Listen up, all you new-to-prospect-development folks (and anyone who has a brand-new researcher on staff)!
Great prospect development training sessions are coming up SOON (like, next week and next month!) and you really can’t afford to miss them. Why? [Read more…]
At some point in every new researcher’s life, they will get to experience the double-edged sword that is Researcher’s Guilt.
It’s that moment when you realize that you have spent (1) way too much time to (2) find a piece of information that you firmly believe must be out there – hiding. Behind some paywall. And now your report is sitting there. Unfinished.
It’s Prospect Research FOMO. Fear of Missing infO*.
It’s frustrating, disheartening, and maddening to have wasted time and feel that, at the end of the day, you just couldn’t make the Boolean logic deliver.
Especially when everything is online, right?
(Well, it’s really not, but that’s a different blog post). [Read more…]
For the past two years, I’ve gotten more and more excited as March approaches. Here in New England, March is not a month that you tend to look forward to, weather-wise. There are no bank holiday weekends. And it’s a loooong month. But if you’re in prospect development, March is now a very special month.
Because March is prospect development pride month, and boy do we have a lot to be proud of. We are a professional community of really smart people who get the opportunity to make the world a better place every day we go to work. Who are actively motivated to learn something new every day. And who are generous in sharing tips, methods, and resources with each other. [Read more…]
I know you know this, but you are awesome.
As we say au revoir to another #ResearchPride month, I wanted to let you know that I (and all of the other #ResearchPride bloggers**) deeply appreciate that you have read, supported, and enthusiastically shared this month’s posts through social media and word of mouth. It’s a big deal to us, and we thank you. [Read more…]
Today is a very special day indeed.
Not only is it the first day of Prospect Development Pride Month 2016, but I’ve got a special treat for you.
What’s #ResearchPride? Well, it’s a movement started two years ago on this very blog with my article, Coming Out. It was the result of a meeting of chapter leaders at APRA headquarters where we discussed the importance of advocating for our profession, and discussed strategy for ways to do that.
For me, the discussion became a personal call to action. Last year’s post, Coming Out (Again) continued the theme. I was re-energized by a TED Talk and NEDRA conference keynote by charity defender Dan Pallotta, who champions the importance of the work done by those of us considered “overhead.” [Read more…]
If you’ve been following our company blog for the past month or so, you know that we’ve been focusing on data analytics and what a powerful tool it can be to benefit fundraising. But maybe, like others I’ve been talking with recently, you feel that you’re not yet ready because your data isn’t pristine, or you don’t have enough data, or you just have too much else to do.
If you’re one of those folks who is feeling a little overwhelmed, I put together this brief video just for you. Really, all you need to get started in analytics are these 16 little fields. [Read more…]
There’s been a sea change in prospect research, and it was front and center at our international industry conference last week. The 27th annual APRA conference, held in steamy Las Vegas, was called “Prospect Development 2014; new approaches, new connections.” The Twitter hashtag was #APRApd2014 (have a look – good stuff there). As always, it was a great conference with lots of meaty takeaways.
Nonetheless, I kept shaking my head every time I saw the conference name or used the hashtag. I’m just having a hard time with “prospect development.” Not the profession – the name. Prospect development is relatively new as a descriptor for what we professionals formerly known as “prospect researchers” do. [Read more…]
When I was a kid, we went to the Bloomsburg Fair every year, rain or shine. The Fair has been a magical place for generations of kids (no matter their age) and a place of hope as well. It’s been held in late September since 1855, and hundreds of thousands of people come every year for miles around, making it the biggest fair in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
It’s an agricultural/exhibit fair, and my mom tells me that during the Great Depression, many folks relied (some fairly desperately) on winning cash prizes for things they grew, bottled, jarred, knitted, sewed and showed at the Fair. Slightly more recently, the Bloomsburg Fair was the place where Taylor Swift made her concert debut. So I suppose it’s always been a place where dreams (and money) are made.
Every year as we [Read more…]