By: Jayme Klein, Senior Consultant

No matter which industry you prospect for, all nonprofits are feeling affected these days. Leadership and fundraising offices at national and international organizations alike are worried, rightly so, and trying to make contingency plans to make sure the important work they are doing continues to be funded to maximize their impact.

What can prospect development do in the face of massive cuts to the nonprofit sector? How can we help our colleagues and communities amidst so much uncertainty? It feels daunting and impossible, but there are steps that we can take in our everyday roles to help sustain the causes that we work for and care about.

Look for the helpers: The National Council of Nonprofits has taken on the herculean task of filing lawsuits against these cuts, advocating for nonprofits, and providing excellent resources on risk assessment, workforce development, budgets, and other issues. Though outside of the prospect development sphere, their work affects all of us who hold nonprofits dear.

The Council on Foundations recently released a public statement fighting back against potential infringements on free speech and cuts to nonprofits. They encouraged all charitable organizations to sign on to the statement, which is searchable. While not all of them are increasing their grant output, they are still allies.

Think creatively: As researchers, we’re all trying to find the donors who will help push our causes forward. When all of us are revisiting our budgets and thinking twice about our spending, how can we identify donors who are able to give right now? Are you struggling to populate your fundraisers’ prospect pools? Keeping your database clean is a good place to start. Are addresses up to date? Can you identify phone and email information? Do you have constituents’ birth date information for planned giving solicitations? This post has a lot of helpful tips for cleaning your database.

On the other hand, are you overwhelmed by the sheer number of donors in your database? One of my clients here at HBG runs a regular report of anyone who donates above a certain threshold. This automatically populated prospect list makes it easy for me to assign a preliminary rating and bring them to fundraisers’ attention. Another useful tool through their CRM is assigning constituents to “campaigns,” which groups them easily for reporting. If I’ve found a donor is a high rated prospect, they get added to that campaign, which creates a great prospecting/research list.

How is your employment data? Are any of your donors employed by (or a retiree of) major corporations? Are they taking advantage of a gift match? This search tool is an amazing resource to cross-check your database against. Most donors don’t know that their employers match their gifts, which leaves money sitting on the table. Prospecting off of matching gift-eligible prospects could be a boon for fundraisers. Another resource is Double the Donation. Although they offer paid services, their resources page offers a helpful list of top matching gift companies if you need a quick guide.

The same goes for donor advised funds. In a recent Freewill webinar, co-chief executive officer Patrick Schmitt made an excellent point about identifying DAF holders in your database. Whatever these donors have invested in their funds is already allocated towards charitable giving and cannot be used for any other purpose. Have you identified those donors in your database? Here at the Helen Brown Group, we’ve spent the past few years populating DAFinitive® for this very purpose.

Gather your resources: Professional development and extra resources might be hard to come by right now. A great way to stretch that budget is to look for free offerings in the nonprofit sector right now. Lots of generous companies and people are providing networking opportunities, resources, workshops and webinars that could spark the next good idea. If your organization uses Kindsight, they have a new training video hub on a number of topics, including prospecting, modeling and other ways that you can use their product. If you’re a Blackbaud user, some of the trainings are available at no additional cost.

Take a breath: These are unprecedented times for our field, and for the world at large. Remember that what you do matters, and that the smallest actions in your research can yield large results! All of us are working to protect the causes that we care about right now in any way that we know how. As Helen said for Research Pride/Prospect Development Month, “We make a significant impact on a nonprofit’s fiscal success by keeping the focus on the best potential sources of funding. That description “best” may change from moment to moment, and it’s our job to figure out (or participate in the process of knowing) what “best” means at any time.”