A Small Change- Fundraising Blog

Good prospect research can be invaluable but needs to be paired with good question asking. It is great to learn house values & business ownerships, etc. but if you do not talk with your donor and learn about their family, interests, current situations your research is useless. I wanted to talk today a little bit about what are some good probing questions that I ask and that I have found useful.

Each time I attend a donor event or go on a donor visit I find that they are looking for some kind of relationship. They want to know you care about them and want to know how best to plug them into the organization. When I talk with donors I am doing two things: trying to learn things about them (interests, capacity, family, etc.) and trying to create a two-way relationship. Here are a few questions that I often use to get the conversation started.

• How did you find out about the organization?
• What first connected you to us?
• Why have you stayed connected?
• Are there things you’d like to see us doing that we are not?
• What are your favorite programs?

Make sure to check out other posts I’ve done regarding prospect research.  What questions do you use? Leave them in a comment below.

I hope you enjoyed the information on people searching from the previous post. I want to stress again the importance of respecting people’s information. Today, I’m going to give you a few search techniques that I learned from, Web Search Garage. This will be my last post on using search engines I hope that it was helpful and I’d love any feedback you have.

Principle of Unique Language: We all used different vernacular when we search. Doctors have acronyms and phrases, fundraisers say things like “solicitation,” “cultivation,” and “planned giving.” When you are searching you will find more success if you can start to understand the right language to ask the question.

Principle of Reinvented Wheel: On a new subject try and find specialty sites written by experts on your topic. You can do this by searching for the topic in yahoo or google groups. Try and find blogs that talk about the issue and see what website they point you too.

Principle of Onions: Sometimes good searching takes multiple attempts to find the right information. Start your search as specific as you can then generalize more and more if you are struggling to find good queries.

Principle of Mass Similar: If you are having trouble finding information on your topic try searching using words/phrases that are similar. If you are trying to learn about candy bars search: Mars Snickers M&M’s or try: caramel, peanuts, chocolate.

All the information for this post on how to search come from the book, Web Search Garage, by Tara Calishain. If you want more details where to find this book or other resources that I am reading visit the Resources page.

There are a lot of ways to find information about people online. I talk about a few Prospect Research tools in my post, Prospecting New and Existing Donors. Before I go on I want to mention that the best information comes directly from the donor in the form of questions and answers. So don’t turn to prospect research as your main or only source for information or you will miss an enormous opportunity to build a relationship with your donor.

When looking for information on an individual I will often try and find a bio about them at their business or church. Using site specific searches can help here in a big way. Just use the person’s name and the site of their organization.
Jason Dick site:hope-link.org

Reverse phone look-up can be a great tool as well. Just enter
rphonebook: for residential and you can add city, last name, or phone number
This can help you get information about what neighborhoods they live in and using local county records can give you house values. This tool can be a good indicator of wealth to help you understand what level to make an ask for. You can also use reverse address look-up in www.white-pages.com to find who their neighbors are:
Go to www.white-pages.com, “reverse look-up,” [1234-1235] Address Road, City, State

These searches don’t work every time and when they do make sure that you are being respectful and appropriate about how the information is being used.

Another place where you can find information is through family genealogies. Here are a few sites you can use to help:
FamilySearch: http://www.familysearch.org/
Ancestry.com: http://www.ancestry.com/
Cindi’s List (A gateway to other sites): http://www.familytreeresearch.com/

All the information for this post on how to search come from the book, Web Search Garage, by Tara Calishain. If you want more details where to find this book or other resources that I am reading visit the Resources page.

My theme this week for is not traditional thoughts regarding fundraising. A couple weeks ago I finished a book that has changed the way that I do online research. I thought I would pick up a couple tips on how to use Google and improve my prospect research but it accomplished so much more that I wanted to share it with you.

I will not usually review a book in such completeness but I found that I learned so many every day tools that am now currently using I wanted to share them. Over this next week you will see posts on general searching and searching for people.

If you are looking for specific information on a website you can search only that website in Google. For example if you are searching my site for information on blogging:
Blogging site:asmallchange.net

You can use * to replace a word or phrase:
“there are * types of trees”
“John * Smith”

Google also has special search engines set up for.
Blogs: http://blogsearch.google.com/
Images: http://images.google.com/
News: http://news.google.com/
US Government sites: http://www.google.com/unclesam
Directory: http://www.google.com/dirhp
The Google Directory is different that the general Google site. The main difference between Google & Yahoo is that Google searches the entire website while Yahoo searches the domain name, title, and a brief description. This is called a searchable subject index (as opposed to a full text index). Google Directory is a searchable subject index just like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/).

All the information for this post on how to search come from the book, Web Search Garage, by Tara Calishain. If you want more details where to find this book or other resources that I am reading visit the Resources page.

What is the point of donor prospecting? Most often we do it because we think that with donor research an incredibly wealthy donor is going to appear out of thin air. Then we are going to asking him for a big gift based on what we learned about him and it’s going to change the life of our non-profit. But, that’s not really how it works.

I’ve often found that non-profits rarely have big gifts that fall out of the sky, most of the time they come after years of cultivation. Why would it be any different after donor prospecting? I think we need to changing our mind on donor prospecting and get back to a focus on the donor. Fundraising is about relationship and unless we start there donor prospecting does not help. We need to spend time listening to what our donors are saying about themselves & their interests. If you do that then donor prospecting helps you fill in the gaps.

Prospect Research can be a really useful tool for finding information about existing donors and can bring an organization to the next level. It is important that we have the right mindset. Prospect Research is not the answer for your organization—good fundraising is. Donor research can help and a great way to start is by asking your donors questions. I will be writing an article in a couple weeks about what kinds of questions and conversations will help you in your donor research. If you want more information on how to research your donors check out a previous article I wrote, “Prospecting New and Existing Donors.”