• 08/25/2016 2:27 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Guest Author: Liza Turcotte, Senior Consultant at Target Analytics, a division of Blackbaud, Inc. (APRA-Carolinas Sponsor)

    Liza.Turcotte@blackbaud.com 




    For all the annual giving folks out there…

    Annual giving is one of my favorite fundraising things to talk about.  I “cut my teeth” running an annual giving program, so the topic has a special place in my heart when I work with Blackbaud’s clients.

    It has a special place in nonprofit offices everywhere too.  It’s how you acquire donors, educate them about your essential mission, and hopefully grow their passion into a long, loyal relationship.  Some of your annual giving donors will even grow into major and planned giving, and that’s beyond exciting, isn’t it?

    With that in mind, how can the data you have on hand (yours, ours, or otherwise) help your annual fund get more done for your organization?  Two of my recent clients are trying new tactics, and I thought I’d pass them along in case they’re helpful to you too!

    • Are you mentioning planned giving as part of your annual fund mailings and communications?  If not, how can you work it in?  I am working with a client who asked us to take a custom look at their database to determine which prospects are likely to give through certain vehicles, like annual, major, and planned gifts.  We discovered a lot of prospects sharing high annual and planned giving affinity, and it turns out they have noticed planned giving communications inspire a lot of annual gifts.  They haven’t tried it “the other way” though, so they plan to use an upcoming mail solicitation to highlight a donor who is both an annual and planned gift donor to share the idea with a good audience for a blended message.


    • When do you introduce your annual fund donors to higher touch cultivation?  Another client is thinking about this differently to address a gap between the experience of annual fund donors and major gift donors.  The pipeline hasn’t been as healthy as they would like—but their staff is small and the bandwidth is limited.  To get started they identified a small group of “up and coming” prospects who will make up a portfolio for the annual fund manager.  She will ensure these prospects get some personal outreach and start a higher-touch experience.  The idea is that when they are ready for a more significant relationship, the cultivation process will feel familiar and seamless.

    And if you’re a little lost in the process or it’s time to revisit a long-standing approach, give us a call.  There are lots of ways Target Analytics can help you understand your donor base and potential (you can explore here).



  • 07/14/2016 4:20 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    We are proud to share that a few APRA Carolinas' members will present at APRA's Prospect Development 2016 in Nashville. Congrats to Elizabeth Roma (Helen Brown Group & President-Elect of our chapter), Missy Garner (Clemson University & our chapter's Western SC Regional Representative), Vicki O'Brien (University of South Carolina, & our Midlands SC Regional Representative), and Abigail Mann (University of South Carolina, & one of our wonderful blog writers). If you are attending the conference, we encourage you to show support to your fellow Carolinas' chapter members.

    Click on the presentation title below to view more details. 


    Missy Garner  How to Find the Golden Prospect Pool

    Time: Jul 27, 2016 (09:00 AM - 12:00 PM)

    Prerequisites : Attendees should be able to lead organization conversations to develop portfolio creation and dissolution and maintenance procedures. Creatively suggest criteria for portfolio assignment dependent upon fundraising role and seniority. Shape or develop metrics used to measure portfolio performance. Finally, a mastery of how to best utilize existing resources for portfolio management.

    Presentation Description:  In this session the presenter will use data results from a Segmentation Project to demonstrate how to build an internal rating and confidence level system to uncover best prospects and ultimately develop a “Golden Prospect Pool” for each Development Officer. Other major topics of discussion include tracking methods, metrics, ROI, and goal-setting.


    Elizabeth Roma & Rachel Dakarian 20/20: Strategic Vision for Today’s Philanthropic Realities

    Time: Jul 28, 2016 (10:30 AM - 12:00 PM)

    Presentation Description:  Presenters will provide an overview of the current landscape in philanthropy and issues that have received recent press coverage. Presenters will discuss how the trends we are observing impact all nonprofits, regardless of size or sector, and what attendees can do to help their respective organizations thrive in the world of fundraising today. Attendee participation is encouraged. Topics covered might include (but are not limited to):

    • Megadonors/Megagifts 
    • Prospect research under fire/Protection of personal data 
    • Due diligence fails 
    • Data security 


    Vicki Leigh O'Brien & Abigail Mann Predictive Modeling – Or How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Database

    Time: Jul 29, 2016 (10:30 AM - 12:00 PM)

    Presentation Description:  “How does affinity influence an individual’s giving?” University of South Carolina Prospect Research staff asked themselves that question two years ago – and have been working to answer it ever since. This session will provide an in-depth look into how USC’s shop created a “homegrown” predictive model using attributes in the university’s database to predict the outcomes of future solicitations and identify high quality prospects with a strong affinity for the university. Topics covered will include categorizing and weighting indicators of affinity, running a linear regression, and interpreting its results to give the model meaning. The aim of this session is to present a methodology than can be applied to and tailored to the needs of other prospect research shops. This presentation will expand on material presented at the Fall 2015 APRA Carolinas conference.



