prospect development Archives - Helen Brown Group

January 21, 2021 By Helen Brown

Opportunity of a lifetime

As I watched the Inauguration ceremonies over the past couple of days and saw those heartbreaking and beautiful flags on the Mall, it made me think about where we are now and how unbelievably changed we are from just a year ago.

If you had known a year ago what you know now, what would you have done differently? What have you found to be more important than you expected? What did you think was important then that you’ve now easily discarded? What do you wish you’d taken advantage of sooner?

One easy thing for me is that I would have made my ‘temporary’ home office a lot more comfortable sooner. I finally did that over the holiday break, but I wish that I’d done it back in July when it settled in my bones that this pandemic really wouldn’t be over as soon as we’d all hoped. Looking back, in some ways it felt like much of last year was just suspended time.

On the other hand, when I was craving lost community last spring I reached out to some folks that I’d always wanted to talk with but hadn’t had time (or hadn’t made time) to reach out to before. Some lovely new personal/professional friendships have bloomed, and it’s been a source of joy in this time of disconnected connection.

Did you do that, too? Did you make new connections over this past year, or re-forge old ties that had gotten frayed?

What about professionally? What did you do that challenged you to learn something more? Did you jump into the deep end and do something scary like take on a role you weren’t totally sure you were qualified for? Or speak at a virtual conference? Or survive being furloughed? Or…what?

What did you do this past year that your January 2020 self would be astonished to know about you? What did you learn about your priorities?

Here at HBG we launched a new Data Insight unit that I’d been inching toward for probably five years. In July, I just said “GO.” No more waiting. No more wondering “are we ready yet?” And now, every Friday my smile is goofy and wide with pride listening in on the DI team strategizing about new screening and analytics projects they’re working on, sharing data sources they found that week, or discussing how they want to visualize key discoveries for a client. It’s keeping me learning, too, and pushing myself and my team to pursue opportunities for services that will offer unique value (more on that this summer!).

Mid-summer, I couldn’t seem to resolve to the reality of fixing up my home office, but we launched a whole new business unit. I guess I discovered my priorities.

This year I’ve been impressed by leaders like Jay Frost and Jason Briggs who prioritized education and community and brought real innovation to our sector. Both of them jumped into the void with great speaker series and new, innovative forms of conferences to keep us connecting and learning. I’m honored to be speaking at the PyroTalks Fundraising Intelligence Conference next month on due diligence, and I hope you will join me.

And the Apra chapters! Wow. The pandemic has shown their resiliency and super-creative thinking to bring great programming that expands their reach and attracts membership beyond their geographical borders. My own chapter, NEDRA, runs research boot camps that will be available to newbies from Alabama and Albania to Nebraska, New England, and Zimbabwe, and they’re offering 11 full scholarships to their annual conference in May, including a brand-new one to support an initiative to bring more diversity, equity, and inclusion to prospect development.

Although the vaccine is slowly rolling out now, we’re probably going to be in the same physical situations for at least another eight or nine months, and possibly another year. Where do you want to be then?

Now is a really great time to break out of time suspension, take stock of where you are, and think about where you want to be personally and professionally this time next year. What do you need (or need to know) to take that next step? What certification or Coursera class or connection with a mentor will help pave the way? This is the opportunity of a lifetime to do that.

August 6, 2020 By Helen Brown

Credit where credit is appreciated

On occasion, a prospective client will ask “How much money has your company helped your clients raise?”

That’s a tricky question, because the truly honest answer is, “I don’t know.”

Some clients hire us simply to provide profiles and we don’t usually hear what happens after the fact.

If we’re working with clients on a dedicated basis – meaning that one of our team works with them side-by-side over a period of months or years – it’s a lot easier. We can trace the donations of the people we’ve identified for them and come up with a figure. Or, as happens more frequently, the fundraiser we’re working with calls to celebrate the donation – and that’s like the sun beaming through after a full week of rain. Pure joy.

