You need to spring clean your brain – really air it out and get new, fresh ideas in. At least, I know I do. This time of year, I start itching to get out and meet people and learn lots of new things. It’s always worth it when I make the effort.
3 Ways to Build a Great “Gold Guide”
Prospect researchers tend to grab great information sources with the zeal of kids let loose onto the lawn of the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll.
And for good reason: well-curated information sources are really interesting and offer valuable time-savings. Especially because (for most of us, anyway) the pile of pending research requests is always a foot high.
Why wealth screenings are a waste of money
“Yes, we did a wealth screening a couple of years ago. We didn’t really find it very helpful.” <pause>
“Well, to be honest, we didn’t really do anything with the information when it came back. It just kind of sat there.”
If I had a twenty for every time someone said that to me I’d be making major gifts already.
It absolutely kills me, too, because wealth screenings
a) are not cheap, and
b) can be worth every single penny.
What your capital campaign plan is missing
There’s a critical piece of information missing from most capital campaign feasibility studies:
The amount of money an organization’s constituency can actually give.
We need the answer to that before we can set the goal, right?
And yet… most of the time nonprofit organizations launch their campaigns without knowing the full answer to that question. They wait until after they’ve launched to finally get all the pieces in place. Which seems kind of crazy to me.
What do you say?
Counter to what you’ve probably been thinking, I do have more to do than simply wax philosophic about what it means to be a provider of fundraising intelligence. I do sometimes go on a bit when I get passionate about a topic, and I realize that my last few blog posts have been heavy on the forty thousand feet and light on, well, the feet.
Coming out
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of other places around the globe, there are more than 5,000 of us.
People who, at one time or other in our professional lives have faced bias and, at times, even open revulsion from the public or the very people we serve. Most of the time we face well-intentioned misunderstanding without even knowing it.
Actionable information
Imagine with me that it’s Saturday afternoon. You are flat out busy today, and tonight you have exactly two hours to prep and cook dinner for guests. One of the guests is a good friend, but the other two you don’t really know all that well. They are friends-of-friends in town for the weekend.
Is this the night that you’re going to pull out the 25-ingredient recipe for a gourmet French dinner? Julia’s cassoulet, perhaps?
Six Benchmarking Questions to Enhance Your Shop
This week I’m in England talking with our colleagues at The Factary in Bristol. Their offices are open-plan and I’m impressed at how collaborative they are, with each other and with their clients. I met with nearly everyone on the team to learn more about the kinds of projects they’re working on, what they each do to meet their clients’ needs and how they work together as a team. It’s really interesting to see the ways we’re the same and the ways we do things differently.
Funding overhead
Back before I started my career in prospect research in 1987 at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was the assistant to the director of finance for the development office at the university. My responsibility was to help my boss Jean track all of the money the university received; she had to make sure it went into the right bucket and was distributed correctly.
Why Most Prospect Research Profiles Are Dead On Arrival
Imagine that it’s 10 am on a Thursday morning and you have just discovered a new seven-figure prospect for your organization.
This prospect is an active volunteer and a recent donor.
She’s expressed a firm endorsement of your organization’s mission in the press, and she has undisputedly significant wealth.
You’re going to run down the corridor and tell everyone, right?
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