    In addition, while in Nashville -- be sure to join us for a social event on Thursday, July 28th!

    We have been invited to join in on Mid-Atlantic’s chapter happy hour at the APRA Int'l Conference!

    Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center's Conservatory Bar

    Thursday 7/28/16

    5:30 -7:00 pm


    To Sign Up Click Here

    for “Are you a member of a chapter?”

    Select "Other" and type in APRA Carolinas


    The Conservatory Bar is located in Garden Conservatory Atrium.

    *no charge to attend, drinks/snacks on your own


    Hope to see you there! 



  • 06/29/2016 3:52 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by: Lisa Ukuku, The Citadel Foundation

    Here at The Citadel Foundation (TCF), gift officers set travel to prospects or donors around one or two anchor visits usually from constituents in their portfolios. Once a gift officer (GO) has set up an appointment with his or her anchor, they send a request form to research and ask us to create a list of additional prospects within a 50 mile radius of the preferred address of the anchor visit(s). The process for developing the list has become automatic and we typically sort the prospect list in three ways:  largest total gifts, propensity score, and zip code.

    This list is usually condensed, (unless the GO wants to see everyone) with only the top donors in the area where the GO is visiting. According to the travel location, the list may contain 30 names or it could contain up to 300 names. The affiliation of the prospect is indicated on the list, which could be an alum, an alum from The Citadel Graduate College (CGC) or a parent of a current cadet/student. We also show the last action or contact that anyone from TCF has had with the prospect so that the GO can see the last time the prospect was visited or if they were ever seen at all.

    Research spends a lot of hours fine tuning the list to make sure we are forwarding the best of the best prospects in the area requested. It could take us up to three days to return the names to the GO’s. We also attach any miscellaneous notes to the email when we send the list to indicate any additional information we may learn about some of the prospects on the list. There are situations where the prospect may already be assigned to a GO but has not been seen in a while so we will suggest the traveling GO speak with the assigned GO to see if they could visit the prospect. As a side note, if the assigned GO has a strategy in place that we were not aware of (not noted in the database) we support his or her decision for another gift officer not to visit at that time. If a prospect is a current parent, we consult with the parent program GO who will confirm with the appropriate campus entity that the cadet is in good standing prior to the meeting.   

    So this all brings me to the question in the title of this piece. Should there be a minimum number of visits to justify a GO’s travel? What would your reaction be, after spending three days developing a list of prospects, and finding out the GO scheduled three visits? As a researcher, you may feel a little let down when you learn this. We are wondering if any development shops have a policy that sets a minimum number of required visits for GO travel. If so, we would love to hear from you. We are interested in knowing how many visits should be set per day and the standard duration of travel. If two or more GO’s are traveling to the same area, should they both go on the same visit or each have their own separate visits scheduled?  How many visits should be set if the trip also includes an alumni event on one of the three days? 

    We would love to hear your feedback! Please feel free to reply to us with your questions or comments.


  • 05/27/2016 2:52 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by: Elizabeth Roma, The Helen Brown Group, APRA-Carolinas President-Elect

    Whether you are new to the field of prospect development or are a seasoned veteran, chances are you’ve been asked to research a foundation. Maybe you discovered a family foundation in the course of researching a new donor, or took a deep dive into the activities of a trustee’s company foundation in order to better understand how her business approaches philanthropy, or were asked to create a list of foundations that seem likely to support your organization. If you haven’t done this type of work already, you can just about bet that you will be asked to do it at some point, probably in the not too distant future. According to Linsey McGoey’s book No Such Thing as a Free Gift, almost half of the roughly 85,000 private foundations in the US were started in the past fifteen years, and new foundations are being created at a rate of about 5,000 each year.