We also do prospecting projects, of course, by hand and through our Data Insight team. But again, we rarely hear the long-term results of those projects 18-24 months down the road (the usual time from identification through cultivation to gift).

We would love to hear, of course, but as is the way of things, our clients are focused forward, not back.

And also, (going back to the original question), when you work in prospect development you’re entirely at the mercy of the action and skill of the fundraiser, dean, executive director, volunteer, etc., to convert that prospect to a donor. You could identify the Gates Foundation for a world-class malaria and TB charity with a connection to a program manager, but if the fundraiser doesn’t act on the prospect, that research work had zero impact.

Of course, prospect development often does have a huge impact, and there are lots of ways we can measure it, including…

Number of new prospects identified
Number of prospects identified who went on to make a gift (and why? what did they have in common?)
Estimated capacity of newly-identified prospects
Number of reports completed
Number of prospects rated and assigned

…and more. But those ways are presented in statistics, produced at our desk, provided monthly or annually in a report. Not the most super-exciting reading for the recipient, nor is the report something that generally causes the reader to call the research manager to exclaim their praises. But, you know, those stats can be kind of a big deal.

What we need, especially now, are examples of ways to communicate and celebrate the impact of prospect development.

Many times staffers will hear exciting news about a big gift in office kitchens or hallways before the monthly announcement at the all-staff or major gifts meeting. But with a pandemic going on and all of us working remotely, those moments of shared joy aren’t happening. We’re cut off from colleagues, physically isolated, and working in a vacuum. It’s hard for those moments of celebration to happen. Which means it’s even harder for staff to stay motivated and feel part of the big picture.

So especially now, when those gifts happen, how can leaders share them? How can fundraisers help prospect development folks feel valued? How can PD managers keep their teams motivated? We need to find every way we can. And honestly, the endorphins that flow with sharing that kind of joy is good for all of us, sharer and recipient alike.

How does your team creatively share celebrations now? How do you as a manager make sure that your team stays inspired – and credited – for their part in making those moments of success happen?

July 30, 2020 By Helen Brown

Silver linings

So here we are, week nine hundred and twenty-whatever, working from home, wearing a mask when we’re out, socially distancing, all that good stuff. We’re w-a-a-y past the novelty and deep into the “Seriously I cannot binge-watch yet another series” portion of this Pandemic-a-thon. And that’s if we’re lucky.

[PSA: Now is the time when it’s really easy to break down and do something that honestly doesn’t seem like it would be that risky but three months ago would have freaked you out. Don’t. You’ve made it this far and we’re all counting on you to keep being a strong link in this virtual chain. Also you’re awesome and cherished].

But, yeah, this is still 17 kinds of awful. I’ve been trying to keep a gratitude list to stay positive, and I wanted to share with you some positive things I noted that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for this pandemic.

For one thing, no one is saying “It’s impossible for prospect development folks to work from home!” anymore. There is an element of “be careful what you wish for” here, but if you’re one of the millions who’ve discovered that working from home really is a wish come true, well, there’s good thing #1 to come out of this.

Another good thing happened a couple of weeks ago. My university held a virtual stewardship event for donors to the student COVID emergency relief fund, and one of the speakers said “of course, we’d ideally be all together now so we could thank you in person.” Since my university is across an ocean, the likelihood of my being there in person would be approximately nil, but because the event had to be virtual, there I was, one happy square among many on several pages in a Zoom room. How many great opportunities will nonprofits be able to take advantage of to engage with distanced constituents (who want to be more engaged) because we’re separated?

And speaking of the benefits of virtual gatherings, here’s another good thing: All of the free and low-cost webinars this spring were great, right? Especially in the beginning when we were trying to figure out how permanent or temporary this was all going to be. But if you’re like me, right about now you’re longing to be part of a real discussion again with other prospect development folks. Conversation. Back and forth, not just being talked at.

