Helen Brown Group

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Stepping up with pride

My guess is that you fell into your fundraising career. Most of us have, including myself and my colleague Tara McMullen-King, this month’s Intelligent Edge author. What we make of that opportunity can be a combination of hard work, stepping out of our comfort zone, and the good fortune of meeting people that impact our lives and our careers. Tara shares her career trajectory and the choices she made along the way to her success in this #ResearchPride celebration. ~Helen

Happy #ResearchPride month everyone!

So – possibly like many of you – I graduated with a B.A. from a liberal arts college not really knowing exactly what path I wanted to embark on with my career. What did I want to be when I “grew up”? After starting out my studies with plans to major in Psychology, I then switched to English, and then finally settled on Studio Art in the first half of my junior year. Many days were spent happily painting and drawing and studying art history (while still taking classes in myriad different subjects – everything from Buddhist mythology to developmental psychology to Spanish literature to classes in anthropology… and the list goes on and on).

While I temporarily entertained aspirations of becoming a high school art teacher, I just wasn’t really 100% sure what I wanted to do with my life. The problem was that my interests were just so broad, and I fell passionately in love with pretty much anything and everything I studied. Once I graduated, I moved to the Boston area and had to quickly find a job – ANY job – to pay my rent (a whole $500 a month – those were the days!).

Soon after I moved, I managed to find an administrative position working for a small association management firm, where I helped process memberships, create newsletters, and register members for conferences and other educational programs we planned and executed for clients. Our firm’s two biggest clients happened to be the Massachusetts chapter of NSFRE (the National Society of Fund Raising Executives – now known as AFP) and NEDRA (the New England Development Research Association).

At the time, I knew nothing about fundraising, and even less about what development research was. However, through working closely with those two organizations, I was exposed to the wild and wonderful world of development – and I haven’t looked back since.

After about a year working for that company, I decided to take a chance and accept a position working in the development office at a college in Boston to explore my new-found interest in fundraising. This position required me to perform some basic research, such as event bios and some low-level information gathering and analysis on prospects.

The more I learned, the more I became enthralled by the world of prospect research, and realized that I was able to use all the diverse skill sets I had developed over the years– reading, writing, researching, analyzing, creating, communicating, and using critical thinking – to be successful in my work. I eventually accepted a full-time development research position at the college – but as a newbie to research, in a small shop, I had limited exposure to the field and few opportunities to meet other research colleagues. As a result, I sought out educational programs offered by NEDRA to help me gain more knowledge and find networking opportunities, and eventually became a volunteer for the organization. As I became more involved with NEDRA, I had the opportunity to meet a number of colleagues who became instrumental in my professional development, including my now-boss, Helen Brown, and the late Heather Reisz.

Back in those days, Helen and Heather were instrumental in creating the first NEDRA Boot Camps for researchers new to the field. Heather and I connected almost immediately upon meeting one another – she was vivacious, hilarious, and knowledgeable, and had a particular passion for “research newbies,” many of whom she took under her wing. As she and I became more friendly, she told me that she thought I would be a great board member for NEDRA, and that I would absolutely be a great Boot Camp instructor in the future. At the time, I sort of chuckled and didn’t take her ideas too seriously – I thought that she was just being kind. As someone who has suffered from imposter syndrome for most of my life, I was sort of convinced that I wasn’t “good enough” or smart enough for any of that, at all.

But then just a year later, I was nominated to join the NEDRA board of directors – to my shock – and decided to ignore my feelings of self-doubt and take that plunge. I was honored to spend six years on the NEDRA board, trying my best to give back to the organization that had not only provided me with integral support and education at a time when I needed it, but had quite literally exposed me to the field and piqued my interest in it in the first place. In a way, things had sort of come full circle.

When Heather unexpectedly passed away in 2013, the loss was profound for those of us who had been lucky enough to know her. A few years ago, NEDRA’s then-president, Amy Begg, echoed Heather’s previous sentiments and encouraged me to get involved as a bootcamp presenter for NEDRA. Even though years had passed since Heather had first floated the idea, I still wasn’t sure about it – and those nagging feelings of self-doubt crept up yet again.

However, this past January – despite my nerves– I finally agreed to co-present a NEDRA Boot Camp in Boston. And you know what? It was amazing. Meeting a batch of new professionals coming into the field, and being allowed the chance to help them and arm them with the tools and confidence they need to get started was one of the most professionally rewarding experiences I have had in my career. Again – it felt like things were coming full circle.