    In many ways foundation research can be a dream assignment for prospect researchers. Foundations are created exclusively for the purpose of philanthropy, and in the US they are required by law to provide a high degree of transparency about their operations through detailed reporting on their assets, grantmaking, and personnel. In addition to what they reveal explicitly about the philanthropic activities of their founders, foundation filings can often give us clues into the lives of our prospects that we might not get from other sources.

    I recently recorded a video podcast with Helen Brown, founder and president of the Helen Brown Group, in which we discuss the basics of foundation research, including what to look for when researching foundations, how to navigate the Form 990, ways to approach identifying new foundation prospects, and how to make connections with foundations through your own constituents. If you could use a primer on foundation research, settle in with a fresh cup of tea and have a look. I hope you’ll learn something new and pick up some new tips!


  • 04/25/2016 3:46 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by: Abigail Mann, University of South Carolina

    In November 2015, the Prospect Research Department at the University of South Carolina received a request from one of our professors based overseas. They were planning an alumni event for the coming year and wanted a list of university alumni living in France and Germany. As our team’s international analyst, I was handed an early Christmas present.

    My initial plan was to conduct a search on LinkedIn (LI) filtered by school and location and compile these results. The search was successful, but there was a catch – I was working with a basic account, which meant that nearly all of the alumni in my search results were named “LinkedIn Member.” So what’s an analyst to do with a deadline looming and a project budget of free resources only? Below is a methodology as well as tips, tricks, and work-arounds I discovered as a result of this project. It may not solve all of your problems, but you’ll still be surprised by what you do find along the way.

    Start with What You Have

    My first step was to regroup and start closer to home – specifically, what did our CRM have to tell us. If your CRM is anything like ours, then you tend to take your international data with a grain of salt. Foreign regulations and privacy laws make it difficult to verify and update contact information, screen for capacity, etc., so this data isn’t always as current as what we have on file for our domestic alumni. I also knew that there were going to be gaps in my data. For example, my LI search for alumni in France returned over 300 results while our CRM listed only 140. A smaller dataset for each country actually ended up being an advantage, since I was going to have to do some research on each constituent individually. (Short of being tied to my desk chair and put on a caffeine drip, there was no way I was going to be able to reverse engineer the results for the 300+ alumni in France, not to mention the nearly 500 LI said were in Germany).

    Utilizing our CRM’s dashboard, I exported spreadsheets containing education and address information for alumni in each country and combined the data via an Access database. Once I had my master list, constituents were checked against three main data points – address/country of residence, e-mail address, and social media.

    Verify Your Data

    In addition to designations for home, business, etc., addresses in our CRM are further coded as “Good”, “Bad”, and “Deceased”. Deceased individuals had been excluded from the dataset, so I was dealing only with “Good” and “Bad” addresses. Regardless of whether an address was coded good or bad, there was little I could do concerning the postal address itself. I could, however, reasonably verify that they were still in the country in question via social media. For the sake of convenience, I utilized LI rather than other social media platforms, since it was most likely to have additional education and employment information that might be missing from our constituents’ records. I ran searches for each name on the lists, applying additional filters for education and country/location as necessary. Though this took time, it proved to be a helpful work-around as it let me find through individual searches profiles for constituents who displayed anonymously in my initial master search. Additionally, if a constituent had an e-mail address on file, these were checked to see if they were valid (mailtester.com is a great free resource for this).

    By this point, my spreadsheet was a festive sea of color coding that would have made catalogers at libraries everywhere jump for joy. There were constituents with good postal addresses (so far as we knew), valid e-mail addresses, and who followed the university on LI, constituents with bad postal address but good e-mail addresses and no social media presence, and constituents for whom all we had was a bad address, as well as every other combination of these criteria and a partridge in a pear tree. From these results, I refined the datasets for each country down to those alumni who, to the best of our knowledge, we had a viable means of contacting.

    Constituents were included in the final lists based on the presence of one or more of the following criteria:

    • ·         A good postal address
    • ·         A valid e-mail address
    • ·         A LI profile wherein they referenced attending and/or followed the University of South Carolina
    • ·         Any combination of the above

    Those who only met the social media criterion were included based on the rationale that the professor could make arrangements to promote the event through this platform. As followers of the university they, as well as those alumni who got lost in the “LinkedIn Member” shuffle, could still be made aware of the event. Rows for these constituents were highlighted on the spreadsheet while all other contact and education information was displayed in columns.

