Helen Brown Group

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“Summertime is always the best of what might be.”

Ah Summertime! It’s a great time to take time to recharge your batteries. But it’s also a great time to to recharge your prospect research activities as well – getting ready for the year ahead. Whether you’re gearing up for a campaign or just a busy fall ahead, Grace Chandonnet has some wonderful suggestions of projects to tackle now to help your future self. Happy summer! ~Helen

Grace Chandonnet

         Grace Chandonnet

As a kid, summer was the most anticipated season – sleeping in a bit, staying up a little later, lightened responsibilities, and more time for fun. It’s a bit different as a working adult, but even so, the pace of life – and work – does slow down a bit during the summer for many of us.

So why not take advantage of fewer deadlines, a lighter workload, and clients, colleagues and bosses taking some time off, by tackling those “someday” projects and tasks that you never have time for the rest of the year. In addition to switching up what your work is like for a little while, you just might set yourself up for success when the busy season inevitably starts in September.

In our profession, there are lots of ways we can use this time to help out our future selves while also having a sense of real time satisfaction. I surveyed my colleagues at HBG for some of their/their clients’ wish list items and I’ve included a couple of my own.

Database Hygiene – We all run across things (or the lack of things) in our databases that we wish were “cleaner” but often just move on to what is pressing in the moment thinking we will get back to cleaning things up at some amorphous future date. Why not dive into your database and tackle tasks like deduping records, being sure that all assigned prospects have capacity ratings, batch updating addresses, and adding phone numbers and email addresses to skimpy records? A clean database makes for a happy prospect intelligence professional, because we all know that if it isn’t in there, or if it is in there incorrectly, it doesn’t exist.

Research Refresh – One forward-looking client is interested in having full profiles completed for their top prospects now, in anticipation of being ready to go when the organization’s president’s calendar starts filling up with meetings in the fall. All that will be required will be a quick refresh when the meeting is imminent. If a pile of full profiles to complete seems too ambitious for one summer season, you could always review recent philanthropy and new board appointments for your trustees, top donors, and other partners, and brief the relevant fundraiser on anything especially interesting that you find. And while you’re in those database records, take the extra few minutes to update information as outlined above!

Proactive is the Name of the Game – Now might be a good time to undertake some proactive work.

  • Do you have a sense as to what priorities your organization will be turning toward this autumn?
  • Can you undertake some prospecting to identify a few new potential donors to those priorities?
  • Can you start a process for screening new donors (of an amount that makes sense for your organization), to quickly assess their capacity, their potential inclination to become closer to your org, and how to engage them?
  • Do you have some screening credits with any of your vendors that you could use to screen some subset of your database, and then use some of your time to validate the results?
  • How about checking out those folks who are checking out your organization on social media?

Prospect Management – Setting your fundraisers up for success is tantamount to setting yourself up for success. Maybe you could spend some time working with fundraisers, whose workload might also be lighter this season, on optimizing their portfolios. Having the right prospects and the right number of prospects in a portfolio is an effective way to eliminate frustration for fundraisers, and to ensure that time is being spent on the people who are going to move your organization forward.

Professional Development – With your supervisor’s blessing, this could be a suitable time to enroll in a course or workshop that you’ve been wanting to tackle. If the subject matter contributes to the advancement of your career, all the better. You might also consider joining a board or otherwise volunteering for your favorite cause to take advantage of the longer days and (hopefully) your increased energy because of a little less stress at work this season.

The Feel Good Stuff – Okay, it is summer, and some part of that should be about things that make you happy right now, and that you might neglect during the busiest times. Presumably, everyone is breathing a little easier at the moment – why not ask a colleague or two if they’d like to take a lunchtime walk on a pretty summer day and get to know them a little better? Or invite a few colleagues for a Thursday evening happy hour? Focus on people who have a different job description than you do, like a frontline fundraiser or the IT person who drops everything to write the query you need. I have found that working with people whom I know and like makes my days better and happier, and everyone has something interesting to say. Your colleagues will be glad you invited them.

And don’t forget to take that vacation or staycation and recharge your batteries! As author and journalist Charles Bowden wrote: “Summertime is always the best of what might be.”

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Have Job, Will Travel

Grace Chandonnet

          Grace Chandonnet

Where in the world is Grace Chandonnet? Most of the time she’s in the southern US, but every once in awhile she logs in from somewhere else and shares pictures with the team of the view out her new window. Working in a beautiful, chosen location can be good – not just for the soul – but for productivity as well! This week Grace shares her top tips for working remotely – securely. ~Helen

Those of us who are lucky enough to be a part of this profession have known for a while that our occupation lends itself nicely to remote work. HBG was years ahead of the curve in understanding that a remote workforce allows us to choose candidates from a national pool and to also save resources on the bricks and mortar aspects of running a company – long before the recent COVID pandemic changed remote work on a global scale.