Writing this today, after having now spent seventeen years working in development research, I have come to realize many things. First and foremost – it is okay (and normal) to sometimes have those nagging moments of self-doubt. I consider myself to be a pretty humble person (compliments make me uncomfortable; praise often makes me bashful), and I still have those moments on occasion.

But what I have learned is that putting yourself out there – pushing those feelings down a bit and taking some risk – can lead to some truly rewarding personal and professional experiences. During this month of Research Pride, I can truthfully say that I am proud of myself for taking those risks in the past, and I am proud of the work that I do.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to work with many amazing non-profit organizations to help them achieve their goals and further their missions. I am proud to work with Helen Brown – who has been a mentor to me over the past thirteen years – and to be a part of the Helen Brown Group, where I get to work with so many amazing and intelligent colleagues each and every day.

I am proud of the work that NEDRA has done – and continues to do – to provide education, assistance, and networking opportunities to so many of us. And I am truly grateful for the support that so many other researchers offered me as I navigated my way through those first years in the field.

It may have taken me a while to figure out what I wanted to do when I “grew up,” but now I can’t see myself doing anything else. And in my heart of hearts, I would like to think that Heather would be proud of me as well.

Are you new to prospect research or know someone who is? NEDRA’s got another Boot Camp coming up in May! Registration can be found here.

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Life in fundraising’s fast lane

A couple of times every week my other half and I are on a particular section of highway in rush hour that is backed up for 7-10 miles. I am always grateful that there are the two of us, but most especially those times because we slip into the HOV lane and speed past the bumper-to-bumper madness to get to work on time.

As I was thinking about what I wanted to say to kick off Research Pride month this week, it occurred to me that prospect research, prospect management, and fundraising data science are a nonprofit’s HOV lane. Its warp drive, if you will. A nonprofit can certainly fundraise without fundraising intelligence, but it’s a bumper-to-bumper slog.

In fact, academic research undertaken at the University of Kent by Nicola Williams, MA, showed that 100 percent of fundraisers surveyed felt that research is necessary to helping them understand a prospect’s capacity to give. Eighty-six percent felt it was necessary to prioritize prospects, and 80 percent for understanding a prospect’s affinity with their organization.

84% of fundraisers said that prospect research helps them raise more money.

Those of us in research, prospect management, and data science have always known it in our bones, but finally the academic research (and most importantly) the opinions of our colleagues – frontline fundraisers – bears out the truth of our impact.

This #ResearchPride month, whether you’re a frontline fundraiser or prospect development professional, please tell your impact stories in staff meetings, on social media, at professional conferences, or wherever you gather.

If you’re a frontline fundraiser, how has fundraising intelligence made an impact on your work, on your campaign, on your fundraising totals? If you’re a prospect development professional, celebrate those prospects you found that turned into major donors or share the impact of your new or renovated prospect management system.

There are still fundraisers at nonprofits struggling in the slow lane, and some of them don’t even know that prospect development exists. Get the word out about your great work, and share your pride!

#ResearchPride

#PDPride

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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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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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Why Prospect Management?

“Burger and Spudhenge” (c) Julie Kahn

Happy #ResearchPride month! I’m so happy to share something new we’re doing this year on The Intelligent Edge to celebrate. Our field is brimming with great talent and great ideas, particularly around the area of prospect management. This month we’re featuring four experts discussing aspects of the topic that impact most of us in the nonprofit sphere. Jessica Balsam kicks us off with an introduction on why prospect management is so important to your nonprofit’s success. Take it away, Jessica! ~Helen

I’m excited to kick off this #researchpride series on prospect management, because I get really excited about great prospect management systems. Like the bun to the burger, like the burger to the bun (in the words of the Beastie Boys), a great prospect management system exists as a perfect and necessary complement to research.

A great prospect management system is more than some tables and fields in a constituent relationship management database (CRM). It’s more than a collection of reports. It encompasses fundraiser training, portfolio building, analysis, and policy. Just like research, it requires close working relationships with frontline fundraisers and a deep knowledge of the practice of major gift fundraising.

(Oh no, did I lose you because I said policy? Come back! Policies are not scary, I promise!)

[Read more…]

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A lot to love

There’s a lot to love about fundraising intelligence (aka prospect development), which, for those of you who are new to the term, is comprised of prospect research, prospect management, due diligence, and fundraising data science.

In research, each profile we build is a love letter, of sorts, to the donor prospect we’re writing about. We gather the information carefully. Ethically. Lawfully.

