One of the yearly reports that sends a tingle up the collective spines of the prospect research community is The Wealth Report from Knight Frank. The 2019 edition came out this week, and my copy is already highlighted and sticky-noted – how ‘bout yours?
If you haven’t had a chance to download and read it yet, here are seven highlights I didn’t want you to miss… [Read more…]
Since June is the most popular month for the pledging of troths, it got me to thinking about The Giving Pledge, which is an organization of billionaires who pledge to give away 50% of their fortunes while they’re still alive.
I realized that I hadn’t really heard much about the Giving Pledge when it resurfaced in the news recently with MacKenzie Bezos’s sign-up. That could be because interest in the club seems to have waned a bit in the decade since Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet splashed out the announcement at its founding. 122 people signed on in the first four years, but only 68 have committed in the five years that have followed. [Read more…]
We talk about “the 1 percent” a lot in our line of work. Yesterday, the HBG Book Club met to talk about chapter one of Uneasy Street; The Anxieties of Affluence by sociologist Rachel Sherman, and what spurred most of our conversation was the ambivalence high net worth people had toward their wealth.
In the book, Sherman interviewed wealthy Manhattan-ites to learn their attitudes towards their wealth and what they felt it means to be considered wealthy. She recognized a distinct pattern over time, and shares two distinct categories she observed depending on how people spoke about their wealth: upwardly- and downwardly-oriented attitudes.
The “downward-oriented” wealthy share an unease with having so many resources in a time of stark income disparity. Sherman found that this group are more likely to have inherited their wealth or have come from more modest origins. Most are not in a high-pressure earning environment. More liberal politically than the upwardly-oriented, people in this group are be more likely to mix with a more racially and income diverse group of friends. We posited that people with these attitudes might fall into the shirtsleeves-rolled-up volunteer-donor category.
The “upwardly-oriented” wealthy, she wrote, tend toward the attitude of “sure, I’m comfortable, but not like that guy. He’s really wealthy. I’m middle class compared to him.” There aren’t many inheritors in this group; they tend to be earners who make their money in finance, real estate, business, or corporate law. More conservative politically than the downwardly-oriented, their charity involvement may be less hands-on and more focused on opportunities to network with others.
As we were discussing this chapter, I was thinking about what it actually means to be a one-percenter, and if the attitudes of Manhattan one-percenters toward their money are the same as Mercer Island’s, or England’s, or if each locale’s attitude is like Darwin’s finches – unique to that island.
Naturally, I decided to do some research to see what it means to be a one-percenter elsewhere than New York City. Unsurprisingly, it really depends on your geography. Someone working in a senior leadership position in a large nonprofit in New York, Boston, or San Francisco would probably qualify as a one-percenter in Arkansas, where in 2017 the bar was set at annual income of $237,428.
Before seeing the article, I had assumed that NYC would be the top, but Connecticut actually beat out New York by a mile, $659,979 to $517,557. Even New Jersey got New York’s upper hand, at $547,737. What’s also fascinating to see in the article is that the average annual income for members of the one percent in each state is usually much, much higher than the threshold.
What we discussed in our book club was being aware of these geographic differences and, as always, understanding the context of where our prospects are in their life – living in an aspirational neighborhood with two kids in private school, or two-income, childless and nearing retirement. Taking Sherman’s observations into consideration as well – whether prospects are upwardly- or downwardly-oriented – may also provide us with help as we plan how to involve and steward major donors and volunteers.
Are you reading this book as well? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
I recently became the owner of the rear half of a tandem kayak, and what I very quickly learned is that the adage “a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into” is no joke. After paddles, roof racks, waterproof bags, storage racks, water shoes, skirts, and other must-have sundries (and this is a KAYAK, mind you) I’m beginning to get an idea of what yacht owners have to go through.
Well, okay, what yacht owners’ employees have to go through. The ones who oversee the dingy in the 15th storage hold. But still. I get it. There’s a lot of stuff beyond just the boat that you have to account for. Some more than others.
One thing I don’t have to do (that yacht owners do) is register the boat/yacht. That noise you heard last week was a team cheer that went up in our company chat room when our colleague, Kelly, discovered that Lexis Nexis is now featuring Watercraft as a searchable field.
