for working remotely, mainly, working from home.” They used nine factors to calculate the score. The top 30 work from home counties represent the top 1%. The top five counties include:

  • Forsyth County, Georgia

Part of the Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Alpharetta metropolitan area, 11.3% of the workforce already works from home and 99% of the population is served by three or more broadband internet service providers (ISPs). It’s a fast-growing area, and the population rose nearly 21% over the last five years.

  • Douglas County, Colorado

Part of the Denver-Aurora-Lakewood metropolitan area, 11.7% percent already work from home and 98% of the population is served by three or more broadband providers.

  • Los Alamos County, New Mexico

Part of the Los Alamos micropolitan area and the Albuquerque-Santa Fe-Las Vegas combined statistical area, less than 3% work from home but what stands out is that 68% of the workforce work in office-using industries. Homes are very affordable and only 11% of homeowners pay  30% or more of their income on their mortgage.

  • Collin County, Texas

Part of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area, 8.6% of the workforce work from home, and its population expanded 17% from 2014 to 2019, indicating it is a fast-growing county.

  • Loudoun County, Virginia

Part of the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan area, 7.5% of residents work from home, with 44% working in office-using industries. 100% of the population is served by three or more ISPs.

These areas could also be a good place to keep an eye on if you have prospects living there as they could see an increase in their property value. It is also going to change the type of home people want to purchase, which may now include two office spaces and an area that can act as a home school.

What trends are you seeing in your area?

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Companies House: a treasure trove of info on UK companies

Carrying on with the theme of prospect research and the UK for another week, I’m delighted to welcome Toby Savin as the author of today’s Intelligent Edge article on finding information about companies and company directors from Companies House. An experienced researcher and leader in the UK prospect development community, Toby is Development Research Manager at the University of Leeds. My thanks to Toby for sharing his knowledge! ~Helen

Over here in the UK, for all the challenges we face, including (and because of) a culture where it’s still seen by many as crass or taboo to discuss money even in the context of giving it away to a worthy cause, the prospect research community has one resource that our counterparts elsewhere can only dream of: Companies House.

Companies House is the UK registrar of companies and there are 4.4 million companies (and their associated filings) on the register, many of which are privately-owned. This includes not just limited companies, whether quoted on an exchange or not, but also limited partnerships (the legal business structure of choice for private equity funds and hedge funds) and limited liability partnerships (‘LLPs’), which have been astonishingly popular across many sectors of the economy since being introduced in the UK in 2001, thanks to the twin benefits of limiting partners’ liability and not incurring UK corporation tax. It also includes companies limited by guarantee (as opposed to share capital), a structure much used by charitable trusts and foundations.

What’s more, it’s free to access this data: in 2015, a Beta version of the register – freely available to anyone with an internet connection – was launched as part of the UK government’s commitment to free, open data. Sure, the register has its faults: one major issue, which was successfully used to push for a formal consultation on reforming the register last year, is that the information filed is not actually verified or checked by anyone at Companies House.

But, unlike data on non-quoted companies that many other countries are forced to rely on (typically, top line numbers self-reported to large data vendors within a voluntary and entirely unregulated framework), in the UK there is a statutory requirement to formally submit a whole range of filings and many of the accounts themselves are externally audited. Make no mistake: this is a treasure trove of public data that ought to make us the envy of researchers across the world, especially the US, where finding reliable, detailed information on privately-held companies can be difficult or impossible.

Want to know not just who owns a particular company but how much they own? Check.

Want to know the total compensation of the highest paid director? Check.

How about estimating the value of a privately-owned business? For sure, this is a tricky pursuit at the best of times (like a house, a business is only worth what someone is prepared to pay for it) but close to impossible – and perhaps even futile – if you have only sparse, unreliable numbers to hand. Here too, Companies House can help: businesses of a certain size are required file full audited accounts with a profit and loss account, balance sheet and cash flow statement.

And in addition to the hard numbers, Companies House provides an abundance of less tangible (but equally useful) information. A Chairman’s Statement on the company’s performance and strategy, for example, might be taken with a large pinch of salt by a forensic accountant looking for fraud but in the hands of a savvy prospect researcher, the salient points can be summarised and used by a frontline fundraiser to completely transform a discovery meeting with that top prospect who hitherto has been impossible to engage.

For anyone wanting to tap this most valuable of resources as part of their prospect research (or indeed gift acceptance due diligence), here are some things to take into consideration.

