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2024 Intelligent Edge Year in Review

‘Tis the Season!

Whether you will be counting down the 12 days of Christmas, the 8 nights of Hanukkah, the 7 days of Kwanza, or the seconds until the New Year’s ball drops, this time of year is typically a time for counting and a time for giving.

Here at The Intelligent Edge, we thought we would join in the holiday spirit by using this last post of 2024 to re-share our most popular posts from the past year.

So, with no further preamble, here are the Top 5 Intelligent Edge posts* of 2024:

  1. Topping the list are a pair of posts sharing Helen Brown’s Exciting News that HBG was acquired in August by Melissa Bank Stepno, who shared her thoughts on the acquisition in Looking Back & New Beginnings.
  2. Next up, Kristina Gropper, our HBG in-house expert on all things related to art, contributes her top Tips for Researching Art Collectors and Artists.
  3. Getting very practical and tactical, in Building Research Systems That Work by Michelle Guzman talks about the importance of putting guidelines and guardrails in place that help manage inbound research requests.
  4. And, speaking of those requests, in Crafting a Meaningful Donor Profile: Connect with the Donor Behind the Dollars, Susan Barclay explains why it’s not just about dollar signs and zeros. Understanding a prospect’s interests and values is just as important their capacity.

With that, we wish you a festive season.  We’ll be back with fresh new content in early 2025!

 

*at least according to LinkedIn Analytics!

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Tis The Season for Giving!

Whether you are celebrating the 8 nights of Hanukkah, looking forward to the 12 days of Christmas, planning for the 7 days of Kwanza, or waiting for the New Year’s ball to drop, this time of year is typically a time for giving – and for countdowns.

Here at The Intelligent Edge, we thought we would join in the year-end holiday spirit by using this last post of 2023 to re-gift our most popular posts from the past year.

So, with no further preamble, here are the Top 5 Intelligent Edge posts* of 2023:

  1. In Factoring in Compensation, Tara McMullen-King shares her favorite resources for researching compensation and expert advice on how to interpret what you find.
  2. Any life-long learners out there? Kenny Tavares shares his tips and tricks for organizing your efforts in Lessons in Self-Learning.
  3. For Wearing Many Hats Including Research: Strategies for Success, Maura Baron shares her journey from having multiple responsibilities as a part-time research in small shops to becoming a full time prospect research consultant.
  4. Karla Davis’s thoughts on how to stay motivated when asked to research This Guy Again? seems to be resonating loudly and clearly with prospect researchers
  5. And, rounding out our Top 5, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Comprehensive Due Diligence Research focuses on Heather Willis’s vast experience with increasingly important topic of due diligence research.

With that, we wish you a festive season.  We’ll be back with fresh new content in early 2024!

*at least according to LinkedIn Analytics!

 

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My favorites from 2018

Hi there and happy almost-New Year!

I did a wrap-up last week on the HBG team’s favorite resources from our prospect research links page, and this week I thought I’d share some of my own personal favorite reads from this year.

This list is the really-worth-it books, articles and white papers I’ve read over the course of 2018. In case you have some down time between now and the new year (or even in the weeks ahead), I thought you might like to queue up the ones that are new to you. I’ve thrown in a couple of personalities I think you might want to follow on social media, too.

As always, if you have suggestions for things that I and others shouldn’t miss, please don’t hesitate to share them in the comments – I love learning about new sources! [Read more…]

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No Budget For Paid Research Resources? This is for you!

This week we welcome HBG Senior Researcher Heather Hoke to share her knowledge on the blog. Every year, nearly a third of attendees at our professional association conference are brand new to our field. The Apra conference in July is one of the best places for new researchers to find in-depth training and unparalleled opportunities to network, test-drive critical resources, and learn from experienced colleagues. If you don’t have the budget this year but still need information to get you started, Heather’s article will help launch you with lots of advice and resources.

I have been a development researcher for more than 15 years and have had the opportunity to meet many new researchers starting out in our profession who need to learn the basics. It’s an exciting time for them, but our field can be a bit overwhelming.

I have met folks just starting out in a non-profit or educational institution with no prior experience or training on how to do prospect research to advance fundraising. And sometimes, to make things more difficult, there may be no researcher on staff to guide them. [Read more…]

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How much is a good prospect researcher worth?

About $750,000 by my estimate.

