Researching Companies Archives

October 12, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Broadening your alert horizon

By Lizard Fine Art (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

There’s such a great sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a prospect research profile. You can dot the i’s, cross the t’s, hit ‘save’ and move onto the next assignment.

But if you think about it, that moment is really the starting line. What happens after that?

Well, an opportunity for us to have a conversation with the front line fundraiser assigned to that prospective donor, to begin with.

Did the profile answer all of your questions?
Is there any further work to be done?
What questions remain unanswered in the work that the fundraiser can discover on their next visit?

And most importantly, this signals the beginning – or deepening – of the relationship between your organization and the donor. The gift. Stewardship. Continuing engagement. [Read more…]

September 14, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

International prospect research resources – United Kingdom

From a North American perspective, international prospect research just doesn’t get any better than the United Kingdom.

First of all, there’s no language barrier.

Second, the way information is gathered and distributed by commercial and governmental entities is relatively similar to ours, so navigating around information sources feels …familiar. Logical.

And third, many of the resources that provide information here in the US (like LexisNexis, Factiva, D&B, and Moody’s) also offer products and services in the UK, so there’s crossover. Some of the information we can already get through what we’ve already, well, got. [Read more…]

May 4, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Valuing Real Estate in the US West

Last week at the (sold out!) NEDRA conference, this week’s guest author Heather Willis spoke with her HBG colleague, Kelly Labrecque, on finding real estate values in the US west and east. “Country Mouse/City Mouse” was a big hit, and I asked Heather to share tidbits from her portion of the presentation with us today. (If you’d like to see the slides from their presentation, let us know!) And now, here’s Heather:

It’s that time of year again in the West; the snow is melting, tulips are flowering, calves are being born, and the birds are singing. It also means the year- end real estate market analyses, the new agriculture statistics reports, and the top ten landowners, have been published. Exciting right!?

Ok, you might not have the desire or the time to read through all of these reports when researching a prospect who owns a farm or ranch, so I will point out a few changes from last year and try to give you some insights into an extremely diverse and difficult group of prospects to research. [Read more…]

April 13, 2017 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Doing Your Due Diligence

By Silke Remmery (Newspaper) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a major donor to a nonprofit organization in the UK or Europe, chances are good that someone has done background research on you to make sure you’re not an arms dealer or drug kingpin.

This is called due diligence research and it’s essential to protecting the reputation of the nonprofit. What the organization is doing is ensuring that there are no legal reasons why the gift may be contested or clawed back later. Or worse.

A nonprofit’s reputation is obviously important – if an organization becomes allied with …a despot, say, it risks years of damage and decreased support of every kind. They become that scarlet-lettered nonprofit that everyone remembers for being the de facto money-launderer for the drug ring. Not too many volunteer and trustee types (or donors)(or talented employees) want to be affiliated with that kind of organization.

Most organizations in the UK and Europe have a policy to do due diligence research at a relatively modest level (at least by major donor giving progam standards). The amount under consideration can be as low as £1,000 or €1,000.

Of course, we do due diligence research on this side of the Atlantic, too, but we are more likely to back into it. By that I mean that we’re not usually specifically looking for negative information to see if we want to be allied with a donor from the get-go. Many times the person or company or foundation has already been a donor at a certain level for many years, but now is interested in making a very large or transformational gift of some sort.

Sometimes the news just falls in our lap in the course of our usual prospect research. Like the time I discovered…well, never mind. Suffice it to say it was a yikes-bullet-dodged moment and the organization I worked for decided to let that relationship gently fade away into the night.

But let’s say you do need to do reputational research on a prospective donor. Where are the best places for you to go?

Some organizations decide to hire an outside firm that specializes in due diligence research. It can be expensive, but of course the avoidance of reputational damage is frequently worth the money.

Others ask their prospect research department (or HBG) to take a first crack at it to see if any immediate red flags appear. They can then decide how to move forward if worrisome details start to emerge, by either running the request up the flag to a due diligence firm or by deciding not to ask for the donation to begin with.

If you want to tackle the due diligence research yourself, here is a list of a few of our team’s favorite sources:

Better Business Bureau
Business press (Crain’s, American City Business Journals,)
Datocapital – a database of 12.5 million directors of privately-held companies in 8 European countries
ICIJ offshore database
Lexis Nexis – there’s a specific area in LNDP just for this.
Newspapers.com
Opensecrets.org – Donor database, nonprofit database
Secretary of State’s business lookup database in the state a company is registered (MA provided here as an example)
Social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. (we use Mention.com to monitor these)

You’ll find tons more resources on our HBG Research Links page. What are some of your favorite sources for due diligence research?