We are curious and diligent. We pull every loose thread. [Read more…]

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Philaepángelma

As #ResearchPride Month comes to a close I wanted to say thank you to everyone – practitioners and our kind vendor colleagues alike – who participated with loads of tweets, podcasts, blog posts, articles, and even re-posting oldies-but-goodies from years past. It’s been another great month of sharing.

One of the main themes that I noticed this year was the outpouring of gratitude for the way our profession is generously collaborative, and I think that’s something we shouldn’t take for granted. [Read more…]

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March On: Celebrating Research Pride Month

What are some of the things you like best about fundraising and our professional community? One of the ways we are as successful as we are is because of the colleagues that help and teach us. This week in honor of Research Pride month, HBG’s Kristina Gropper shares some of her favorite things about fundraising intelligence and shows her gratitude to colleagues who have helped her along the way. Do you have Research Pride stories to share? Let us know if you post an article or blog and we’ll share it at the end of this article! ~Helen

March is prospect research pride month! 31 days dedicated to creating awareness and celebrating our efforts as prospect researchers. The month also marks my first anniversary at the Helen Brown Group, and it has been an amazing twelve months.

There is a wonderful closeness and comradery that I share with my fellow HBGers, which is truly ironic since most of us work remotely. I have gained so much knowledge and insight in my first year here. In the spirit of prospect research pride month, I wanted to share some key takeaways from my first year:

Ask your brain trust: At HBG, there’s a friendly, helpful, incredible team of researchers. I’ve relied on colleagues to help with everything from ranches in California (thanks, Heather Willis) to co-ops in New York (thanks, Kelly Labrecque and Kenny Tavares). It’s been great getting input from others helps to craft a stronger profile. Do you have a brain trust? What do you rely on them for?

Start or join a work book club: So far, the HBG Book Club has read David Callahan’s The Givers and Brooke Harrington’s Capital Without Borders.  We are in the midst of Jake Bernstein’s Secrecy World.  Having a weekly call to discuss these relevant tomes is a workout for my brain. The information gleaned from these discussions has already been applied to our profiles, and there’s palpable excitement when we read an interesting chapter (like Bernstein’s chapter on freeports).

Tweet and share: At HBG we are encouraged to participate in social media and contribute to the prospect research community online. I was shy at first, but then Rachel Dakarian hosted a training on Twitter, which made it less intimidating. By tweeting (and retweeting) and sharing articles and blog posts on LinkedIn, I’m contributing to the prospect research community instead of being a wallflower.

Get out there and do it: Rachel and I are presenting at Apra of Greater New York’s ProspectCon on March 16 (there are still spots available for the afternoon session, by the way). We’re both passionate about our topic: profiling ultra-high-net-worth individuals and wealth managers.

Wishing you all a month filled with pride and collaboration. We are a uniquely supportive profession, and this month is a great time to celebrate our accomplishments and teamwork!

Research Pride articles

Marianne Pelletier of Staupell Analytics shares her pride as the middle generation of a multi-generational family of researchers – three different professions, one super-sleuth trait – in My Bourne Legacy.

Crystal Leochko’s article, #ResearchPride for Life, is a celebration of her path to prospect research, the mentors who helped her build a career, and the great resources new researchers can use to strengthen their skills.

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Olympic-Sized Appreciation: #ResearchPride

The past two weeks, there’s been a whole lot of Olympics-watching in my household. You too? I don’t know what it is about curling, I don’t even care who’s throwing the stones, I will watch it. (and GO Team USA-men on your gold medal!).

The same goes for ice dancing (did you see those smokin’-hot Canadians?? Wow!) and figure skating. I honestly can’t tell the difference between a lutz, a toe loop, and a Salchow, but the fact that they nail the landing 9/10s of the time is just astonishing.

It was while watching the fortnight highlight farewell review by the NBC Olympic Ice commentators – Scott Hamilton, Liam McHugh and Tanith White – that one of them said in closing how grateful they were to their off-camera research team for helping them be as informed and prepared as they were. That they couldn’t have done their job without them. [Read more…]

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Rock Solid

This past year has been enough to make anybody’s head spin. What would have been the normal amount of news in one of 52 average pre-2017 weeks has been crammed into 341 news cycles of increasingly elevated astonishment. Nearly every day feels to me like watching a piranha feeding frenzy in the Amazon.

Will we end up losing our capacity to relax? Or to believe that we aren’t just missing something in our newsfeed if we don’t immediately see evidence that something shocking has happened overnight? [Read more…]

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