As COVID-19 takes up less space in our collective psyche, a lot of workplaces expect their employees back in the office. Fortunately the Prospect Intelligence field seems to have adapted for the long haul and many shops appear to be continuing to embrace the zeitgeist of remote work. I recently took a look at Apra’s Career Center site and, out of 27 job openings listed in the Prospect Intelligence/Research space, 13 of the positions were hybrid, seven were fully remote, and seven were onsite.

I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to take my work with me and be a little bit digitally nomadic as a Helen Brown Group employee, and for any of you travel buffs working in our profession, I hope that you give it a try too!

I spent a month in Cuenca, Ecuador in the fall of 2016, a month in Livingston, Montana in 2021, and another month in Ecuador, this time along the coast in a town called Manglaralto, in 2022, and worked while I was in each place. I am planning for my next adventure to be lengthier, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of Latin America and Europe on a longer-term basis and taking my job with me! It’s easier than you might think, but as with any new and unfamiliar situation, there are things to consider in order to keep yourself and your employer’s information safe and secure, especially when working abroad.

VIRUS-PROTECTION PROGRAMS

We all know that it’s a good idea to run a security check up on your systems and data on a regular basis, especially when you are a remote worker and act as your own IT department. HBG recently held an internal session to talk about this and it was a great refresher. It is especially important when you are traveling and cannot confirm the security of the network you are accessing.

USE A VPN

The first order of business when you are taking your work on the road is to get a VPN for your computer. A Virtual Private Network is a cheap and easy way to protect your and your company’s privacy, and in my opinion, the most essential tool in the toolkit for working while traveling. You can find one for $10 per month or less.

A VPN establishes a secure connection to the internet by creating a private tunnel through which encrypted data travels safely between your device and the VPN server, making that data unreadable to anyone else. It protects your personal data and privacy online, and it hides your IP address, online activity, and communications. A VPN connection is also secure against external attacks. When you are home or anywhere that you know your network is secure, it may not be necessary to use a VPN, but it truly is important when you are traveling, especially internationally. When I first used a VPN in Ecuador in 2016, it slowed my system down noticeably, but not terribly, and I was able to adapt easily. When I went back to Ecuador in 2022, I had no issues with system performance at all, and in both instances, it made it possible to safely access sites and resources that I would not have accessed otherwise.

CAVEAT CAVEAT

All of that being said, there are U.S.-based vendors that many of us rely on that specifically restrict their usage outside of the country, so be sure to consult the guidelines of your go-to vendors and know what the restrictions are. You can then formulate a plan – such as enlisting a helpful colleague in your team to assist you with look-ups when you’re out of the country.

BE PREPARED – INFRASTRUCTURE

The infrastructure in unfamiliar places may not be what you’re used to, so it’s a good idea to think about things like unexpected power outages. If you think that you are going to be in a place that may be subject to frequent or extensive losses of power, you should consider buying an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), which is a type of device that will power your system, nearly instantaneously, in the event of grid power failure, thereby protecting your equipment from damage. It’s a one-time expense that may prove to be money well spent, even for at-home use if you live in a place that experiences power outages on a frequent basis.

PASSWORDS AND ENCRYPTION

You likely already know this, but it’s always a good idea to use a password manager, which will store your login information for all the websites you use and help you log into them automatically. It will also help you generate and store long, unique passwords for your online accounts.

Also, if you are not already doing so, consider using a secure cloud-based file sharing system to store and share all of your work.

Don’t forget to check with your cellphone provider well ahead of time to find out what your international calling/texting options will be. You could also consider using an encrypted service for calling and texting. For example, WhatsApp chats are encrypted and use the internet rather than through your phone provider. It is the standard for texting in many parts of the world.

None of this stuff is difficult or awfully expensive, and if you, like I, love to travel and have thought about experiencing new places for longer term than a one- or two-week vacation allows, there is no better time than the present! There are lots of places where the cost of renting a comfortably appointed space for a long-ish period of time is no more expensive than booking a hotel room for the length of that beach vacation. I am happiest when I can wrap up my work for the day and, as I call it, walk out into the world!

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How much is that private company worth?

