The Intelligent Edge - Helen Brown Group

August 10, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Innovation: Measuring fundraiser portfolio strength

This week I’m very excited to share with you a podcast I recorded earlier this week with Mark Dumich and Ling Sun of the University of Notre Dame. Their department is doing innovative work to help strengthen and create parity amongst their fundraisers’ portfolios.

In our podcast, Mark and Ling shared with me the questions they were trying to answer, their step by step actions, and some unexpected (but welcome!) outcomes. Mark explains their plan:

The Portfolio Strengths Model was developed at the University of Notre Dame to better understand both the strength of a prospect and the quality of a portfolio. As fundraisers expressed concern about the giving potential of their prospects, we decided to score various attributes of those individuals to get a better assessment of their value. It moved the conversation away from how a development officer feels, and back to objective data points that we can all agree on.

It’s very easy to evaluate a fundraiser on the number of dollars he or she brings in to the organization, and it’s important, too. Unfortunately, that metric has some significant shortcomings when you consider that not all portfolios have the same potential. So how can we more accurately measure a fundraiser’s performance? When we viewed production relative to the strength of a portfolio, it highlighted a lot of incredible work that had been achieved at all levels of philanthropy within our organization.”

We’re especially fortunate that, not only did they speak with me for 30 minutes, they also generously provided a step-by-step worksheet of their project, so you can do it, too!

The podcast is below, and the worksheet is in our free member area. Warm thanks to Mark and Ling for sharing this with us!

August 3, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Another day, another hundred million dollars…

This week on The Intelligent Edge, HBG senior researcher Rachel Dakarian provides a window into the ongoing discussion that members of the HBG Book Club have had recently over our first shared book. I think in the beginning we thought that we’d all read this useful book, share our thoughts weekly, and then go back to our work. What’s actually happened has been a lively, ongoing, daily chat-room discussion as we toss articles to each other with comments of “hey, read this! It’s just what we were talking about yesterday!” punctuating our times between book club meetings. Rachel expands on our latest discussion beautifully in this week’s article. We’re interested to hear your thoughts as well! ~Helen

“Carnegie 1903” Drawing by Louis Dalrymple

As you may have noticed, ours is the era of the mega-gift. This trend of non-stop blockbuster giving has left many reeling or salivating – not to say that the two are mutually exclusive, nor will this trend be ending any time soon. Wealth and philanthropy are often perceived to fit hand in glove, but we prospect researchers know firsthand how difficult it can be to verify wealth and encourage charitable giving. [Read more…]

July 27, 2017 By Helen Brown 6 Comments

FOMO Cheat Sheet

Photo by Land Rover MENA (New Range Rover Sport joined the Jumbo Jet-Set) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on Prospect Research FOMO – that researcher’s Fear-of-Missing-infO guilt that forces you to keep looking for a piece of information when you know all hope is lost – but you just can’t stop. It’s a particularly gripping affliction for new-to-research-ers, but it never really goes away. [Read more…]

July 20, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Great prospect research training – now!

Listen up, all you new-to-prospect-development folks (and anyone who has a brand-new researcher on staff)!

Great prospect development training sessions are coming up SOON (like, next week and next month!) and you really can’t afford to miss them. Why? [Read more…]

July 13, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Pivot Tables – step by step

At the most recent NEDRA conference, Meghan Hakanson and Amy Begg of Harvard University delivered a session to a packed room on how they created pivot tables to sort through mountains of data to identify reunion prospects. What had session participants clamoring for more was the nitty-gritty details of how Meghan and Amy actually did it. So I asked them to share their project with us – step by step – so that we can all try it, too!

Huge thanks to both of them for their generous willingness to share, and to Meghan especially for writing this article.

Have you ever found yourself sorting through mountains of prospects and thought, “There must be a better way to do this!” and at the same time, “but I don’t have a lot of time!”? We found ourselves saying and thinking the same things to each other as we embarked on a new project for our Reunion and Annual Campaigns team here at Harvard. [Read more…]

July 6, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

No Budget For Paid Research Resources? This is for you!

This week we welcome HBG Senior Researcher Heather Hoke to share her knowledge on the blog. Every year, nearly a third of attendees at our professional association conference are brand new to our field. The Apra conference in July is one of the best places for new researchers to find in-depth training and unparalleled opportunities to network, test-drive critical resources, and learn from experienced colleagues. If you don’t have the budget this year but still need information to get you started, Heather’s article will help launch you with lots of advice and resources.

I have been a development researcher for more than 15 years and have had the opportunity to meet many new researchers starting out in our profession who need to learn the basics. It’s an exciting time for them, but our field can be a bit overwhelming.

I have met folks just starting out in a non-profit or educational institution with no prior experience or training on how to do prospect research to advance fundraising. And sometimes, to make things more difficult, there may be no researcher on staff to guide them. [Read more…]

June 29, 2017 By Helen Brown 3 Comments

Fear Of Missing infO

At some point in every new researcher’s life, they will get to experience the double-edged sword that is Researcher’s Guilt.

It’s that moment when you realize that you have spent (1) way too much time to (2) find a piece of information that you firmly believe must be out there – hiding. Behind some paywall. And now your report is sitting there. Unfinished.

It’s Prospect Research FOMO. Fear of Missing infO*.

It’s frustrating, disheartening, and maddening to have wasted time and feel that, at the end of the day, you just couldn’t make the Boolean logic deliver.

Especially when everything is online, right?

(Well, it’s really not, but that’s a different blog post). [Read more…]

June 15, 2017 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Gorilla Philanthropy

Art by Lieven Van Melckebeke

As I mentioned here on the blog a couple of weeks ago, a growing number of us on the HBG team are reading David Callahan’s latest book, The Givers; Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age, and we meet weekly to talk about the latest chapter we’ve read.

Our discussions start with the book but we usually veer into the news of the day, pulling in observations from relevant and related articles from the New York Times, the Stanford Social Innovation Review, HistPhil, and more. [Read more…]

June 8, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

501(c)(what?)

Harbor seal at Magdalen fjord by AWeith (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

You’ve probably heard of 501(c)(3)s or (4)s because you work or volunteer for one. But did you know that there are actually almost 30 different types of entities under the 501(c) section of the Internal Revenue Code? And there are 501(d)s, (e)s, (f)s and (k)s, as well as 521(a)s, too. There are a lot more nonprofit types than I ever dreamed of when I started this rabbit hole project. [Read more…]

June 1, 2017 By Helen Brown 4 Comments

Unstructured and very valuable

This week we welcome my colleague, Tara McMullen, to the blog-stage to talk about a type of data that’s particularly tough to wrangle, but totally worth the effort. Here’s Tara on the rewards to be found in digging through unstructured data (and some great places to find it).

Image by Tomas Castelazo, www.tomascastelazo.com / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46457765

In my work, I find myself constantly perusing social pages, local and regional news publications, and text-heavy lists and articles about wealthy and powerful people to try to pull out valuable “soft” information from these sources of unstructured data.

The information found in these sources is often invaluable in providing insight into a prospect’s relationships and connections, non-profit and civic affiliations, family members, neighbors, community groups, hobbies and activities (like golf or boating), and – of particular interest to those of us in the prospect development field – potential philanthropic interests. [Read more…]