Firstly, if you intend to process any personal data, you’ll need to carry out an assessment as to what research is acceptable from a data protection perspective. There is an abundance of guidance available, from bodies like the Institute of Fundraising and CASE (the Council for Advancement and Support of Education).

Secondly, you’d do well to keep tabs on any changes to the legislation governing the information that companies are required to disclose (thankfully, these are widely reported across the blogosphere and beyond) as well as changes to the search functionality and other aspects of the free Companies House beta service itself (signing up to be a member of the user panel can help with this).

Last but by no means least, you really need to know what you’re doing: the proverb “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” might as well have its origins in interpreting data in company accounts. This one is a bit trickier to address but I’d like to highlight a couple of initiatives that will help.

Here in the UK, Researchers in Fundraising (RiF), a special interest group of the Institute of Fundraising, has launched a major project to develop a Researcher’s Handbook (including a chapter specifically on estimating wealth and capacity). Work on this is in progress and in the meantime, one very enterprising former prospect researcher has been working with some of the best talent in the sector (and me) to launch a Community Interest Company called PyroTalks offering a wide range of (virtual) conferences and training sessions, including a number that are specifically aimed at helping prospect researchers navigate some of the data you can find on the Companies House register.

Companies House isn’t the only source of useful data on UK organisations and potential donors but it is an essential part of any researcher’s tool kit; and, for all its faults, we’re lucky to have it. Take a look and expand your UK company knowledge.

Toby Savin is Development Research Manager at the University of Leeds in the UK, having joined the Alumni & Development Office there in 2010. Prior to this, he spent a decade working for a leading business risk consultancy in London and then a Nasdaq-quoted fraud prevention company, carrying out investigative due diligence and background checks on employees and vendors for banks, hedge funds and FTSE 100 clients.

In between these two ten-year periods working as a researcher, he gained first hand experience of worker-controlled co-operatives at two food co-ops in Manchester and volunteered on a number of different food and environmental projects. This experience formed the basis of a dissertation on the co-operative movement as part of a Master’s degree in Food Policy at City University in London, which he successfully completed with Distinction in 2011. Toby also holds a Bachelor’s degree, with Honours, in Hispanic Studies from the University of Birmingham, UK.

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Who is doing well now in the UK?

Back in April, I wrote a blog post about companies, individuals, and sectors in the United States that were doing well despite (or in some cases, because of) the coronavirus pandemic. Today I want to offer some research that I’ve done on the same topic, but focused across the Atlantic. For everyone who has prospects in the United Kingdom, this one’s for you.

Just as everywhere, the economy in the United Kingdom right now is on a slanting slide into sure recession. However, that doesn’t mean that every company or sector is in the red along with it. As I go through the individual companies and sectors that are doing well right now, think not only of those who are executives or major shareholders that are in these companies, but the companies themselves and others in that sector that may be prospects. Also consider if they have a corporate foundation with funding priorities that your nonprofit might fit.

Basic goods

Just like here in the States, the major supermarket chains are experiencing solid sales right now: Tesco’s sales are up 12.7% and Sainsbury’s and Waitrose are both up 12.5%. Discount grocery chain Co-op is up 30.8% and sales for mainly-frozen-foods grocer Iceland are up 29%.

In order to get those groceries, many people are relying on the UK’s main delivery service, Ocado, which is reporting sales that are up nearly 33%.

Companies and manufacturers

According to Make UK, the professional organization for the UK’s manufacturing sector, 90% of UK manufacturers have continued to operate fully or partially since March, although around 20% have furloughed or laid off staff.

Which manufacturers specifically are doing well?

Any company manufacturing Perspex (plexi-glass), for example. Every person operating a cash register or sitting at a customer service window has (or will have) a sheet of plastic between themselves and the customer, so those manufacturers are operating on all cylinders.

The same goes for anything medical related, including PPE manufacturers/suppliers (face masks, gowns, visors, aprons, thermometers), medical equipment parts and materials (beyond just respirators to the base materials like plastics and sheet metals), and companies that make household and institutional cleaning supplies, including Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of Dettol, and hand sanitizer manufacturers.

And of course early on in the lockdown just as in the United States, UK television streaming services, games, and other forms of entertainment did (and continue to do) really well, too.

Who does well all the time?