We’re not alone. Coffee talks are springing up everywhere. Last week Apra-MN had a great coffee hour conversation featuring Janna Lee and Mark DeFilippis on the topic of the legality of using FEC data in prospect research. Lori Lawson (who helped write the guidelines on this for APRA) was able to chime in from her home in Florida. Bonus!

Next month Apra-MN will host another interactive kaffeeklatsch on the topic of New York real estate, and they’re also doing evening happy hours just for conversation. Apra-Carolinas and Apra-PA are also hosting social gatherings…maybe your chapter is doing something, too? If not, volunteer to lead one yourself! It’s great that distance doesn’t have to be a factor – we can share a beverage and talk to peers everywhere! (oh, and hey: chapter membership chairs? Members don’t need to be in your geographic area anymore! Just saying.)

What other good things are happening because of this very bad thing that you can think of?

May 16, 2019 By Helen Brown

Portfolio spring cleaning

Photo by Arbitrarily0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Not that you would know it from the weather in Boston, but it’s spring out there. I washed my windows last weekend and wow, what a difference! I’m really looking forward to seeing the sun shine through them when it eventually makes an appearance.

My next task is to get rid of this huge cd rack that has been sitting in the corner of my living room since cds were a thing. There must be at least 750 cds on this rack, which is just one part of the problem.

There are too many of them
We haven’t played any of them in years (some of them never)
Since computers don’t have cd drives in them anymore, I have nothing to convert them with
We have a sentimental attachment to them
Someday they may be worth a lot of money (but seriously, probably not)
They’re taking up room we could be using for a desperately-needed additional seat

As I was standing there staring at it last evening, it occurred to me that our cd rack is a metaphor for many under-performing major donor prospect portfolios.

Most portfolios have too many prospects in them
We haven’t connected with some of those prospects in years (or ever)
We don’t have enough time or fundraisers to help convert many of those prospects into donors
We have a sentimental attachment to these prospects
Someday they may give us a large gift (but seriously, probably not)
Prospects that are never going to give (or won’t give anytime soon) are taking up the place for new prospects with higher capacity, interest, and likelihood to give.

So what to do? Well, it’s time for some spring cleaning, isn’t it?

I’m no Marie Kondo, but I do like to keep things simple if I’m going to get some tidying accomplished. When trimming portfolios, I put prospects into three categories: A, B, and C.

A – the keepers. They’re definitely or probably going to give in the next year-to-18 months.
B – prospects for reassessment. If you don’t have a prospect management director, ask your research team or your research consultant to give you a candid, unsentimental, strategic assessment. You probably don’t need heavy-duty research. The goal should be a simple “Keep in portfolio, they’re an A” or “Move elsewhere, they’re a C.”
C – these are the ones to remove. The folks who may be lovely to have lunch with but who will never make a major gift. Move them out of your portfolio to your colleagues in stewardship, annual fund, gift planning, or whatever other department/section that makes the most sense (if your organization is large enough to have them).

But whether your development shop is large or just you, it doesn’t matter – prospects that will never donate at a major gift level should be moved out of your major gift portfolio.

The goal should be to get rid of every prospect that isn’t going to move forward in the 0-24 months. I know – it’s really hard. You’ve become attached to people you’ve formed good relationships with, but when you do this you’ve moved them to a better place for them, for your nonprofit, and for your performance goals.

Once you’re finished you’ll have room for all of those new prospects that your research team or research consultant have found for you that they’ve been excited to move into your portfolio.

Which is great, right?

Say, now that we’ve cleaned out your portfolios, can I get some help schlepping these cds to donate to the library?

March 28, 2019 By Helen Brown

So you say you want a revolution, well, here goes….

Our month-long #ResearchPride focus on prospect management closes today with advice from one of the mountaintop gurus on the topic, Lisa Howley. It would be impossible to overstate Lisa’s expertise and generosity in sharing her knowledge over the years, and I’m delighted that she agreed to close out the month for us here on the Intelligent Edge to talk about creating a roadmap for solid prospect management success. ~Helen

We all want to change the world. Or at least our prospect management (PM) systems. It’s a common refrain by prospect management practitioners and gift officers alike. Walk down the hallway in any development office and you may hear someone scream in frustration ‘the system is broken!’

