The Intelligent Edge - Helen Brown Group

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…]

May 25, 2017 By Helen Brown 4 Comments

That work book

You honestly do want to read it. You spent the money on it. It’s just sitting on your desk or your shelf.

Very innocently. But making you feel guilty.

That work-book you bought.

I’ve got a few books like that on my office shelf. Some that I’ve started and abandoned after an interested afternoon, and others that I haven’t even cracked open yet. (but I will! I swear!)

But now, a solution.

Last week, some of my HBG colleagues and I – independent of each other – watched a vidcast of David Callahan and Emmett Carson in a fascinating, spirited, and sometimes provocative debate sponsored by Philanthropy New York. Callahan is the founder and editor of Inside Philanthropy, and author of the new book The Givers; Wealth, Power, and Philanthropy in a New Gilded Age. Carson is president of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, the largest community foundation in the world, with $8 billion+ in assets. [Read more…]

May 18, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

How much is a good prospect researcher worth?

About $750,000 by my estimate.

You may think that’s an outrageous amount (and it is) but I’m saying it anyway. Let me explain why.

First of all, many professionals in the world have one main job. They repair things in a human body or in an automobile. They speak in front of cameras and explain what a company means to do, or what a politician did do. They deliver mail, or babies. They build houses or computer programs. [Read more…]

May 11, 2017 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Wealth events – a primer

“J. L. Thompson & Sons Ltd, shipbuilders” from Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums

Wealth events are the most significant financial occasions that can happen to a person in their life. They’re pretty interesting for prospect development pros, too, because they allow us to sharpen our pencils and get down to the math, create beautiful family trees, or follow really interesting stories in the press.

Most of the time, we won’t be able to find out the whole story. Sometimes, we’ll only be able to report that an event has happened in our prospective donor’s life, but without much more detail than that. Occasionally, the wealth event news we’re discovering won’t be positive, such as a bankruptcy. In rare golden moments, we’ll have a news report or transaction filing that shares everything we want to know.

So what are wealth events, anyway? [Read more…]

May 4, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Valuing Real Estate in the US West

Last week at the (sold out!) NEDRA conference, this week’s guest author Heather Willis spoke with her HBG colleague, Kelly Labrecque, on finding real estate values in the US west and east. “Country Mouse/City Mouse” was a big hit, and I asked Heather to share tidbits from her portion of the presentation with us today. (If you’d like to see the slides from their presentation, let us know!) And now, here’s Heather:

It’s that time of year again in the West; the snow is melting, tulips are flowering, calves are being born, and the birds are singing. It also means the year- end real estate market analyses, the new agriculture statistics reports, and the top ten landowners, have been published. Exciting right!?

Ok, you might not have the desire or the time to read through all of these reports when researching a prospect who owns a farm or ranch, so I will point out a few changes from last year and try to give you some insights into an extremely diverse and difficult group of prospects to research. [Read more…]

April 27, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

The Third Sector and the Fourth Estate

Photo by Kai Mörk, freely licensed under CC BY 3.0 (Germany).

As a researcher, one of the things that has been most interesting to me over the recent few months is that I’ve noticed an increase in the number of articles relying on investigative journalism. Many larger newspapers have some sort of investigative unit, like the Boston Globe’s deservedly celebrated Spotlight Team.

But it’s been historically unusual to see skimcoat newspapers – that are more commonly slipped under hotel bedroom doors for business travelers – begin to do deep investigative research projects. It’s another reminder that that the information geeks of the world – we researchers – are the most important players speaking truth to power. [Read more…]

April 21, 2017 By Helen Brown 2 Comments

Giving Collaboratives – a podcast

Have you been following the emergence and exponential growth of giving collaboratives? Giving collaboratives can be individuals, foundations, NGOs, and others that join forces (and their finances) around a particular cause or toward a shared goal.

Angie Stapleton

Elizabeth Roma

This is an emerging phenomenon in philanthropy that caught the attention of two HBG team members, Elizabeth Roma and Angie Stapleton, who deeply researched and presented on the topic at the 2017 Apra Regional Conference (ARC). Part of their presentation included an 18-page companion guide to Giving Collaboratives, now available in the Learning Media Library here on our website.

I sat down with Elizabeth and Angie yesterday to ask them to tell me more about Giving Collaboratives and the resource they compiled, and recorded our conversation in this podcast so that you can hear as well:

Whatever it is that you are looking to fund…there is a group of people out there who are looking to fund it” – Elizabeth Roma

Elizabeth and Angie will also lead an Apra Best Practice Webcast on the topic called “Collective Giving: Philanthropy as a Team Sport” on Monday May 15th at 1:00 PM ET. If you can’t make that day and time, look for the recording on the Apra website under Apra University.