Grocery stores usually operate on fairly thin margins, but people always need groceries so they tend to be fine no matter the economic circumstance. Banks, energy companies (those delivering heating oil and gas, for example), internet and phone companies, and the infrastructures that support them do well, too.

Right now, in addition to ecommerce (like UK-based companies selling must-have items like Argos, B&Q, Curry’s, Screwfix, office suppliers, etc.), shipping (and supporting industries) are also doing well because all of those ordered items have to be delivered.

Which companies and industries are having a moment?

And speaking of delivery, a new-ish form of vehicle is increasingly important, with drones supplying medicines and PPEs in half the time over the Solent to the Isle of Wight and from mainland Scotland to the islands. Look for companies like drone operator Skyports and defense and technology companies like Thales that manufacture these useful technologies.

It’s not just corporations and UHNWIs doing well: Local bike shops can’t keep stock on the shelves – especially bikes under £500, and they can’t keep up with repairs, either. Electric bike sales are up 96%! Britain has re-discovered biking in a big way, and it’s healthy for the bikers and for the bike sellers, from local shops to chains like Halfords.

The UK is a gardener’s paradise, of course, and garden centers which have now reopened are experiencing the same sort of panic-buying (and associated boom in sales) as we Americans had with toilet paper in late March. There’s an 8-week wait for certain plants as sales at some centers have exploded 75%.

Who will be doing well moving forward?

Because of COVID-19, demand is also beginning to rise for contact-free items like touchless faucets, flushers, and dispensers, so watch those manufacturing spaces as well.

Property investors with deep reserves like Great Portland Estates, one of the largest property owners in London’s West End, bought up bargains during and after the Great Recession. They purchased nearly 60% of their current portfolio between 2009 and 2014, and according to an article in the Financial Times (paywall) they plan to do it again.

As in the United States, look for managers and investors in contrarian hedge funds. Some that shorted the market back in January and February have made hundreds of millions of dollars.

Any company with a contract to supply to the government should do well in the next year (or more) as well. Once awarded a contract, a company can expect steady payments from a reliable source. Look for connected companies like Liberty Global, (no relation to Liberty of London) which signed a deal with the UK government to provide on-street charging points for electric vehicles.

Finally, although it would be easy to think that private equity and venture funding would be completely dried up, it’s not always the case. I spent a little time spent in Crunchbase and found that startups and young companies in the UK received $3.9 billion in the period between March 1 and June 1 of this year. A quarter of those companies are outside of London, too, so it’s not all invested in the south. Both the funders and the companies funded are worth a look to see if there are prospects for your nonprofit.

What other companies and sectors do you know of that are doing well in the UK right now? Please share in the comments for all of us to benefit from!

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Who’s doing well now?

In the past four weeks, I haven’t gotten a single solicitation from any of the charities I support on a regular basis. Not by email, not by snail mail, not by text.

One of the newer charities I support has sent two emails with links to video showing them in action, delivering meals to COVID-impacted families, low-income folks, nurses, doctors, hospital maintenance, and more.

But that’s it. Everybody else has been dead silent. And my charity didn’t ask me to help in either email.

Now, I understand, I’m not a major donor. But I am one of those long-term nonprofit-sustaining regular donors that helps pay for rent and toilet paper and electricity through my unrestricted gifts. It’s been my honor to support “my” charities, and I have been under the impression that my support was needed. I’d think so now more than ever. Their silence confuses me.

I’m not alone. There are millions of Americans looking for a way to be helpful. Even in tough times, especially in tough times, people want to give. People do give.

Perhaps the fear is that we might bother people while they’re down.

Or maybe some fundraisers are just deer in headlights right now, trying to figure out the “best practice,” “right” thing to do and are just…immobile.

I know, we’re dealing with a pandemic. This is a whoooole new playbook. But (if there’s a plus side to be found) we’re also dealing with an economic reality that we’ve seen before. Many of us lived and worked through the Great Recession, and although it’s not what we hoped for, we can do this again.

There’s a fundraising intelligence solution to this problem

Just like in the good times, our job as prospect researchers and fundraisers is to find the people and the industries that are doing well right now. We need to build an engagement strategy with them. And move forward. Because they are looking to help and they will give.

Maybe they’re current major donors (which is always the best, of course), but they don’t have to be. They can be those next-tier people further down in your portfolios, or people, companies, and foundations that you haven’t even approached or considered yet.

