Research Pride Archives - Helen Brown Group

February 29, 2024 By Helen Brown

Happy Tenth Research Pride!

Tomorrow is a Very Big Day. It’s the 10^th anniversary of my cry into the void that, to my surprise and delight bounced away in concentric circles to others in the Apra community and chapter members everywhere and then echoed back to me just as strongly in return. Wow. It was really amazing. And still is, every year.

I wrote the article back then because I had just come back from a meeting of Apra chapter leaders and I was equal parts fired up and dispirited. Our profession has always had so very much to be proud of, and it felt to me like our light was hiding under a basket of our own weaving.

We needed then, as we continue to need now, to consistently consider all of the internal, external, one-off and persistent reasons why the work we do is important. And we need to use our skills of communication to share our impact with the wider fundraising community.

Advocacy will never not be important for us, especially as technology continues to edge into the margins of our core work.

Yeah, I’m talking about you, AI. Artificial Intelligence is the Wonder Child right now, out there to ease the burden for everyone, specifically for our frontline colleagues to help write communications to donors that have been machine-picked, also by AI. I’m not here to trash that at all – seriously (read on). But we’re already seeing the lure of push-button donor profiles as the end-goal and I can tell you now the discussion about that is not going to be pretty. There is a place for reliable AI, and we need to understand this tool.

We need to be educated – in own minds, in our nonprofits, and as a profession what the benefits, opportunities, and limitations are of this technology that is increasingly available to the fundraising sector. We need to pay attention to what each product can do (really – not just the hype) and how it differs from (or enhances, or replaces) what we professionals offer. And we need to set up rules around their usage within our departments and across our nonprofits.

I’d like to offer up a huge shout out to Apra Metro DC for their excellent recent conversation with Beth Kanter on “Responsible AI Adoption: Balancing Innovation with Integrity in Fundraising.” This is a session that’s definitely worth watching. Beth had great insights and examples on how AI is being used in our industry and shared specific tools for us to use when evaluating how and when to use AI and the responsibilities we need to keep in mind when we do.

Safe infrastructure around new tech is important, and so is taking a step back to consider its practical usefulness.

For example, my friend Mark Schaefer has written a series of bestselling books about marketing. In a recent blog post, Mark said that he thought he might try to write some of his next book using “all the AI tools available” to him. After several tries with limited success, here’s what he realized:

[T]the bottom line is this: AI works by searching everything that has happened in the past to come up with an “average” answer to serve your query best. Creating a new work from the “best average answer based on what happened in the past” is a lousy premise for a book…

To me, a book must contain insights and stories and quirky ideas that come from the unique perspective of the writer. ChatGPT failed miserably when it came to unique insights needed to create something unique and bold.”

It’s the exact. same. thing. with us and our work. It’s hard to get people to read all 8 pages of a full profile now. Can you imagine the dullness of endlessly iterative work with no donor story and no insight? Creating a new work from the “best average answer” might actually enhance our work (if it’s reliable). It would definitely save us time as long as the algorithm doesn’t randomly hallucinate, make up stuff, or create word salads that we have to fix. My favorite Kanter quote from the Apra Metro DC session is going to keep me grounded for a while I think: “AI is hot sauce, not ketchup. You might not want to use it in everything, right?”

But AI could be a big help amassing information. And taking masses of information to create unique (and maybe even bold) insights is our profession’s secret sauce.

Truly strategic prospect development work has to have that added insight, or there’s no reason for us to be here.

Our knowledge of the prospect or group we’re providing information about, blended with our unique understanding of the mission of our nonprofit and its current and future goals is the value we bring to help convert information into action.

It’s not just AI, though: it’s important for us to understand where any new technology or product or legislation or privacy law can enhance or impact our work. That’s always been kind of a fun (and kind of an expected) extension of our jobs – the learning part.

Converting on learning

If you’ve spent more than 5 minutes with me professionally, you’ll know that continuing professional education has always been a mantra for me.

Just like ten years ago, we still need to grab onto the unbelievably deliriously wonderful panoply of professional educational opportunities that are available to us. If you’re on the education committee of your Apra chapter or Apra International, please know that you are an absolute hero to me. If you have spoken at a conference or done a webinar, or written for your chapter newsletter or Connections, or done a Career Fair, or led a Boot Camp for newbies, I need sunglasses to look at you because you shine so brightly in my eyes.

These people are doing all this for you, so you need to show up for them

If you’re still in the need-to-learn years, go to a conference. If they say there’s no money, advocate for yourself about how important continuing education is. If you still meet with resistance to attend, then apply for a scholarship to get there. Having served on numerous scholarship committees, I’m always dishearteningly surprised by how many repeated calls we have to put out to get people to apply. You should seriously apply.