It can be daunting to be tasked with fixing a broken prospect management system. Sure, staff have been sharing their woes, and you have been compiling issues. But where to start? [Read more…]

February 28, 2019 By Helen Brown

Growing your corporate fundraising through better data tracking

Last week’s article about improving our use of interest codes to more effectively identify, engage, and steward donors got me wondering about doing the same sort of thing for companies that support our nonprofits. I asked Amanda Jarman, (aka the “Fundraising Nerd”) to share her perspective on the topic this week. Companies are made up of people, of course, and Amanda uses the term “biographic data” to help us consider tracking the many interconnections between companies, the people within companies our nonprofits are connected to, and our nonprofits themselves. Thanks, Amanda! ~Helen

Paying attention to the “biographic” data you track about companies can help you step up your corporate fundraising game. This is data that lives in the biographic section of your database, along with names, addresses, communication preferences, and the like – but instead of being related to an individual, it’s related to a company.

There’s a variety of information you might track about companies, including:

Contact people
Other important employees (such as alumni or volunteers, for example)
Matching gift information
Size/annual revenue range
Sector and/or SIC code
Subsidiaries
Funding priorities – company (philanthropy and sponsorship)
Funding priorities – company foundation

Just like with any data management process, your data coding needs start with your business needs. Depending on the type of corporate giving you are pursuing and the complexity of your fundraising program, you may need to only track some of this information, or you may want to collect all of it.

Here are some other types of data you may want to consider collecting as well:

Corporate Sponsorship Programs

Sponsorship is one of the most common types of corporate giving. If you have an active corporate sponsorship program, you’ll definitely want to keep track of the names and contact information of your primary contact(s) for sponsorship requests and stewardship.

Matching Gift Programs

Many companies match their employees’ giving to your organization. If you have an active matching gift program, you may choose to store information about a company’s matching conditions. This helps to project matching gift revenue and also helps you inform your donors about their employer’s matching program. You may choose to track an employer’s match rate (1:1, 1:2, etc.), match dollar limit, and any funding limitations related to your organization (e.g. some corporations do not fund athletics programs). In addition to tracking information about the employer’s matching program, be sure to link constituents like alumni, volunteers, members, and friends to employer records.

Corporate Major Giving Program

If your organization raises major gifts from corporate donors, consider tracking annual revenue range to help you prioritize among corporate prospects. You may also track likelihood to give and funding priorities (i.e. which of your programs the corporation prefers to give to).

This is similar to the kind of information you might track about individual major gift prospects to prioritize and focus your asks on the best philanthropic match between your organization and your prospective donors.

Corporate Partnership Program

Some organizations partner with companies beyond giving, e.g. hosting employees as volunteers, co-hosting other types of events, and/or developing programmatic partnerships like sponsored research. If your organization has a strong corporate partnership program, then linking individual constituents to their employer’s record is essential. This way, you can see the companies – and people – with which you already have a firm connection. These companies are great fits for employee volunteer or giving days.

Complex Organization with Multiple Funding Priorities

If your organization is complex and/or has multiple funding priorities, you may need to track information to help you align corporate donors with your program areas. Consider tracking business sector, either using your own categories or SIC or NAICS code, which are used to categorize businesses by industry.

This is particularly important in the prospecting stage. As you begin to develop relationships with corporate funders, you will start to uncover the company’s funding interests which may or may not be related to your organization’s overall sector, but to one or more of your programs or research strengths.

Corporations with Multiple Locations

Many corporations have multiple locations, multiple philanthropic interests, and even multiple corporate foundations and giving programs. For example, one corporation may have several subsidiaries and branch locations, with matching gift programs, sponsored research, and corporate foundations or giving programs related to each one. To get a full picture of the corporation’s giving and relationship with your organization, it is helpful to link subsidiary and branch records to a corporate headquarters record.