LexisNexis says:
[t]he Watercraft file contains Boat Registrations and Titles for 38 states (25 updating and 13 historical (including US Coast Guard Merchant Vessels)).
Updating coverage includes 25 states:
AK, AL, AR, AZ, CT, FL, GA, IA, KS, KY, ME, MA, MI, MS, MO, NE, NM, ND, OH, OR, TX, VA, WA, WI, and WY.
Historical coverage includes 13 states + U.S. Coast Guard Merchant Vessels:
CO, IL, MD, MN, MT, NV, NH, NY, NC, SC, TN, UT, WV, and US Coast Guard Merchant Vessels.”
So that’s exciting, eh? Even more exciting is that the records include (among other things) the owner’s name and mailing address; hull number; description (year, make, model and length); registration number, issue date, expiration date and status; title number; title status, title issue date and title type; and vessel make, use, year, type and length.
Most of those fields are searchable as well as some additional ones, like company name.
I know! Awesome, right?
But wait, there’s more
For due diligence research, you can search the US Coast Guard Maritime Information Exchange database to learn if there has been any contact between the Coast Guard and the vessel you’re researching – and what the nature of that contact was. It’s not a detailed report by any means, but I did learn that in 2015 a 38-foot pleasure craft called the ‘Monkey Business’ ran afoul of the Coast Guard in Washington, DC for being a pollution source. (That’s what dump stations are for, mateys).
Interested to learn more about a particular Super Yacht? Check out the database at SuperYachts. You can search by name of the craft or just browse through the entire database. In addition to the general specifications of the yacht, including the designer, builder, and dimensions, there are usually photos of the ship, information about the number of crew on board, and the name of the owner (if known).
What It Really Costs
Owning a superyacht takes a lot more than the couple of hundred bucks I plowed into peripherals for my kayak. I found these articles about the affiliated costs of yacht ownership to be a useful guide to understand that asset in context.
Lightening Round – useful boat-related sites
These five resources (and many more) can be found on the HBG Research Links pages, accessible through the free-with-registration portal on our website.
What other resources do you find useful when researching yacht owners? Share them here in the comments for everyone to use.
Not long ago, a client confided to me that she was worried that her major gifts team was missing information about their top prospects. She fretted about a recent instance where information had come to light – six months too late – about a dear donor/volunteer that had sold their company to another for a significant amount of money.
Which, from a fundraising standpoint, we all know isn’t great. You’d rather know about these things in real time, or at the very least within the month.
What was worse was that the client felt like they’d missed the opportunity to celebrate with the donor. Selling their company was an event that the donor had mentioned with delight and anticipation – a new chapter was opening in their life. My client felt like the fundraising team had unwittingly blown it. Congratulating the donor half a year later felt lame and tainted with opportunism, which wasn’t the message they wanted to give. [Read more…]
Following the close of UC Berkeley’s last capital campaign in 2013, the campus recognized that the fundraising community needed a better way to understand the interests of current and potential donors if they were going to meet the goals of their next campaign.
The University Development and Alumni Relations team was also given a new priority to identify prospects interested in multidisciplinary institutes, such as the Berkeley Food Institute and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
So in 2014, Mallory Lass and Abbey Myszka of UC Berkeley’s Prospect Development team led a working group (which included multiple advancement operations partners) to examine and overhaul their interest coding. They had no idea it would be a project they would still be shepherding nearly five years later!
After hearing their presentation at the Apra conference, I was so interested in their project that I asked Mallory and Abbey to tell us more about it in a blog post so you could hear about it, too. I’m delighted that they said yes! ~Helen
You may have attended our 2016 APRA presentation Got Interest? Improving the Utilization of Donor Interest Codes and are thinking to yourself, “But I thought they finished that project…?!” You would be correct – and it’s also a project that found new legs.
When we first undertook a complete overhaul of our interest coding, the project entailed creating a new data table that was hierarchical in structure (this allows us to capture parent/child/grandchild level data which we can use broadly or narrowly), reviewing data integrity on the nearly 30K existing codes, and creating new processes and a new culture around the way we thought about and documented interest codes.
