Are you including social media searching as part of your prospect research?
Today’s blog post is a slide show featuring some tips and tricks for getting the most out of searching Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
Make sure to turn your speakers up if you’re solo (or plug in your headphones) and click on the little speaker in the center of each slide to listen to the audio.
Let me know if you have found other ways to search these great resources!
Having trouble viewing the presentation in this window? Go here:http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/HelenBrownGroup-2204575-searching-social-media-helen-brown-group/
iPad and iDevice users: I’m sorry – The audio may not work for you. It’s a Flash thing, apparently. Come back later and view this post on a laptop or desktop.
The Field Guide to Efficient Searching
Let’s just dive right in, shall we? Here are my top five tips for efficient web searching.
Tip #1: Use Quotation Marks
If you want to get the best results for an exact name or phrase, always put your search string in quotes. This works really well for names, for example, of a person or an organization.
Searching on Bing for Council on Foreign Relations got me 18,700,000 hits. Searching for “Council on Foreign Relations” narrowed down the hit count to a mere two million.
This might not matter when you’re searching for something like the COFR, but what if you’re looking for a name? [Read more…]
Web search overview: Three Key Things Everyone Needs to Know
Web searching can be a lot like hiking. Sometimes it’s a pristine path along the coast with stunning views over the channel, other times it’s a bracken-laden jungle where you can’t even see your feet. I’ve been on both kinds of paths, and I much prefer the former. [Read more…]
Search Strategies – The hunt begins
I admit that sometimes I cringe a little bit when I watch [some] other people search.
Not all people, mind you. Not professional (and natural-born) researchers. I actually love seeing how they search differently than me – the terms they use and how they use search engines and deep-web sources. I always learn something. It’s fun to share techniques and watch them get from point A to point B efficiently. [Read more…]
6 Reasons Why Real Estate Matters to the Savvy Prospect Researcher
Every so often, the topic of “Should we or shouldn’t we include real estate as one of the factors we use to determine a prospective donor’s gift capacity” comes up in the prospect research community.
Some folks have this logic: “Well, our prospective major donor is never going to give us their house (or sell their house and give us the money), therefore we shouldn’t include it.”
Which is absolutely true. (<stage whisper>: I won’t mention “planned gift” at this point, okay?)
3 Ways to Build a Great “Gold Guide”
Prospect researchers tend to grab great information sources with the zeal of kids let loose onto the lawn of the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll.
And for good reason: well-curated information sources are really interesting and offer valuable time-savings. Especially because (for most of us, anyway) the pile of pending research requests is always a foot high.
Why wealth screenings are a waste of money
“Yes, we did a wealth screening a couple of years ago. We didn’t really find it very helpful.” <pause>
“Well, to be honest, we didn’t really do anything with the information when it came back. It just kind of sat there.”
If I had a twenty for every time someone said that to me I’d be making major gifts already.
It absolutely kills me, too, because wealth screenings
a) are not cheap, and
b) can be worth every single penny.
Why Most Prospect Research Profiles Are Dead On Arrival
Imagine that it’s 10 am on a Thursday morning and you have just discovered a new seven-figure prospect for your organization.
This prospect is an active volunteer and a recent donor.
She’s expressed a firm endorsement of your organization’s mission in the press, and she has undisputedly significant wealth.
You’re going to run down the corridor and tell everyone, right?
The Golden String – the key to 7-figure gifts
The gift that led to the billionaire
A friend and colleague of mine (who is one smart cookie) was researching a newly-identified prospect in his 30s. Although relatively young, Mr. Jones seemed to be on a steep upward trajectory in his career, and he had volunteered for the organization where she works on a number of recent occasions. She wanted frontline fundraisers to get to know him. When she started to write up the profile and filled in the section about his philanthropic gifts to her organization, Cookie noticed a tribute gift that was even higher than their “Hmm, look at that!” category. (That’s a stray gift in whatever amount that makes you do a double take when you see it). The tribute gift was given to her nonprofit on the occasion of Mr. Jones’s wedding by a Mr. Smith. “Now why would Mr. Smith give such a large amount in honor of Mr. Jones’s wedding? That seems overly generous,” she thought. As an experienced researcher, it didn’t take long before Cookie discovered that Mr. Smith was the head of a large, very recognizable family-owned company, and he had given the gift on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to young Mr. Jones. Possibilities immediately opened up for both family and corporate sponsorship opportunities at the 7-figure level. Wow!
Four secrets for speedier prospect research
As a fundraiser constantly on the go, sometimes it might seem like it takes a long time to get a research profile back from an in-house prospect researcher or consultant. When you’ve got a meeting coming up or you need to prioritize your prospect pool in a hurry, I know that you really haven’t got a lot of extra time to wait. Here are four secrets to getting information back faster from your research partner:
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- …
- 15
- Next Page »