Finding information about public companies is so easy! Unfortunately, the majority of companies in the world are privately-held, so finding information about them – especially how much a company is worth – is a daunting task. Thankfully, today my colleague Grace Chandonnet provides a huge hand up for those of us who aren’t professional company valuers with this enormously helpful article. ~Helen

Grace Chandonnet

                Grace Chandonnet

It’s an age-old prospect intelligence challenge. Especially if you’re new to our field, placing a value on a privately held company, and on your prospect’s stake in that company, can seem daunting. Publicly traded companies are required to report their financial information to the SEC, and that information (things like market capitalization, revenue, number of employees, and insiders’ stock holdings), is then available to the public. Privately held companies are not under the same legal obligations, so getting at their financial information is a bit trickier and less straightforward. The good news is that there are some pretty simple tricks that can help a researcher arrive at a reasonable guess as to the value of a private company.

You will need a couple of pieces of information, and the fact is that sometimes you will not be able to know enough information to make a realistic estimate. But there are some resources to help.

If you can uncover a reliable estimate of the company’s revenues, that’s a great start. The unicorn is to find a news article, often published in business or industry publications, that is talking about the company’s industry and uses your prospect’s company as an example. In this article, the exact amount of revenue is not reported, but enough information is provided about the company, a provider of solar energy, to figure it out. The company “reported a 124% gain over 2018 gross sales – an increase of $42.4 million” – when you do the math, you will arrive at 2019 gross revenue of about $76.6 million.

If I have information like this, the first thing I will do is try to find one or more publicly traded companies with a similar line of business and similar revenue, and then compare the public company or companies to the privately held one that I am researching. To find similar public companies, I use a stock screener like this one, which is a free resource.

Select Create Custom Screen and then pull down on Select Category to Current Financials and select Revenue. Enter the revenue criteria (I use a range of values, in this case between $60M and $80M). Once you’ve entered that and clicked in the box to activate the search, go back to the pull-down menu. Pull down to Company Overview and then click on Industry (scroll down in the box, it’s slightly hidden). For this example, I picked “Alternative Electricity”. As you’ll see in the image, there is only one search result, but it’s a good one – click on View Screen Matches to see results. The piece of information to look for in those results is the market capitalization or market cap, which is the total value of the publicly traded company because it is reasonable to assume that there is some similarity between the market capitalization of the public company ($373.1 million) and the value of the private one.

If I have multiple companies in my search results, I will use the average market cap for the companies in the list that are the most similar to my prospect’s company. When doing this, I leave out any outliers – where the market cap is a lot lower or higher than most of the companies in the list.

If, however, you know that your prospect is trying to sell her company or that she already has, the value you want to look for is the enterprise value rather than the market cap. Enterprise value is the amount that a company could fetch in an acquisition. You can find this number by looking up the comparison public company or companies at any number of free sources. I like Yahoo Finance, where you can find the enterprise value under the Statistics tab.

Of course, a good deal of the time, you won’t find an article that tells you exactly what your prospect’s company’s revenues are or there just won’t be good comparison public companies in your search – sometimes a close industry match isn’t available or (if you do have an estimate of revenue), there won’t be any companies with revenues in that range.

My second go-to in cases like this is the Business Reference Guide, which is a paid resource, but not terribly expensive. This resource is available as an online subscription, a book, or both. It is focused on pricing businesses and franchises and is geared toward entities that are seeking to buy a company or franchise.  It is chock full of industry benchmarks and trends, rules of thumb when assessing certain industries or franchises, and ways to assess a ballpark figure for what a company is worth using a host of different data points that you may have. If you have an estimate of the number of employees a company has, for instance, you can often find a simple multiplier to use to estimate a company’s valuation.

This of course brings us back to whether you have that information and where to find it. I like to look at my prospect’s company in several different resources, including Dun & Bradstreet and ZoomInfo, both of which are included in a Lexis Nexis for Development Professionals (LNDP) subscription, and see how these resources’ results compare to one another. If you have access to LNDP, you not only have access to both of these resources, but also to a host of others, including Gale Group Company Briefs, IAC Company Intelligence, and Lexis Nexis Corporate Affiliations.

iWave is another great source of aggregated company information. Dun & Bradstreet has often been maligned in our profession for not containing trustworthy information because its data is frequently based on self-reported numbers and/or modeling, so it should be taken with a grain of salt. I’ve been finding lately that ZoomInfo often returns data about revenues and number of employees that seem pretty accurate to me. With practice, you will be able to identify which information is probably wildly inaccurate versus information that seems quite reasonable. D&B Private Company Insight (also available in LNDP) often has information about what percentage of the company is owned by whom, and this is great to know. Estimating the value of a company is one thing, but knowing how much of the company your prospect owns is the next (and important) step to including these numbers in your capacity score.