Lots of things remain the same in frontline positions, but change comes at us fast in our profession. We have to keep up.

And if your days of foundational learning are in the rear-view mirror and you can afford to lift up your colleagues, please consider volunteering and/or donating to your regional or (inter)national association’s scholarship fund to pay it forward in honor of all of those (other?) volunteers who helped you.

As you learn new tools and techniques, absorb it like a sponge and reflect that education back in the work that you do to springboard your nonprofit’s fundraising ability beyond what was possible without you and without all that education.

Advocating for ourselves

We’re better than we were ten years ago at advocating for the value of our work, but that doesn’t mean that we’re 100% there. It’s wonderful to have their support, but there is no vendor partner and no frontline colleague who can advocate for the value and impact of prospect development practices and practitioners like we can.

Individually and at the chapter and international professional association level, it falls to us on a daily basis to serve as examples of what great prospect development work is; to track and report on our specific impact within our nonprofits; and speak up collectively to build on our visibility and shine a spotlight on our distinct value in our sector.

If you do that, and look around at the next conference you attend, you just can’t help but be proud.

So a decade after the first #ResearchPride month, let me say that I am still so proud of our profession, the work that we do, and the unique and wonderful collegiality of our community.

Our work actually makes a difference in this world. Seriously.

Isn’t that worth shouting about?

Happy Research Pride month, y’all. Let’s keep shouting it out together.

March 14, 2019 By Helen Brown

Prospect Management – Starting From Scratch

This week I’m delighted to share with you an article written by prospect management expert, Janna Holm. I was introduced to Janna at an Apra conference by Lisa Howley (more from Lisa later this month!), and Janna’s enthusiasm for our field and, specifically, her delight at building strong and dynamic prospect management systems simply won me over. I’m so pleased that Janna agreed to lay out the foundations for us in today’s blog post so you’ll get to meet her, too, if you haven’t already. ~Helen

Research Pride Month is such a special time to me—our friends and colleagues around the world come together to celebrate accomplishments and where our industry is headed. Our field has undergone some incredible transitions over the years. In my last job, I went digging for office supplies and stumbled upon a filing cabinet in an old storage closet, only to find it full of index cards holding tidbits of information and asset data on our alumni. This was their “research system” through the 1980s.

I’ve used databases built in the 1990s where cell phone and email fields were hidden away under “miscellaneous info” as they weren’t common enough to have a home yet. Now, in 2019, our conferences are full of discussions about machine learning and artificial intelligence. It’s amazing to think about how far we’ve come.

One of the biggest transitions over the years has been to incorporate prospect management into shops that historically focused on prospect research. I’ve seen and worked at organizations where prospect management was fully established and ingrained in the culture, and others where prospect management was still nascent or didn’t exist. But over the years, this has grown to become a vital part of a major gift shop. So how does it begin?

When to Begin:

Any organization with multiple staff involved in fundraising should start thinking about a prospect management system. An airport with only one flight per day may not need an air traffic controller, but the more planes you add, the more vital coordination becomes. The same is true for prospect management—when more staff and donors are involved, it becomes increasingly important to have a prospect management system in place.

To build out a strong prospect management system, you need to think not only about your constituent relationship management database (CRM), but also the policy around how you work and the procedures that delineate who does what and how that work is done.

Incorporating Prospect Management in your CRM:

Going back to our air traffic controller example, they need to know which planes are taking off and landing, at what times, and in which direction. They need to know their runways, and wind speeds, and who’s ready versus who’s running behind schedule. In order to ensure prospect management is coordinated, it helps to know some data as well.

No matter which CRM you’re using, there should be some ability to begin tracking prospect management or moves management. Most prospect management systems begin by tracking the following elements:

Who oversees the relationship with this prospect?

This could be labeled as a Gift Officer, Relationship Manager, or any number of titles, but it’s helpful to note which person is in charge of the relationship and responsible for coordinating outreach to the prospect.

Where is this prospect in their relationship to our organization?

Different organizations use different stages (see the 4-, 5-, 6-, or 7-stages of a gift solicitation), but you’ll want to know who is at each step of whichever cycle you choose.

What have we asked this prospect for previously, and how did it go?

You may refer to these as Asks, Solicitations, Opportunities, Proposals or myriad other names, but this would be a place to track what size gift you solicited, what program or project it would fund, when you asked for it, and what the outcome was.

What have we done with this prospect?

