prospect research Archives - Helen Brown Group

April 11, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

How to stand out in your next job search

“Red Leaves” Photo (c) Julie Kahn

Over the years I’ve been part of countless job searches. In fact, my first day at my first development job I helped the office manager conduct a search for a new major gifts officer at my alma mater, a state university.

Because it was a state job there were lots of legal hoops to keep track of, and I’ve always been grateful for that excruciatingly-detailed foundational experience. Since then I’ve helped numerous clients find great candidates and, more recently, had to engage in multiple searches myself as my company has grown.

I wanted to share some of the most important things I’ve learned as someone who has looked at lots of resumes and interviewed lots of candidates. There are definitely things you can do – and things you should avoid – to help you stand out in any job search.

Read the fine print

Especially in prospect research, showing that you pay attention to details is incredibly important, and it’ll be noticed if you don’t. For example, read the job description all the way to the end. If the instructions say to address correspondence to a certain person, or that applications without cover letters won’t be considered, overlooking those details will probably cause your resume to go further down – or completely off – the consideration pile.

Make sure you meet the minimum qualifications

If the job description says that applicants must have 5 years of experience and you only have 1.5, you’re probably going to waste your time (and potentially frustrate the hiring team). Also, your 15 years of experience in a related field may seem relevant to you, but you’ll need to make a strong case in your cover letter if you want to be considered.

In addition to a scrupulously-edited resume, there are two important documents you should never omit in a job search.

The first is the cover letter. It’s the first impression people will get about you, so it needs to be spectacular from the first sentence. The problem is that every hiring manager is looking for something slightly different, so it’s hard to hit the mark all the time. Here are the things that are important to me:

There are no typos or awkward sentences. It’s well-written, showing off your writing skills.
You sound confident and enthusiastic, not cocky or over-familiar.
You show that you have worked to learn something about this particular job and/or the organization you’re applying to.
You make a case for how your experience can bring a benefit to the organization. (I’ve actually seen letters where candidates have written how taking the job could benefit their own future job trajectory and nothing about what they bring to the nonprofit!).
It’s three paragraphs; four max. Longer than that and it makes me wonder about your ability to synthesize information for end-users.
You avoid clichés and overused jargon. I like to see original thought.

The second is the thank you note. There is no way I can overestimate the importance of this. After your interview, whether you decide you want the job or not, send a thank you note. Opinion is divided on whether you should email it or handwrite it and snail-mail it – but either way send a thank you note.

Sending a thank you note isn’t just common courtesy. It sends a message that you want that particular job, and it gives you a distinct edge over your fellow candidates who didn’t bother.

Take a deep breath, introverts, and get out there and meet people

Are you trying to break into prospect research? Don’t just join Apra and/or one of its chapters. Attend as many seminars, conferences, and networking events as you can afford in order to learn skills and to meet people.

When you meet someone at a conference, follow up with them by asking to meet them for lunch, or in their office, or for a cup of coffee for an informational interview. Make sure you come prepared with questions and pay for that cup of coffee!

When people get to know you and see that you are serious about the profession, they might be willing to go to bat for you with colleagues at other nonprofits that are hiring. In fundraising, the adage is “Ask for money and get advice; ask for advice and get money.” The same follows for job searching – ask for advice, and you may just get a job.

What tips do you have for other job seekers? Share them in the comments!

April 4, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Six Tips to Make Your Next Wealth Screening a Success

David Hargadon is a go-to expert on our team, especially where wealth screenings are concerned. This week I asked David to share some of his best tips and tricks for getting the most out of your wealth screening investment. Thanks, David! ~Helen

Wealth screenings can be daunting undertakings, and I can definitely say that I’ve done my fair share of them. Over the past several years, I’ve conducted dozens of wealth screenings, screening hundreds of thousands of prospects, so hopefully some of these tips and tricks I’ve learned can help make your next wealth screening a success for your organization.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Many of the potential hiccups that arise through wealth screening processes can be avoided by making sure your data is clean prior to sending files off for processing. Before a wealth screening is one of the best times to clean up addresses, employment information, spouse information and more. Consider doing a data append to make sure your data is as current as possible. Having this information up to date and current can help reduce false positives in your results, making the verification process run much more smoothly.