The more you do this kind of research, the more you will trust your instincts about what seems to be relatively accurate numbers, both for revenue and number of employees. There will always be things we can’t know abut a privately held company, such as the value of inventory or machinery and other hard assets, and debt/liabilities, but I believe that we should at least attempt to understand what a privately held company could be worth when assessing a capacity rating for a business owner, and I also believe that these relatively simple calculations can result in a strong estimate.

Some additional things to consider:

  • What percentage of the company does your prospect own? If you don’t know, estimate conservatively – I like to use 10 to 25 percent ownership.
  • Is it a multi-generation family business? This could indicate that there are minority shareholders (family members) and should be taken into account when assessing your prospect’s true stake.
  • Did your prospect found, grow and continues to head the company? This could indicate 100 percent ownership for your prospect.
  • Is it venture funded? Investors will own some stake in the company if so. Sometime the percentage of company owned by the investors can be found in a news search, but not always. If not, be conservative when estimating what your prospect’s ownership percentage is.
  • A company’s valuation is not a liquid asset for your prospect until/unless she sells it, but it is an asset that should be included in your capacity rating, just as real estate values are.
  • It is conventional wisdom that privately held companies are often not as valuable as publicly traded ones, so as for all the other steps, be conservative in your estimates.

Good luck – and remember: sometimes you just will not have enough information to make a reasonable guess about a company’s valuation and this is not a bad reflection on you or your research skills!

 

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Prospect Research for the Here and Now

In the midst of any crisis, after the first moments of stopping and taking stock of what is happening around us, the next thing people normally do is jump into action to help. This week my colleague Grace Chandonnet shares her perspective on practical ways that we in prospect research can jump into action to be helpful to our organizations. Be well. ~Helen

We’re a few weeks into the new (for now) normal and lucky to be in an industry that lends itself well to remote work. It seems like a good time to be strategizing around ways to get through an economic downturn with our organizations intact, and also a good time to look ahead and prepare for the future.

I’ve been thinking about things that we fundraising intelligence pros can do to make the present moment more productive and satisfying that will also help prepare us to move ahead through – and past – turbulent times. Here are some practical things that we can do now.

Projects and Planning

This might be a good time to consider all those things on your to-do list that you never seem to have time to fit in. What can you be doing to look to the future and be ready to hit the ground running when we emerge? For example:

  • In-person events are off the table right now, but can you work on prospecting projects for future event attendees?
  • Now is a great time to plan and implement analytics projects to find the hidden gems in your own databases. Consider appending free or inexpensive data to make your data insight projects even more robust.
  • Research and draw relationship maps to identify strong prospects who might know your organization’s friends and family and want to be engaged?
  • If you’re working at a school or university, now is a good time to re-imagine your parents research programs as we’re heading into summer.

Supporting the Front Line

Now is a great time to be looking for additional ways to support our frontline fundraisers. Our extroverted colleagues may be really struggling in a time of enforced social distancing. The logistics of business as usual – building relationships with donors and prospects – has been suddenly altered drastically.  If you’re a prospect development pro, take the opportunity of having more planning time with frontline colleagues and discuss their priorities and concerns to strengthen your relationships with them.

  • Work with fundraisers to help them re-balance their portfolios to set them up for future success. This could include re-assessing capacity with an eye toward the industries that are recession-proof vs. those that might not be – we can lead these discussions and also touch on the overarching economic outlook.
  • Use the aforementioned analytics and prospecting projects to target the prospects that will help fundraisers meet their visit and solicitation goals.
  • Set up some interactive trainings or presentations geared toward frontline fundraisers – perhaps a quick training on basic research – to give them tools for things that they can do themselves to get ready for a meeting or phone call when there is no time for formal research.
  • It might also be a good time to focus on process-oriented training, such as short sessions on entering research requests, prospect management moves, and/or contact reports into your organization’s CRM.
  • Now might also be a great time to host a few virtual coffee breaks – that have no set agenda – with small groups of fundraisers and you or your team of researchers just to get to know each other a little better.

Take advantage of trainings and webinars

We can also be focusing on our own professional development. Apra and many of its chapters  as well as  familiar vendors like iWave and DonorSearch offer ongoing, as well as timely and relevant virtual trainings and webinars on a variety of topics relevant to our industry and ways we can weather the pandemic. Is there something that you’ve been wanting to know more about? Wishing to take a deeper dive into certain industries, or know more about the hands-on intricacies of data analytics? With fewer research requests in the queue, it could be a good time to set aside some time for some of these free training opportunities.