To help our clients right now, my colleague Angie and I started doing research into companies, industries, and people that are thriving in this upside-down economy, and we wanted to share what we found with you, too. Spoiler alert: there are a lot of people and companies doing well right now. More than you’d think.

Let’s start with the companies and industries that won’t surprise you a bit, because these are the ones that you are probably personally are relying on right now:

  • Costco
  • BJ’s
  • Walmart (hiring 100,000 new workers) and other discount retailers
  • General Mills, ConAgra, Campbell Soup and other companies making shelf-stable food
  • Companies manufacturing cleaning products (including small/nimble companies that have pivoted to meet new opportunities like Fabrizia)
  • Amazon (hiring 100,000 new workers)
  • Comcast, Charter, Cox, RCN, and other internet providers
  • Personal fitness equipment companies (treadmills, stationary bikes, weights, etc.)
  • Companies manufacturing puzzles and games
  • Online / computer gaming (Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, etc.)
  • Online education companies
  • Zoom, GoToMeeting, and other videoconferencing services
  • Project management and collaboration software
  • Netflix (and Hulu, and Disney Plus, and every other in-home entertainment-related company)

Okay, a lot of those make sense, right? It’s easy enough to go to your database and filter on company or industry code to get a list of constituents affiliated with these companies and industries. (As long as you’ve been gathering that information and keeping it up-to-date in your database. If not, here’s your opportunity to get started).

What other companies and industries are making money now?

  • Healthcare-related (medical supplies, medical equipment, diagnostics, tele-medicine)
  • Drug / vaccine companies that are in the race right now (Moderna, Sanofi, Johnson & Johnson among many others)
  • CVS, Walgreens, Rite Aid and other drugstore retailers
  • Staples/Office suppliers
  • FedEx, UPS, supply chain services and logistics
  • Private jet companies (NetJets, Wheels Up, Delta Private Jets, etc.)
  • Industrial warehousing
  • Data centers
  • Alcohol beverage companies and retailers
  • Cannabis/CBD/hemp-related growers and sellers

Don’t forget the individuals that bet on an economic downturn. Hedge fund managers expecting a downturn shorted the market and made billions. Here are just a few:

Boaz Weinstein’s Saba Capital Management Tail Fund was up 175% in March, with an estimated gain for Saba’s funds at $500 million. According to Reuters, other winners betting on a downturn and winning big included Capstone Investment Advisors, Universa Investments LP, 36 South Capital Advisors, and Cambria Investment Management LP.

You may also have read one of the many articles about Bill Ackman (of Pershing Square Holdings) who earlier this year bet $27 million in shorted high-yield bonds that made him a profit of $2.6 billion. Ackman published this letter to investors which was leaked to the media explaining in detail how (and why) he did it.

There are whole mutual funds designed to take advantage of economic downturns. Just do a search on “tail risk fund” and you’ll be amazed at the number of funds that are in the black right now.

These people and companies are not alone. While many of our prospects don’t do well in a recession, it’s good to remember that some people (and companies) do. Some even thrive, and – like Jack Dorsey – want to help.

But you don’t have to look to the billionaires. There are lots of regular fund donors who would love to support their favorite charities right now if you make a good case for why your nonprofit is relevant – and then ask.

Your org doesn’t have to be COVID-specific, either. Botanic gardens and nonprofit parks that are open provide much-needed relief now. Symphonies and theaters are reaching out with online concerts and plays to meet our need for entertainment. Libraries, bless them, are still loaning e-books and doing story hours for kids via video.

There are prospects out there with capacity, inclination, and connection to all of our nonprofits. We have to give them the opportunity to be helpful.

FOR FURTHER READING

Coronavirus Business Tracker: How The Private Sector Is Fighting The COVID-19 Pandemic, Forbes

Some Big Investors Smell Profit in Virus-Plagued Companies, New York Times

Hedge Funds Legends Quietly Contacting Investors, Citing Historic Buying Opportunity, Institutional Investor

This Hedge Fund Saw Risks of Coronavirus Early. Now It’s Up 36%. Wall Street Journal

The Booming, Cloistered, & Rarefied World of Private Jet Pandemic Travel, Institutional Investor

Grocery delivery apps see record downloads amid coronavirus outbreak, TechCrunch – Includes download numbers. Data supplied in the TechCrunch article available here.