The focus of this project was our constituents’ outside philanthropic interests, but after talking to other EllucianAdvance users and other institutions such as University of Chicago that were also undertaking their own interest code projects, we realized the value of exploring internal philanthropic interests as well. This would lead us to code interests down to program level specificity. A whole new phase was born!
Since then we have taken ownership of prospect related interests and see this as an ongoing data stewardship and data acquisition project that may never see its “end.” That is both daunting and exhilarating.
The bulk of our efforts over the last five years have been focused on building and maintaining two distinct interest code areas: one to reflect outside philanthropic interests and one for internal interests. Sometimes those overlap, too.
For example, a donor to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art would get an outside philanthropic interest code for Art and Museums, but, depending on other circumstances, might also be coded for an internal interest in the Berkeley Art Museum.
In conjunction with our development and database management teams, we steward the creation of new codes (interesting new additions include cryptocurrency, cannabis, and astrophysics) which makes our data reactive to changing needs, to new research and, in a lot of cases, anticipatory.
For example, we created a code for an interest in cannabis in January of 2017 and in January of 2019, UCB announced a New Cannabis Research Center to explore environmental and social impacts of legalization.
This forward-looking focus helps us to pose questions, think about, and define the structure we have been working to implement over the last year. One question we worked on was “How do we best incorporate outside data sources into our prospect-interests ecosystem?” We discovered that this involves determining the integrity of the outside data source, assessing the value-add to our internal database, and deciding whether the data should be mapped to outside or internal philanthropic interests.
External data: The Federal Election Commission
We started with Federal Election Commission (FEC) data because it was easy for our analytics team to capture and studies show that people who contribute to political campaigns are more likely to also contribute to charitable causes.
FEC data includes individual giving to political action committees, and the subject matter of those PACs is what was mapped to our interest code area. Based on political giving data identified and matched by the Prospect Development analytics team, we have been able to add over 166K interest codes on 72,920 entity records.
Internal data: past giving
Our crowdfunding team is another great source of data we can use to map a data set to our internal philanthropic interests. For example, donors who gave to a Cal Band initiative to purchase new lockers would be coded for an interest in Cal Band. We are also assessing how we can leverage eGiving and donor survey comments.
What the future holds
After attending a CARA presentation where James Sinclair from the University of Southern California explained mapping foundation funding priorities directly to campus programmatic needs, we have begun thinking about the feasibility of using foundation data for interest codes as well. The potential to leverage outside data sources for this project is almost limitless – this project might never end!
If you would like to talk to Abbey and Mallory in more detail about this project feel free to contact them by email at amyszka {at} Berkeley dot edu or mlass {at} Berkeley dot edu. If you’re working on your own interest-coding project, tell us about it!
Over the past week I’ve added more new links than I can count to our HBG Prospect Research Links pages. At the moment there are 5 regional pages, covering (mainly free) resources for the Americas, Europe and the United Kingdom, the Middle East, Asia Pacific, and the Baltics (which is a little slim, but we decided to make it public anyway. If you have any resources you’d like to share, don’t be shy).
We’ve also built a page for due diligence and data protection/GDPR resources. Also in the works is a resource page for off-shore sources of information. [Read more…]
Read the footnotes! It’s not new advice, but it is important and bears repeating. When evaluating the stock holdings of an individual, it is so important to read the footnotes in a proxy statement underneath the beneficial ownership section.
I know, it’s tempting to just take the number in the “total amount of beneficial ownership” column (let’s call it the ABO column), price the stock, and call it a day. But sometimes there is important information in the footnotes that will value that person’s stake very differently. [Read more…]
“Untitled” Image (c) 2018 by Bill Gotfredson. Used with permission.
Back in the 80s (and then again briefly in the 90s) there was a tv show hosted by a guy named Robin Leach called “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Leach took you into celebrity homes, yachts, and resort destinations to provide a glimpse into how The Other Half lived. It was a prospect researcher’s dream show. [Read more…]
If you’ve been reading the Intelligent Edge blog for a while, you may have heard the HBG Book Club has been on a roll! We’ve recently read The Givers by David Callahan, Capital Without Borders by Brooke Harrington, and Secrecy World by Jake Bernstein. At their core, each of these books is about the inherent relationship between wealth and power, the structures UHNWIs use to conceal wealth, and the ability of these structures to quietly shape the world we all live in. [Read more…]