Helen Brown Group

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A missed opportunity – and how to avoid it

“Ruby Red Horse Chestnut Trees – Backlit blossoms” Photo by Rod Raglin

A few years ago in the late spring I went to a botanic garden and saw a tree in bloom that just knocked my socks off. I love gardens, but I’ve never before just stood staring at a tree for a good five minutes. I knew that if I ever had the opportunity to plant a tree in my garden, that was going to be the one I picked.

Four years later, here I am, looking up the tree on the web, planning the purchase.

Turns out this particular tree, Aesculus carnea or red chestnut, has a few different varieties, including ‘Fort McNair,’ ‘Briotii,’ and ‘O’Neil’s Red.’ I wanted the exact same one, so I contacted the botanic garden to find out which cultivar I’d fallen in love with.

Fell in love

I actually wrote those words in my email to the contact-us email address for the gardening staff: “There is a tree in your garden I fell in love with…”

Now if that’s not a potential donor begging to be asked for a donation, I don’t know what is.

I did get a response – and it was exactly 9 words:

Aesculus × carnea ‘Briottii’

red horse chestnut hybrid

[Responders Name]

As a future tree owner, I was thrilled. As a fundraising professional, totally crestfallen.

“I’m so happy to hear that our Briotii delighted you!” they could have written. “In case you’re ever interested, we have an adopt-a-tree program and you could take care of our Briotti as well as yours!”

I mean, wow. What a missed opportunity.

And honestly, this isn’t a rare case. I think that we in fundraising are all so busy doing what we’re doing that we don’t take the time to think about the other stakeholders within our organizations who could help us.

As fundraising professionals – especially in small nonprofits – we need to do a better job of raising awareness so that everyone on our team recognizes a potential donor engagement situation when it bops them on the nose.

We prospect researchers have maintained for decades that we’re fundraisers, too, even if we’re not usually interacting directly with donors, and I’m pretty sure that any one of us would be prepared to represent if an opportunity came our way.

But there are loads of people in various roles across a nonprofit that interact daily with the general public, with members, volunteers, visitors, students, alumni, grandparents, etc. They all support the fundraising effort, perhaps without even being aware of it.

Every one of those people could benefit from a brown bag lunch from the front-line professionals on recognizing funding opportunities when they fall in their lap. Just as we prospect research pros provide brown bag lunches to educate the front-line teams on what we do, every fundraising shop should do a dog and pony on how to be a great adjunct fundraising team member.

I’m not talking about training staffers to be fundraisers, just noticers with license to help.

I get it, you can’t train someone to care about the sustainability of the nonprofit they work for if they aren’t personally invested. But for those who are invested, raising awareness of how they can help could make a big difference.

And who knows, maybe one of them will contact the fundraising office and say “Hey, I just got an email from a woman with a question about our red chestnut tree. I get the feeling she might be interested in our Adopt-a-Tree program. I’m not sure if she’s already a donor. How should I respond to her?”

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Quantifying Crowdfunding: Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress

A few weeks ago, I received a request from a blog reader:

“I would be interested in an article on the topic of social media fundraising and prospect research. For example, a prospect giving to a Facebook birthday fundraiser for Save the Whales. My understanding is that donations to something like that won’t appear on iWave under the donor’s name because the donations are grouped together. Any ideas on how to quantify donations you may see on someone’s social media account?”

I know that this is a topic that has interested Brent Grinna of EverTrue for a long time, so I asked Brent if he’d be willing to tackle this question. I’m delighted that he said yes! Thanks, Brent, for sharing your thoughts here! ~Helen

$24,000 to monitor the health of honeybees. $10,000 to bring water filters to a girls’ school in Bangladesh. $250,000 to build an educational therapy center for special needs children in a remote area of India.

Each crowdfunding success story is completely unique. What they all have in common is their reliance on a large number of donors giving small amounts…and spreading the word organically.

Crowdfunding has changed the face of philanthropy in recent years and left many traditional fundraising institutions wondering how best to harness its power and mitigate its risks. Nonprofits around the world have successfully launched crowdfunding campaigns to send student groups on mission-driven trips abroad, support a specific research project, or cover a unique, one-off initiative. Many institutions have embraced this uncertain fundraising approach and reaped significant benefits, both for donor engagement and for major gift pipeline.

The authentic, actionable, impactful nature of crowdfunding campaigns is what makes them so compelling. Friends, coworkers, and family are the donor base, and we are intrinsically driven by a sense of community and a desire to join the crowd. Especially if the crowd shares a common commitment to make the world a better place.

