By: Melissa Bank Stepno, President & CEO
Some of the best prospect research doesn’t begin with a straight line. It begins with a question, a hunch, a loose end, or a small detail that refuses to stay small.
Curiosity is what makes the best prospect researchers follow the path of the unknown. It is what leads us to pull on threads, peel back layers, and inherently know that meaningful discovery is often non-linear by nature.
This is why, at The Helen Brown Group, we specifically include the following as a required skill in our job descriptions:
“Curiosity and an innate ability to identify loose threads needing further exploration.”
For us, it’s not a nice-to-have trait. Rather, it’s central to the work of a prospect researcher, because the ability to recognize what deserves a second look is often what separates a basic answer from strategic insight.
Case in point:
I still think about a phone call I made more than 20 years ago. This was before tax assessment data was comprehensively available online, which meant that it was commonplace for a prospect researcher to call a town assessor’s office and ask for public information directly. Usually, these conversations were brief and transactional: ask the question, get the answer, move on.
In this instance, I was researching a prospect who lived in a small rural town, and I wanted to know the assessment of his home. The employee I spoke with was chatty. When I provided the prospect’s name and address, she mentioned that she knew the couple and socialized with the wife on occasion. As she typed away on her computer (I could hear the keyboard clicking through the receiver of my office phone) she paused abruptly and asked something to the effect of, “Now, did you only want the assessment on their home, or did you also want to know the assessment of their air strip?”
“Air strip?” I repeated as a question while my eyebrows raised.
“Yes,” she continued to share that they owned the adjoining property as well, and they use it as an air strip.”
What a tidbit of information to share!
My professional response was measured: “Yes, thank you. I’ll take that too.”
While inside, I was giddy. There’s only one reason a couple would have a personal airstrip: they must own a plane! And, frankly, by this point, I didn’t really care what that strip of land was assessed at. More importantly, I had an entirely new line of research to pursue.
This is the magic of curiosity in prospect research. One answer can be useful, but one unexpected detail can be transformative. It can open an entirely different path, shift the frame of inquiry, and reveal a fuller picture of a person, family, business, or foundation.
Prospect research has always rewarded this kind of non-linear thinking. We start with a known question, but the work often becomes more interesting when we notice what sits just outside the original scope. A property record leads to an airplane. An SEC filing leads to a philanthropic interest. A casual mention shared by a gift officer leads to a new asset, affiliation, or story.
The most valuable discoveries are not always hidden. Sometimes they are adjacent and they appear because we remained curious enough to notice them.
No one I know is still calling assessor’s offices to gather information because so much of it is now readily available online with just a few clicks. Sure, speed is useful, and efficiency has its place. But if we treat the shortest path to an answer as the only path worth taking, we risk losing the learning that happens while we’re still searching.
A quick answer may resolve the question in front of us, but curiosity helps us understand the landscape around it. It is the difference between retrieving information and developing insight.
As Anne-Laure Le Cunff put it in her recent New York Times Opinion piece We Are Losing the Ability to Discover What We Didn’t Know to Ask:
“Curiosity puts the entire brain into a mode of heightened receptivity — not just for the specific thing you want to know, but also for everything around it. Curiosity opens a window, and while the window is open, learning deepens across the board.”
For prospect researchers, it is a reminder that some of the best work happens when we remain open to the unexpected. The task is not simply to answer the question we were asked. It is to notice when the answer points somewhere else worth exploring.