Picking the Best Product

You should also examine the best products for the type of screening you will conduct. With numerous options and varying price points, making sure you are using the wealth screening platform that fits best with your needs is very important. Some questions you should ask yourself while determining the best product to use are:

Do we have time to manually verify all screening results?
What is our budget for this wealth screening?
Do we need a product that directly integrates with our CRM?
How does the product quantify inclination?
Do we want RFM analysis included in the results?

Answering these questions before choosing a product can help make sure you purchase the right platform for your organization.

Define Your Screening Parameters Well

Doing a good job defining the group you will be wealth screening is another point that can save you time and money down the road. The more focused your wealth screening group, the easier it will be to validate and the more cost-effective your screening will be.

Consider both the constituents you want to wealth screen as well as those you don’t. Excluding constituents who have current ratings, active major gift officer relationships, or that have limited giving history can make your wealth screening more focused and more budget-friendly. Also, make sure you exclude prospects with international addresses if your wealth screening product doesn’t offer data for them!

Utilize Custom Attributes

Most wealth screening platforms allow you to input custom attributes in addition to the default screening template. These attributes can be used to segment your wealth screening file or to prospect for specific purposes within your chosen platform.

Some attributes worth considering for use and contingent on the type of organization you work with: Academic major, region, solicitor assignment, patient service lines, or whatever makes the most sense for your organization!

Build Repeatable Processes

If the wealth screening you’re conducting will be an ongoing or regular process like a new parent screening at an independent school, grateful patients at a hospital, or reunion screenings at a college, make sure you’re building out processes that are easily repeatable in the future.

Building out queries, exports, and reports that don’t require you to reinvent the wheel every time you need to conduct a wealth screening can be a huge time saver down the road! And don’t forget to document your processes to make it easy for another person to pick up and/or help out.

Use your Wealth Screening Platform Efficiently

Most wealth screening platforms offer inclination scoring in addition to capacity information. Using these tools, you can expedite the validation process by targeting those prospects that return both high inclination and capacity ratings.

Conversely, prospects with high inclination but low capacity, or any combination of the above, can be targeted for different purposes like direct mail or annual fund solicitation.

Wealth screening can sometimes be overwhelming, but hopefully, some of these tips will help you effectively navigate your next one!

February 28, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

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 Leave a Comment

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 7, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Are We in a New Golden Era of CSR?

This week my colleague Angie Stapleton kicks off February with a focus on companies and corporate giving. How does your nonprofit position itself with corporate donors? Do you have a written annual strategy with staff dedicated to company fundraising, or are companies a constituency you have yet to focus on? In this article, Angie sets the stage for us to think about companies and their impact on philanthropy – and our nonprofits – today. ~Helen

The national conversation on ultra-high net worth individuals (UHNWIs) and their role in philanthropy is beginning to shift. As we’ve discussed on this blog, a wave of critiques on traditional philanthropy – including Anand Giridharadas’s Winner Take All or Rob Reich’s Just Giving – have begun to impact public debate about effective philanthropy and the greater good.

While most of these discussions have centered on UHNWIs and individual giving, it has also cast renewed interest on the role corporations play in our society and their giving – also known as their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). [Read more…]

January 17, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

How due diligence research can save your assets

“Safety Net” Photo by Andrew Scudder

You know, ethics in our nonprofit work (and – let’s face it – in everyone’s work) is a really important thing. We all know that.

We all know ignoring the rules to accept a timeshare to help out a donor might put something on the books, but that something will be a liability sooner rather than later.

Accepting a transformational gift from a donor whose affiliations and financial background you haven’t researched could just end up causing you a world of trouble.

How many stories have you read recently where nonprofits have had to deal with taking a name off a wall or deal with a lawsuit or public relations nightmare because of the tainted nature of a donor who gave a gift? [Read more…]

January 10, 2019 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Prospect research can be stewardship’s best friend

Photo by Md. Tareq Aziz Touhid [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

Last week, my colleague Angie Herrington shared a personal stewardship horror story. Bad stewardship is a theme that’s all-too familiar in fundraising, as our industry’s frightening donor attrition numbers witness.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Adrian Sargeant’s eye-opening research (coupled with good old common sense) shows that even the tiniest bit of effort to keep an existing donor has exponential benefits, especially compared to the financial drain of trying to acquire the donor in the first place. It just straight-up saves time and money being, well, good at being good to people who are good to you. [Read more…]

December 27, 2018 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

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…]

December 20, 2018 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

A few of our favorite things

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…]

October 18, 2018 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

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.