Getting started

To get started with tracking corporate biographical data, first determine which of these data points will support and enhance your fundraising priorities. Next, assess your database: how can this data be stored? Do you need to customize your system?

Finally, determine how you will collect this information and keep it updated. You may choose to purchase SIC/NAICS code and/or matching gift program data from a vendor. You can also decide to survey your constituents about their employment, and/or purchase employer information about your constituents. Some information-gathering may have to be done the old-fashioned way, with a researcher, intern, or student hand-entering the information.

No matter which way you decide to do, enhancing your company “biographic” information is a great way to strengthen your organization’s capacity for fundraising success.

For more donor data management tips and tools, Amanda Jarman can be found at www.fundraisingnerd.com.

February 21, 2019 By Helen Brown

Still Interested? Expanding the Use of Donor Interest Codes

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!

February 14, 2019 By Helen Brown

A lot to love

There’s a lot to love about fundraising intelligence (aka prospect development), which, for those of you who are new to the term, is comprised of prospect research, prospect management, due diligence, and fundraising data science.

In research, each profile we build is a love letter, of sorts, to the donor prospect we’re writing about. We gather the information carefully. Ethically. Lawfully.

We are curious and diligent. We pull every loose thread. [Read more…]

November 8, 2018 By Helen Brown

Winners Take All

The HBG Book Club met for the first time yesterday to discuss our latest book, Winners Take All; the elite charade of changing the world by Anand Giridharadas. So far, it’s been a pretty wild ride, and we’re only up through chapter two.

In discussing how the ultra-high net worth individuals view the world and the ways they’ve decided to change it for the better (via philanthropy, their business, or social enterprises), Giridharadas says,

There are many ways to make sense of all this elite concern and predation.

One is that the elites are doing the best they can. The world is what it is; the system is what it is; the forces of the age are bigger than anyone can resist; the most fortunate are helping. This view may allow that this helpfulness is just a drop in the bucket, but it is something.

The slightly more critical view is that this elite-led change is well-meaning but inadequate. It treats symptoms, not root causes; it does not change the fundamentals of what ails us. According to this view, elites are shirking the duty of more meaningful reform.

But there is still another, darker way of judging what goes on when elites put themselves in the vanguard of social change: that it not only fails to make things better, but also serves to keep things as they are.”

[Read more…]

October 18, 2018 By Helen Brown

I’ll Tell You What’s Going On with Us: The Big Opportunity for Prospect Development

Last month I posted an article called “What’s Going On with Us?” that caught the attention of my friends on the Apra board. I’d been trying to answer what I thought was a simple question – how many prospect development professionals are there in the US? – and found myself (as usual) in a research rabbit hole. Statistics sometimes tell you more – and less – than you want to know, and what I found started making me a little nervous. Is the number of prospect development professionals actually diminishing?

Fortunately, my friend Mark Egge called and we started riffing on the topic. Together we realized that what was going on was pure potential for our profession. In this guest post, Mark has encapsulated a lot of what we talked about – and a lot more. It was published earlier this week on the Apra website. It’s republished here, with permission. ~Helen

A few weeks ago, former Apra board member and 2017 Apra Distinguished Service Award recipient Helen Brown published a blog post pondering what’s going on with membership in the association.

Specifically, why hasn’t the number of Apra members increased significantly in the past ten years? Especially while there are clear indications that more nonprofits exist (nonprofit organizations registered with the IRS in the United States have increased in number) and that there are more fundraisers employed by these organizations (e.g., membership numbers in the Association of Fundraising Professionals are up).

Now, I don’t necessarily think a response from Apra is warranted every time anyone writes or says anything about the association, but in this case it presents a nice opportunity to talk about some of the important work the board is currently undertaking.