Gaming Stocks Are Holding Up Relatively Well as Consumers Stay Home, The Street

Coronavirus Pandemic Widens Divide Between Online, Traditional Businesses, Wall Street Journal

A note of special thanks to my colleague Angie Stapleton, who provided absolutely stellar background research for this article.

 

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How GIS mapping can improve your real estate searching

This week I’m delighted to welcome Senior Researcher Josh Ostroski back to The Intelligent Edge. If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll know that Josh is our go-to guy on real estate research here at HBG, and this week he has a great article to share on a very clever way to find property information. Take it away, Josh! ~Helen

I had planned to write a blog post about some of the things I’ve learned in my 15 years as a Prospect Researcher since all I ever seem to write about is real estate. However, I’ve been noticing a new trend while researching properties that I think would be helpful for everyone – Assessor GIS Mapping – so I decided to go for a real estate theme for a blog post again.

Geographic Information System, or GIS mapping for short, is not necessarily a new technology, but I’ve noticed that it has popped up on most of the assessor sites now. I’ve found it so helpful that I wanted to share it so that more in the prospect development world are aware of it.

What is GIS Mapping?

GIS Mapping allows you to search for a property by address or by location and you will be able to see the property lines and, in most cases at least, who owns it and basic information about the property. Like all assessor sites, not all counties in the country share the same information and some are more robust than others.

Each site has its unique features and allows you to see different information, so be patient and play with each county (or sometimes state) sites. Even if it doesn’t give you all the information you need, you can at least have a visual of what the property looks like. Then you can use what you know and other resources to find out more specific information about the property. Often times the traditional assessor site will have more robust information on its site about the property.

Here is an example of what the map looks like. Each separate lot is outlined and you can simply click on the lot (be aware that some GIS Maps require you click on a tool in order for the assessor information to pop up), and the information will come up.

How is GIS Mapping Helpful?

I always use this feature when I’m looking at a property that has multiple lots; that way I can see what the property actually looks like. I’ve also found it helpful when someone may have multiple lots, but they are owned by different LLC’s or by family members.

Another way it is useful is when a mailing address and a property address don’t match. Sometimes that could be because the property is split between different streets or the owners bought an adjacent lot at a later date and use that mailing address.

Below is a screenshot from the San Miguel County, Colorado, GIS Mapping site. The property in question was located at 115 Francisco, Telluride, CO, which is Tom Cruise’s estate. It has been on the market for $59M.

What this shows us is that the property is owned by Client 2177 Living Trust, which if you run the property report shows an address in Los Angeles, CA, that is home to Chapman Bird Grey & Tessler, a Hollywood business management firm that Tom Cruise has been associated with. The other thing it shows is the properties adjacent to the main home that are owned by the same entity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this example, the adjacent properties are owned by the same name, but I have often found the names can be different but have the same mailing address. One example I came across just the other day was a home in New Jersey that consisted of six separate lots; each lot owned by a different limited liability company (LLC) (ex: 123 Briar Lane Acquisiton LLC, 129 Briar Lane Acquisiton LLC).

I always use a satellite view when using the GIS Mapping tool (I actually always use satellite view in life); that way you can really see what the home and property look like. You can also sometimes tell if a home was recently renovated or differs from what the assessment records indicate, which could be due to a delay in new information being uploaded.

Another example of how this has been very useful was a request from a gift officer after a meeting with a prospect. The prospect had mentioned in passing that he was selling some land he had accumulated over the years to a developer. It turned out he owned dozens of separate lots, all under different LLC’s and many with different mailing addresses. By using the GIS Map, I was able to click on all the lots in the area and determine if they were his or not.

He was indeed selling them off and to a developer that was building a new golf course community. We were also able to tell which lots he had recently sold and for how much. With traditional resources, it would have taken me much much longer to do and I don’t think it would have been as accurate.

How to Find GIS Mapping Tools

NETROnline.com is a great resource for individual assessor sites, including listing GIS Mapping links. The assessor sites are under the Public Records Online tab.

You can also do a search for “[County Name] Assessor GIS Map” and you will probably have luck. I’ve rarely found a county that does not have this capability. There are some outliers: Massachusetts, for example, does not do it by county, but the entire state has one map you can search.

Let me know what you think of GIS mapping tools, and what other interesting tools you use to find real estate information.

The Helen Brown Group LLC
489 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 4
Watertown, MA 02472
617-393-1983
info@helenbrowngroup.com
Helen Brown Group