At EverTrue, we’ve been especially proud of many of our advancement friends for holding their noses and jumping into the crowdfunding game. In some ways, it has been a counter-cultural move, but so many organizations now have a myriad of success stories on smaller projects and programs that would not have been possible without crowdfunding, with donors that would have otherwise been disengaged (take the University of Oregon, for example).

Now that many nonprofits have embraced crowdfunding and are currently coordinating and managing a number of campaigns, we’re collectively faced with the question of how to identify, quantify, and steward donors to crowdfunding campaigns?

We struggle right alongside our fundraising partners to answer this question. Part of the struggle is due to the fact that many crowdfunding donors choose to be anonymous or donate under a pseudonym. And if the campaign is not managed by an advancement employee who has established a direct link between the crowdfunding software and the school’s CRM, identifying donors is even more elusive.

We may never arrive at the moment where we can identify every person who has donated to a crowdfunding campaign. But, think about this: perhaps we don’t actually need or even want to.

Donors who give to crowdfunding campaigns are exploring a new means of supporting their favorite nonprofit or cause. If they’ve chosen to give anonymously to a small-scale cause they care about, it wouldn’t be donor-centric to move that individual through the traditional donor pipeline by mailing them letters of thanks, adding them to telefund lists, and listing them on the printed donor roster.

Rather than give in to the “Quick! Quantify!” urge, remember first and foremost that these donors are engaging authentically and organically with a cause that resonates with them.

Before jumping to examine crowdfunding campaigns through traditional fundraising lens, fight that impulse. And instead, remain curious. What about these crowdfunding campaigns is working, and what isn’t? How are previously disengaged donors reacting? How many anonymous donors are there? Does the crowdfunding campaign have a defined purpose and impact statement? And, how can these insights inform the more traditional fundraising approaches of our development offices?

The suggestion to remain curious isn’t a decree to sit back and let it all unfold. There are ways to identify engaged donors and begin understanding the crowdfunding donor profile. Start by taking lessons from these campaigns and replicating them in the more familiar and comfortable annual/regular giving space (all with the vision to build your major gift pipeline). Here are some suggestions for that:

  • Ensure that crowdfunding campaigns are shared on your school’s professionally managed social media sites. Track likes, reactions, shares and comments on campaign posts. Use this valuable data to build insights on crowdfunding donors, and route them to annual fund or major gift portfolios, as appropriate.
  • Take note of the powerful effect of peer-to-peer fundraising, especially on social media. Who are your social media champions? Which of your alumni, members, friends, patients, etc. are highly engaged on your nonprofit’s social media accounts? How can you earn the respect and trust of these champions so that they can help to spread the word about your nonprofit’s longer-term fundraising priorities by sharing relevant content across their social networks? (Look to Oklahoma State for insights on how they increased donations to the marching band by 40%.)
  • Do not miss the opportunity to learn about the programs that are being supported by successful crowdfunding campaigns. These are causes, however small, that your constituents genuinely care about. Do your research; meet with campus partners; discover whether there is a program or project that needs longer-term, more sustainable support.
  • Bring the crowdfunding model to a larger scale. Work with your Development Communications team to create inspiring, relevant content on that program area. Share it across your organization’s social media platforms. Track results. And take action on every engaged constituent. (Does this sound like a larger scale crowdfunding campaign? It should!)

We understand that the fact that we can’t pin down and call every donor to a crowdfunding campaign feels inherently like a missed opportunity. But rather than try to make crowdfunding fit into the traditional fundraising model at your organization, think of it as an incredibly useful pilot program that you can learn so much from. Remember: change is the only constant in life!

We are EverTrue are working closely with Facebook to explore the back-end capabilities of Facebook Fundraiser for gathering useful donor data and insights. There is more to come, but suffice it to say that we look forward to sharing what we learn with all of you!

In the meantime, don’t miss the opportunity to track engagement with crowdfunding campaigns on your nonprofit’s social media pages. But by the same token, don’t spend frustrated hours trying to identify and quantify every donor that made it possible for your school’s a cappella group to travel overseas for a competition. Instead, learn what made this mini-campaign so successful, and replicate it on a larger scale using the well-established resources of an advancement shop. (UVA took this approach and funded two $3M professorships.)

All the while, keep in mind that tapping in donor interests and acquiring donors via targeted campaigns is the first step towards building long-term philanthropic relationship.

Curiosity will build a bridge between the old and the new. Good luck (to all of us)!

Brent Grinna founded EverTrue in 2010. He is CEO of the company, which has 50 employees and is based in the beautiful seaport area of Boston, MA. Brent is on Twitter at @BrentGrinna.