For further reading:

One of the resources Elizabeth and Angie mention in the podcast is The Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers and their report More Giving Together.

April 13, 2017 By Helen Brown 1 Comment

Doing Your Due Diligence

By Silke Remmery (Newspaper) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

If you’re a major donor to a nonprofit organization in the UK or Europe, chances are good that someone has done background research on you to make sure you’re not an arms dealer or drug kingpin.

This is called due diligence research and it’s essential to protecting the reputation of the nonprofit. What the organization is doing is ensuring that there are no legal reasons why the gift may be contested or clawed back later. Or worse.

A nonprofit’s reputation is obviously important – if an organization becomes allied with …a despot, say, it risks years of damage and decreased support of every kind. They become that scarlet-lettered nonprofit that everyone remembers for being the de facto money-launderer for the drug ring. Not too many volunteer and trustee types (or donors)(or talented employees) want to be affiliated with that kind of organization.

Most organizations in the UK and Europe have a policy to do due diligence research at a relatively modest level (at least by major donor giving progam standards). The amount under consideration can be as low as £1,000 or €1,000.

Of course, we do due diligence research on this side of the Atlantic, too, but we are more likely to back into it. By that I mean that we’re not usually specifically looking for negative information to see if we want to be allied with a donor from the get-go. Many times the person or company or foundation has already been a donor at a certain level for many years, but now is interested in making a very large or transformational gift of some sort.

Sometimes the news just falls in our lap in the course of our usual prospect research. Like the time I discovered…well, never mind. Suffice it to say it was a yikes-bullet-dodged moment and the organization I worked for decided to let that relationship gently fade away into the night.

But let’s say you do need to do reputational research on a prospective donor. Where are the best places for you to go?

Some organizations decide to hire an outside firm that specializes in due diligence research. It can be expensive, but of course the avoidance of reputational damage is frequently worth the money.

Others ask their prospect research department (or HBG) to take a first crack at it to see if any immediate red flags appear. They can then decide how to move forward if worrisome details start to emerge, by either running the request up the flag to a due diligence firm or by deciding not to ask for the donation to begin with.

If you want to tackle the due diligence research yourself, here is a list of a few of our team’s favorite sources:

Better Business Bureau
Business press (Crain’s, American City Business Journals,)
Datocapital – a database of 12.5 million directors of privately-held companies in 8 European countries
ICIJ offshore database
Lexis Nexis – there’s a specific area in LNDP just for this.
Newspapers.com
Opensecrets.org – Donor database, nonprofit database
Secretary of State’s business lookup database in the state a company is registered (MA provided here as an example)
Social media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. (we use Mention.com to monitor these)

You’ll find tons more resources on our HBG Research Links page. What are some of your favorite sources for due diligence research?

April 6, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

The New Gilded Age

The number of gifts of $10 million-plus at universities are at an all-time high, according to a Marts & Lundy study. Beyond lending just their names or faces to events, an increasing number of celebrities are putting in volunteer time and money for the causes they care about. And new forms of giving vehicles like LLCs are emerging to meet donors’ needs for flexibility. Articles about philanthropy are increasingly in the main stream news, describing how giving is changing our society – in fractal patterns. This week I’m delighted to welcome HBG Assistant Research Director Elizabeth Roma to the blog to help share her thoughts and expertise on our new Gilded Age.

Elizabeth Roma

When I started college in the mid-1990s, I had no idea what I wanted to study, but I knew that I liked to read and think. After taking a variety of core liberal arts classes during my freshman year, I concluded that majoring in English would allow me to spend four years doing just that, and I loved (almost) every minute of it.

I still like to read and think (and I bet you do too if you’re reading this blog), and it turns out that I managed to stumble into a job that allows me to do just that—and even get paid for it! (Side note for those soon-to-be liberal arts graduates—and their parents, siblings, grandparents, spouses, etc.: maybe prospect development is the career for you!) [Read more…]

March 30, 2017 By Helen Brown Leave a Comment

Research Pride and Beyond!

As we bid a fond farewell to another terrific #ResearchPride month, I encourage you (if you haven’t already) to take a look at all of the great blogs, signs, and other activities that happened during this month of celebration, see here and here for the wrap up.

If you were one of those people who contributed a post, a sign, or a cake (!) I want you to know that you are awesome, and it’s not just me saying that. Your colleagues all think you are awesome, too. Thank you so much!

Of course, it doesn’t end here. We celebrate our pride all year; this is just our special festive season.

But now, I’d like to ask you to consider doing more than blogging, tweeting, liking and sharing.

Consider this your gentle but firm nudge to become a more active part of your community. Your Apra chapter could really use your help. From volunteering two hours at a conference, to speaking on a panel, to serving on a chapter task force or board…your ideas, your hands, your voice, and your skills are a precious gift and are truly needed. [Read more…]