Tracking your actions or contacts with a prospect ensures you’re capturing their history. Did they attend an event? Did you send them a holiday card? What did you talk about in your last face-to-face visit? Some organizations will track every single “touch” that happens with a prospect, while others focus on more “substantive” actions that move the prospect along through the stages of their relationship to the organization.

As your organization grows in size and complexity, you may want to begin to track other things like additional staff involvement (secondary relationship managers, volunteers, leadership involvement), details about the prospect’s capacity and affinity, the short- and long-term strategy for a prospect, your metrics for fundraising staff, or more in-depth information about proposals or activities.

Creating a Prospect Management Policy:

Once you have those ideas for what you want to track, there are still some vital things to consider. Your system needs to have a policy behind it and procedures in place so your colleagues know how to use it.

Your policy document should cover questions that may arise as your colleagues adopt this new system. Those will look different based on your organization, and you can find some good examples online. It may include topics like:

How do prospects get assigned to a staffer?
When should prospects be added or removed from a portfolio?
How are staff expected to share information about a prospect?
What information are they expected to track in the CRM?
Who enters that data?
What happens if there’s a conflict about assignment, solicitation, etc.?
What information can and cannot get entered into the record (due to HIPAA, GDPR, FERPA, or ethical concerns)?
What happens when a staffer leaves your organization?

An aspect that should be incorporated into every prospect management system is a glossary to specify what each data element means—what counts as a “visit”? How are you defining “qualification”? It’s hard to stay coordinated if you don’t speak the same language, so make sure colleagues agree on how terms or data fields are defined at your organization.

Up and Running

Once a prospect management system has been crafted and implemented, it will still go through tweaks. Maybe a policy needs to change, or you’re adding some planned giving staff and need to think about their assignments differently, or you realize you need to add a new stage. Building a strong system that colleagues understand and use, and regularly adapting it are key elements of moving prospect management forward.

Our industry is dynamic and we’re progressing faster every year. Our systems should be built to track our history, but also to allow for evolution, so that in 10, 20, or 30 years, we can see a prospect’s journey from stage to stage and gift to gift (and so in 10, 20, or 30 years, we have a data set to use for all that machine learning!).

So, as we near the halfway point of Research Pride Month, I hope you all take a look at your prospect management system. If you’ve had one for years, does it need any edits or changes? If you’re just getting started, what can you do this month to move it forward a bit? Celebrate what you’ve done, and where our industry has been. Let’s keep adapting, growing, and improving!

Janna Holm is Director of Prospect Development at The Trust for Public Land. Currently a board member of Apra Minnesota and a longtime volunteer and speaker for Apra International, Janna is past president of Apra Maryland. She tweets great stuff here.

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…]

March 1, 2018 By Helen Brown

Olympic-Sized Appreciation: #ResearchPride

The past two weeks, there’s been a whole lot of Olympics-watching in my household. You too? I don’t know what it is about curling, I don’t even care who’s throwing the stones, I will watch it. (and GO Team USA-men on your gold medal!).

The same goes for ice dancing (did you see those smokin’-hot Canadians?? Wow!) and figure skating. I honestly can’t tell the difference between a lutz, a toe loop, and a Salchow, but the fact that they nail the landing 9/10s of the time is just astonishing.

It was while watching the fortnight highlight farewell review by the NBC Olympic Ice commentators – Scott Hamilton, Liam McHugh and Tanith White – that one of them said in closing how grateful they were to their off-camera research team for helping them be as informed and prepared as they were. That they couldn’t have done their job without them. [Read more…]

December 29, 2016 By Helen Brown

The most popular articles of 2016 from The Intelligent Edge

I’m going to get to the top posts of 2016 in just a second, but as we bid goodbye to 2016 – a rollercoaster year if ever there was one – we at The Helen Brown Group wanted to take a moment to say thank you.

To our clients, thank you for making 2016 our best year yet. Your missions – and your personal dedication to them – inspire us to do our best work for you. Our appreciation also goes out to the kind folks who point others in our direction – grateful thanks for your referrals.

To our 1,200+ Intelligent Edge subscribers and to the readers who drop by, thanks for signing up, for reading, and for your comments, both on and offline. Two years ago, our mailing list comprised 65 hearty souls! We couldn’t be prouder of the way our readership has grown or thank our wonderful guest bloggers enough. Thank you.

We also really appreciate our vendor partners, who make the great tools we use and who share our commitment to using quality information to make the world a better place.

And to our colleagues in the prospect development community – thank you so much for your support and for the part you play in building and growing this wonderful profession.

And now, to our top five… [Read more…]

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