effective searching Archives - Helen Brown Group

April 25, 2019 By Helen Brown

Alert and Prepared

Not long ago, a client confided to me that she was worried that her major gifts team was missing information about their top prospects. She fretted about a recent instance where information had come to light – six months too late – about a dear donor/volunteer that had sold their company to another for a significant amount of money.

Which, from a fundraising standpoint, we all know isn’t great. You’d rather know about these things in real time, or at the very least within the month.

What was worse was that the client felt like they’d missed the opportunity to celebrate with the donor. Selling their company was an event that the donor had mentioned with delight and anticipation – a new chapter was opening in their life. My client felt like the fundraising team had unwittingly blown it. Congratulating the donor half a year later felt lame and tainted with opportunism, which wasn’t the message they wanted to give. [Read more…]

October 12, 2017 By Helen Brown

Broadening your alert horizon

By Lizard Fine Art (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

There’s such a great sense of accomplishment that comes with finishing a prospect research profile. You can dot the i’s, cross the t’s, hit ‘save’ and move onto the next assignment.

But if you think about it, that moment is really the starting line. What happens after that?

Well, an opportunity for us to have a conversation with the front line fundraiser assigned to that prospective donor, to begin with.

Did the profile answer all of your questions?
Is there any further work to be done?
What questions remain unanswered in the work that the fundraiser can discover on their next visit?

And most importantly, this signals the beginning – or deepening – of the relationship between your organization and the donor. The gift. Stewardship. Continuing engagement. [Read more…]

August 24, 2017 By Helen Brown

Google Search, just for you

According to many tech writers, the future of search is looking very much like a verbal interaction between searcher and search engine. Alphabet wants you to have the same relationship with Google that over 8 million people already have with Amazon Echo’s “Alexa” every day.

ComScore estimates that by 2020 (which is only two and a half years away, my friend) over 50% of all searches will be screenless. Which is very Star Trek and cool and cutting edge and all that.

Smart people in the marketing world are already thinking about what happens for them when Google search (as we know it) goes away.

We professional researchers need to be thinking the same way. [Read more…]

July 3, 2014 By Helen Brown

The Field Guide to Efficient Searching

Let’s just dive right in, shall we? Here are my top five tips for efficient web searching.

Tip #1: Use Quotation Marks

If you want to get the best results for an exact name or phrase, always put your search string in quotes. This works really well for names, for example, of a person or an organization.

Searching on Bing for Council on Foreign Relations got me 18,700,000 hits. Searching for “Council on Foreign Relations” narrowed down the hit count to a mere two million.

This might not matter when you’re searching for something like the COFR, but what if you’re looking for a name? [Read more…]

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