You may think that’s an outrageous amount (and it is) but I’m saying it anyway. Let me explain why.

First of all, many professionals in the world have one main job. They repair things in a human body or in an automobile. They speak in front of cameras and explain what a company means to do, or what a politician did do. They deliver mail, or babies. They build houses or computer programs. [Read more…]

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The most popular articles of 2016 from The Intelligent Edge

I’m going to get to the top posts of 2016 in just a second, but as we bid goodbye to 2016 – a rollercoaster year if ever there was one – we at The Helen Brown Group wanted to take a moment to say thank you.

To our clients, thank you for making 2016 our best year yet. Your missions – and your personal dedication to them – inspire us to do our best work for you. Our appreciation also goes out to the kind folks who point others in our direction – grateful thanks for your referrals.

To our 1,200+ Intelligent Edge subscribers and to the readers who drop by, thanks for signing up, for reading, and for your comments, both on and offline. Two years ago, our mailing list comprised 65 hearty souls! We couldn’t be prouder of the way our readership has grown or thank our wonderful guest bloggers enough. Thank you.

We also really appreciate our vendor partners, who make the great tools we use and who share our commitment to using quality information to make the world a better place.

And to our colleagues in the prospect development community – thank you so much for your support and for the part you play in building and growing this wonderful profession.

And now, to our top five… [Read more…]

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Why wealth screenings – and prospect researchers – are so reliant on real estate

life-saver-ring

Here’s the complaint I hear frequently about wealth screenings, prospect research, and real estate: Knowing what our prospect holds in real estate is useless! She’s never going to give any of those houses to our organization!(*)

That’s absolutely right. She’s probably not. But that completely misses the point of why real estate is key.

Here’s why:

Imagine with me that you’re on a lovely sailboat. You’re out for the day with friends in the Caribbean enjoying the sun and the breeze. You’re moving along at a pretty fast clip with the wind, but all of a sudden an unexpected gust causes the boom to flip from one side of the boat to the other, and somehow you’re overboard.

The water’s warm but it’s going to take a few minutes for your friends to turn the boat around and get you. That thin orange ring they tossed you is by no means reliably holding up your weight, but it’ll help keep you up while you tread water until the boat comes back. That orange ring may be crummy, but it’s the most solid thing you’ve got right now. [Read more…]

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Expanding Your Prospect Research Horizons

fortune

(Fairly appropriate fortune for a fundraising researcher, eh?)

Something must be in the air because I’ve had three calls in the last two weeks about training new researchers.

Fundraising intelligence (or prospect development, whatever you want to call it) is one of those professions that you can’t go to college for. There are degree programs in nonprofit management and, frequently, fundraising intelligence is part of the coursework, but there’s not yet a higher ed degree in prospect research, prospect management and data analytics.

So mostly it’s taught by the experienced to the newcomers, and you learn – and get better – by doing. [Read more…]

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Boss keys: The best apps, extensions, and add-ons for your browser

computer keys1I’m switching browsers this week. I do this about once every three years, so that I can get out of a rut I don’t even know I’m in, and try out new ways of working and thinking. It’s a great way to discover new apps to help me be more efficient or that are just plain useful.

To get a head start, I polled the HBG team on their favorite apps, add-ons and extensions in order to shortcut my level-up. I thought you’d find their suggestions helpful too, so here they are, the HBG Top 10! [Read more…]

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Why Virtual Workers Are a Real Asset

This month we welcome HBG Research Associate Heather Hoke to the blog. Even before she joined HBG, Heather had years of experience with the benefits of being a remote worker. In this week’s post, Heather shares her knowledge and some of the latest research on why virtual workers may make sense for your organization.home office shed

Are you looking to hire or retain a superstar fundraising researcher? Consider implementing flexible work arrangements, including work-from-home (WFH) policies. There are benefits to both employers and employees.

Based on what I see on Prspct-L and APRA’s Career Center, many nonprofits are hiring new staff in prospect development. There are some 5,300 colleges and universities and more than 1.5 million nonprofits in the US, and there are about 2,000 APRA members worldwide. As you can see, the potential pool of development researchers to be employed at these institutions is quite small. If you are not looking to hire now, you likely will be in the future. A survey released by CareerBuilder found that more than one in five employees are planning to leave their current place of employment during 2016, a 5% increase since last year. Why not do something that will keep your best employees and expand your hiring pool to include people that live in other states? [Read more…]

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