February 4, 2016 By Helen Brown 5 Comments

How much is that unicorn in the window?

This month we welcome HBG’s Angie Stapleton who has become quite the expert on tech startups. Angie navigates us through the terminology around startups, shows how and why unicorns fly so high, and gives us insight into what their value might mean for fundraising.

When I was a little girl, unicorns were everything. I mean, if you didn’t have a Lisa Frank unicorn lunch box, hello, you may as well just go back home. Today, a new kind of unicorn reigns king… tech start-ups.

In recent years, tech firms with valuations of $1 billion have become all the rage, the Silicon Valley darlings, the UNICORNS of the investment world. In fact, investors have even come up with a new name for tech firms whose values rise above $10 billion… DECAcorns. I’m guessing this is because “unicorn” just didn’t encompass enough magic and whimsy. [Read more…]

October 29, 2015 By Helen Brown 3 Comments

Hidden Treasure

Last week I had the pleasure of a long layover at Heathrow, so I wandered around trying on Barbour coats, admiring Chanel scarves, and disappointing bored shop assistants in the luxury shopping mall that masquerades as an airport terminal.

As I widened my circuit I passed one of the gates and noticed some neatly-arranged business-y magazines that didn’t look familiar under a COMPLIMENTARY! sign. My gimlet eye spied a cross-armed CEO standing proudly on the cover of one, and the words “Jockey Club” on the cover of another.

Well, well, what have we here? I thought, and sidled over. Picked up one, then the other, and dropped into the nearest seat to have a leaf-through. [Read more…]

September 24, 2015 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Expert omnibus research sources: 10 of the best

Whether you’re a seasoned prospect researcher or someone who only researches once in a while, it makes sense to be guided by other smart searchers who are pointing the way to great resources they’ve found and loved.

A number of research shops (including ours) maintain lists of the best sites to zero in on information about companies, foundations, and high net worth individuals. New and useful websites pop up every day, and those of us who curate these lists add new treasures we’ve found frequently, so it’s worthwhile checking back often with your favorite lists. [Read more…]

September 17, 2015 By Helen Brown 10 Comments

Morningstar Sunset

What is your prospect research shop doing to prepare for the Morningstar/10K Wizard demise?

10K Wizard has been a staple resource for many prospect researchers over the years for information about publicly-held companies (and the people that run them). I thought it was a curious marriage when Morningstar bought the company in 2008, but as long as 10K was still running I didn’t really think much of it. [Read more…]

July 16, 2015 By Helen Brown 6 Comments

Bookmark These Five Great Deep Web Research Resources

It’s really valuable to keep an eye on (and share!) the tools our colleagues in allied fields are using to do their research. This past week I stumbled upon these five great resources I wanted to share with you.

ONE AND TWO

First off, I’d like to mention two books, the Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting and the Verification Handbook; a Definitive Guide for Verifying Digital Content, both edited by Craig Silverman a leading expert on media errors, accuracy and verification, and (among other things), founder of Emergent and former fellow with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

Both books are available free to download in pdf format – scroll down the page here – or you can purchase them if you prefer hard copies. They are written by experts in research, journalism and investigative reporting including Paul Myers (more on him in a minute), Fergus Bell, and Steve Buttry. Don’t miss chapter 10 of the Verifying Digital Content volume, called Verification Tools. There are tons of handy tools there for you to check out! [Read more…]

January 29, 2015 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Corporate board perks: a proxy primer

Today I’d like to talk about executive compensation and the fun perquisites (“perks”) that make looking at a company’s proxy statement really interesting. Perks are those little extra somethings that make the financial lives of company executives and board members just a little bit easier. Like a shiny lure, perks attract the most talented ‘big fish’ and help retain them once they’re hooked.

Think of a proxy statement (aka the DEF 14A) as an aquarium of large and small moving objects that flash silver in the sunlight. Some things are easy to find, like annual compensation. Other things you need to look more carefully for as they glint in the weeds: like the perks. According to many sources (including this one and this one), corporate perks are on the wane. But they’re not extinct yet, and companies are very clever about the creative ways they compensate their executives. [Read more…]