Helen Brown Group

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A hole in the water

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.

  • The folks at BoatInfoWorld have compiled a database of over 400,000 vessels, sortable, downloadable, and ranked by county, if you like. King County, WA wins the prize for most boats registered, in case you were wondering. It’s $20/month to access detailed information and use advanced search strategies, but if you search for boats a lot it might be worth it.
  • If you want to race a yacht, you have to register for the race. Check out Yachtscoring.com, where you can select a race, see which yachts are racing in it (“Current Entry List”), the name of each boat’s owner(s), home yacht club/home port, size of the yacht, and more.

What other resources do you find useful when researching yacht owners? Share them here in the comments for everyone to use.

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Alert and Prepared

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…]

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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 more…]

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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. [Read more…]

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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.

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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!

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Are We in a New Golden Era of CSR?

“Albert Above All” (c) 2018 Julie Kahn

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…]

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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…]

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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…]

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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…]

ABOUT HBG

The Helen Brown Group was formed in 2002 with a goal to be different.

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