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Prospecting 2.0

This week we welcome HBG Senior Researcher Jennifer Turner to the blog to discuss one of her favorite topics – prospect identification. Jen’s been working with a longstanding (and much beloved) client for over five years and the majority of her work over that time has been prospect identification. As a result, Jen is our go-to person on the team when someone wants some innovative ideas to break out of the same-old-same-old ways of looking for new donors. Here she shares three great ideas for you – do you have any to share with her? ~Helen

As I began thinking about a topic for this blog post and looked at my current list of projects for inspiration, I realized I was in the same position I was in when asked to write a blog post five years ago – immersed in prospecting! So, here we go with some more tips on finding new prospects, or, what I affectionately refer to as, “Prospecting 2.0.”

I was recently on a hunt for new prospects, but felt like I had exhausted the usual resources. I was tired of searching the Rich Register and combing through annual reports of organizations similar to that of my client. Having caught up on my alert emails (side note: setting up an alert for “million” AND “gift” can be one way to identify new prospects, just beware that you will be inundated with results and others may already be on their trail as well), I realized it was time to step outside the box of usual resources…

FINDING UNICORNS…

Then I remembered a session I had attended at the last April’s NEDRA conference titled “Lyft that Rocket Lab to the Improbable (all things “unicorn”) by Richard Horne and LaShawn Underdue. During this session, we learned that companies valued at over $1 billion are known as unicorns, and there are over 260 unicorn companies. A deeper look at the executives behind these companies can lead you to some hidden gems that may otherwise not appear on your typical rich lists (since these are private companies, salaries are not disclosed, and there are no stock holdings to report). Yet, I repeat – these are billion dollar companies! And some may be on the verge of going public – definitely worth adding to your alert list. So check out the executives at these companies and see where their philanthropic interests lay.

…and ANGELS…

Another vein  that may lead you to a gold mine of new prospects is the world of angel investors and the organizations they are affiliated with. While you may have already known that such organizations exist, have you ever taken the time to delve into the background of their members? You may be surprised by how many gems you come away with. While it may seem tedious, the payoff could be well worth it. If you don’t know where to start, check out this directory: https://www.angelcapitalassociation.org/directory/

On the site, the organizations are broken down by regions, which is great if you have a development officer traveling to a specific geographic area and looking to fill time with some new prospects.

…IN THE HEDGES

Another area I like to check periodically is the mysterious world of hedge funds. Like angel investors, these executives do not necessarily appear on any rich list because their hedge funds are considered private companies and therefore are not required to report salaries. That being said, we all know big money is usually associated with this field. If you need help getting started, search “hedge fund” and “New York” (or any city your development officer may be visiting) and see what results are returned. You’ll end up with a nice list of hedge funds in your targeted geographic area. You can quickly review the total assets of the firm (to ensure you are dealing with the ultra HNWIs), and then start looking at the top executives.

Again, this may seem a bit tedious, but I find it’s worth putting in the extra time to find these hidden gems, as opposed to relying on the top names that everyone sees on published rich lists.

These are just some of the ways in which I try to find prospects who may be flying under the radar. They may not appear on any wealth list (yet), but a quick look at the size of the company they are affiliated with (be it a unicorn company, through angel investing, or hedge fund affiliation) suggests the amount of money being exchanged. A deeper look into where these prospects may live (and the value of their home) or the size of gifts they’ve already made can confirm your initial hunch that they could easily make a six, and in most cases, even seven, figure gift.

These suggestions are meant to help you be proactive – don’t wait for your development officer to give you the criteria to search for new prospects. Trying thinking beyond the obvious HNWIs to find the unpublished names. While it may seem overwhelming at first, even spending a few minutes at the end of each day scrolling through the executives of unicorn companies, angel investors, and hedge funds can have huge payoffs. Your development officers will thank you for finding those new people who aren’t already being solicited!

What methods do you have for thinking outside of the box when it comes to prospecting?

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Portfolio spring cleaning

Photo by Arbitrarily0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Not that you would know it from the weather in Boston, but it’s spring out there. I washed my windows last weekend and wow, what a difference! I’m really looking forward to seeing the sun shine through them when it eventually makes an appearance.

My next task is to get rid of this huge cd rack that has been sitting in the corner of my living room since cds were a thing. There must be at least 750 cds on this rack, which is just one part of the problem.