Breathe

“Self-care” is an oft-used expression that means different things to different people, but there is no doubt that most of us are experiencing an increase in stress and anxiety, and a little self-care couldn’t hurt. It’s more important than ever to take a few minutes during your day to stand up and stretch, step outside and maybe take a walk around the block (as weather and social distancing guidelines allow), try out a meditation app, or to just sit quietly and breathe for a few minutes.

I do believe that our industry will weather this. We are a resourceful bunch (literally!) and we’ve been through troubled waters before. Let’s have each other’s backs and we and our organizations can emerge stronger than before.

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Read the Footnotes!

Reading SEC documents can be a tricky business. There’s the up-front information, and then there’s the hidden information that you have to know to look for. In this week’s article, first published by (and reprinted with kind permission from) our esteemed colleagues at Apra-Louisiana, HBG Senior Researcher Grace Chandonnet reminds us of the importance of reading the small print. ~Helen

Read the footnotes!  It’s not new advice, but it is important and bears repeating. When evaluating the stock holdings of an individual, it is so important to read the footnotes in a proxy statement underneath the beneficial ownership section.

I know, it’s tempting to just take the number in the “total amount of beneficial ownership” column (let’s call it the ABO column), price the stock, and call it a day.  But sometimes there is important information in the footnotes that will value that person’s stake very differently. [Read more…]

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Innovation in Philanthropy

Creativity abounds everywhere in the Third Sector, from service providers in the field, to fundraising offices managing more on a shoestring, to a new breed of funders (and well-established funders, too) thinking up new ways to engage with, spur forward, and support their philanthropic priorities. In this week’s article, HBG Senior Researcher Grace Chandonnet shares some of the interesting and creative ways funders are having an impact in the world today. ~Helen

Lately I’ve been thinking about the innovative ways that young entrepreneurs are actively engaging in philanthropy. As my colleague Elizabeth Roma writes, the philanthropy landscape is ever evolving and innovating and appears to be picking up the pace of change exponentially in recent years in what is being referred to as the New Gilded Age. Elizabeth touches on innovative philanthropic vehicles such as the Emerson Collective and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, as well as B-Corps and impact investing. [Read more…]

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Come Together. Right Now.

This week my colleague Grace Chandonnet points us to great research on the benefits of collaboration and shares some of the methods we use (and you can, too) to take advantage of deep knowledge and resources around you.
collaboration

Collaboration ©opensource.com via Flickr CC BY-SA

The events of the recent past have inspired divisiveness and mistrust amongst the citizens of the United States and even the world. For the sake of my own wellbeing, I’ve been trying to focus on the things in my life that make me feel connected to something positive. Fortunately for me, not only am I connected to work that makes a real difference in the world, but I have an amazing group of colleagues who are always ready and willing to collaborate.

COLLABORATION’S MULTIPLE BENEFITS

According to Murali Krishna, HR Service Administrator at IBM, “Collaboration not only equals a happier workforce, it represents an educated one. This is because it naturally inspires a sense of community within an organization, meaning that employees feel almost like they are a part of a family. Additionally, collaboration allows employees to learn from each other and the bosses.” [Read more…]

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Not Dead Yet

Mark Twain

This month I’m delighted to highlight an article by HBG team member Grace Chandonnet, who shares some inside information about the prospect profile. Grace works with our clients from her home office in New Orleans, a town that Mark Twain would have been very familiar with from his Life on the Mississippi.

To shamelessly paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of the death of the prospect profile has been greatly exaggerated.

It seems as though that during my entire 12 years as a development researcher, I’ve been hearing that the narrative prospect profile is “going away.” It’s been argued that it isn’t useful, it takes too much time to prepare and to read, that a gift officer doesn’t need all that information to cultivate and solicit their prospect. [Read more…]

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Take Your Seat at the Table

Today I’m delighted to share an article with you written by guest blogger and HBG team member Grace Chandonnet. As you’ll see, Grace is an eloquent advocate and guide for those of us planning a move toward the strategy table in our fundraising operations.

Businesspeople in Meeting

As a prospect researcher, you have access to some eye-opening tidbits of information, which makes you exceptionally valuable to the fundraising team. The trick is to get others to see it—and to give yourself a seat at the table.

Recently, I started a new working relationship with a gift officer. In our initial meeting, she came right out and asked me to include my observations and opinions in the research that I provide to her. This was a gratifying milestone in my 13-year research career. As researchers, we often talk about how it can be difficult for research to get a seat at the strategy table and here was a frontline fundraiser asking me, unsolicited, with the implicit idea that my opinions were welcomed and valued. This gift officer gets it! [Read more…]

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