  • There are too many of them
  • We haven’t played any of them in years (some of them never)
  • Since computers don’t have cd drives in them anymore, I have nothing to convert them with
  • We have a sentimental attachment to them
  • Someday they may be worth a lot of money (but seriously, probably not)
  • They’re taking up room we could be using for a desperately-needed additional seat

As I was standing there staring at it last evening, it occurred to me that our cd rack is a metaphor for many under-performing major donor prospect portfolios.

  • Most portfolios have too many prospects in them
  • We haven’t connected with some of those prospects in years (or ever)
  • We don’t have enough time or fundraisers to help convert many of those prospects into donors
  • We have a sentimental attachment to these prospects
  • Someday they may give us a large gift (but seriously, probably not)
  • Prospects that are never going to give (or won’t give anytime soon) are taking up the place for new prospects with higher capacity, interest, and likelihood to give.

So what to do? Well, it’s time for some spring cleaning, isn’t it?

I’m no Marie Kondo, but I do like to keep things simple if I’m going to get some tidying accomplished. When trimming portfolios, I put prospects into three categories: A, B, and C.

  • A – the keepers. They’re definitely or probably going to give in the next year-to-18 months.
  • B – prospects for reassessment. If you don’t have a prospect management director, ask your research team or your research consultant to give you a candid, unsentimental, strategic assessment. You probably don’t need heavy-duty research. The goal should be a simple “Keep in portfolio, they’re an A” or “Move elsewhere, they’re a C.”
  • C – these are the ones to remove. The folks who may be lovely to have lunch with but who will never make a major gift. Move them out of your portfolio to your colleagues in stewardship, annual fund, gift planning, or whatever other department/section that makes the most sense (if your organization is large enough to have them).

But whether your development shop is large or just you, it doesn’t matter – prospects that will never donate at a major gift level should be moved out of your major gift portfolio.

The goal should be to get rid of every prospect that isn’t going to move forward in the 0-24 months. I know – it’s really hard. You’ve become attached to people you’ve formed good relationships with, but when you do this you’ve moved them to a better place for them, for your nonprofit, and for your performance goals.

Once you’re finished you’ll have room for all of those new prospects that your research team or research consultant have found for you that they’ve been excited to move into your portfolio.

Which is great, right?

Say, now that we’ve cleaned out your portfolios, can I get some help schlepping these cds to donate to the library?

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Don’t miss this new report

Nobody has ever scientifically measured the role of prospect research in major donor fundraising before. Sure, we researchers have always been confident in our knowledge that research is important for fundraising success, but how do end-users really feel? How exactly is it important? What parts are most useful? How do fundraisers actually use the information they receive?

And – scary question to ask – could fundraisers do as well raising funds without prospect research? [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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So you say you want a revolution, well, here goes….

Our month-long #ResearchPride focus on prospect management closes today with advice from one of the mountaintop gurus on the topic, Lisa Howley. It would be impossible to overstate Lisa’s expertise and generosity in sharing her knowledge over the years, and I’m delighted that she agreed to close out the month for us here on the Intelligent Edge to talk about creating a roadmap for solid prospect management success. ~Helen

We all want to change the world. Or at least our prospect management (PM) systems. It’s a common refrain by prospect management practitioners and gift officers alike. Walk down the hallway in any development office and you may hear someone scream in frustration ‘the system is broken!’

It can be daunting to be tasked with fixing a broken prospect management system. Sure, staff have been sharing their woes, and you have been compiling issues. But where to start? [Read more…]

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What to do when your PM system needs a reboot

What do you do when your existing prospect and performance management systems aren’t working for anyone? That’s the question Misa Lobato answers for us this week in our month-long Research Pride look at prospect management. Misa and her team embarked on a serious soul-searching, data-gathering, preconceived-notion-busting, solutions-finding mission to find out what would make their system actually work. Part of what they learned is that you have to measure what matters. And what matters? Read on! ~Helen

Photo by tracyshaun

Many years ago, when I first started learning about performance management in fundraising, I noticed a strange disconnect: there didn’t seem to be a correlation between gift officers meeting established individual goals and being promoted. In fact, often the gift officers who were promoted hadn’t met their goals. As I dug in a little further, I realized no one cares about these goals.

How did we get there, to the point where goals had been established to measure performance but no one viewed them as an indicator of success or failure? It seemed to me that goals had just been handed down year after year without being questioned. Goals were standardized across titles. Some were based on questionable industry lore–a gift officer should raise X times their salary. And some just seemed to be based on what had always been done. [Read more…]

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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

Air Traffic Controlman Third Class (ACC) Wendy Parrett list a new aircraft arrival from her local control position in the air traffic control tower at Naval Air Station North Island. Photo by PH2 Eric A. ClementResearch 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.

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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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