    Data Integrity and Data Mining

    An unexpected result of this project was that we were able to improve the integrity of the data we had on file for a number of these international alumni. In some cases, we discovered that our “Good” addresses weren’t so good after all. For example, a constituent we had every reason to believe was living and working in Paris had since relocated to Oslo, Norway. Other constituents had been promoted within their company or now worked for a different company altogether. This meant that some of our e-mail addresses were likely to be invalid now, since they were business e-mail addresses reflecting a past employer. Any necessary updates were made to constituents’ records and static URLs to their LI profiles were added as well. Again, this took time, but we are now able to point to collection of international records in our database and say that the information is reliable.

    Additionally, it is our hope to use this data to help find international proactive leads for our fundraisers.

    While fundraising strategies and donor appeal vary by country, the profiles of several alumni on our lists showed some of the characteristics we commonly look for in domestic donors – affinity for the university, interest in/support of particular causes or initiatives, and job titles suggestive of disposable income. We are curious to see if these factors hold true across the Atlantic as well.

  • 03/25/2016 9:12 AM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by: Krystal Wilson, Assistant Director of Prospect Management & Research at Appalachian State University, and Past-President of APRA-Carolinas

    In honor of #ResearchPride month, as we advocate for our profession, I’d like to share a few tips on how to advocate within your own organization.

    1. Step up and take initiative. Don’t wait for things to happen to you. For example, review gift reports daily or weekly to look at new donors, determine a threshold that works for your shop, and screen them. You may find a donor that has given $25,000+ to similar organizations… can you say ‘research win’?
    2. Don’t just pull up a chair to the strategy table; own it. Speak up, ask questions, and let your voice be heard. Whether in meetings or in an email with the typical research that you provide, share your opinion or insights (ex: patterns you’ve noticed in a prospect’s giving) as it can change the solicitation strategy.
    3. Increase your presence. Check in with development officers on a regular basis with a phone call or stop by their offices.  This may open the door to get more information than by only reading contact reports. If possible, volunteer at events so you can meet prospects and donors. Some people will share their life story or maybe that tidbit of info that you haven’t been able to verify. Score!
    4. Track your work. Create (or ask your lovely report-writer colleagues to create) a report to show the number of prospects you rated, or number of records that you added or updated research, or number of prospects you identified.
    5. Build your network within your organization, your local APRA chapter, and in APRA International. APRA is truly a community of learners that empower one another; so, I strongly encourage you to get involved. Through APRA, I learned how to be an information strategist, how to enhance a prospect development program, and have met many amazing people that I have the honor to call friends. #IamAPRA
    6. Last but not least, be positive and have fun! Having a positive attitude can increase productivity and creativity, as well as lower stress.

    Feel free to share your tips on how to advocate. Thanks for reading! #ResearchPride



  • 02/15/2016 2:44 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by Beth Inman, Senior Director of Prospect Management & Research Analysis
    University of South Carolina
    President, APRA Carolinas

    In last month’s post about the University of South Carolina’s recently concluded portfolio consultation project, I examined why we bothered doing the project and what we learned from the process. Since then, I have been thinking a lot about everything we’ve been doing since it ended. The project is over, right? We even made a toast to the project’s ending! So, why are my team and I still working on it?

    After reviewing approximately 3,500 manager assignments and releasing about half of those assignments, we realized we needed a way to know which prospects were released in the database besides simply ending the manager relationship (manager relationships are assigned on the Relations screen in our database). We changed a lot of data in the system as a result of this project and wanted it to be clear in a constituent’s record if they had been released from a portfolio. It doesn’t mean the constituent isn’t a major gift prospect for another division, but information on being recently released from a portfolio should be helpful if the development officer decides to proceed. Some constituents look great on “paper,” but what we didn’t want was the constituent to look great to another development officer and they start the qualification process unnecessarily.  We made the decision to add ‘released prospect’ information on our Actions screen (where we document contact reports, manager requests, etc.) to briefly explain the prospect had recently been released from a portfolio. We recommended they communicate with the formerly assigned manager for more details or to contact my team for info on why the prospect was released.  This screen is a common one  referred to (or it should be!) when development officers are reviewing a constituent’s record. Also, putting the ‘released prospect’ information on the Actions screen means it will appear on our portfolio reports staff can pull from the database.

    Another aspect of our portfolio consultation project was streamlining our manager assignments. We used to have 5 different categories of manager assignments. It was a lot for everyone to keep up with; this many options made it easier for a manager to have too many prospects but it also made it easier for some prospects to have too many managers. From the development officer perspective, there could be ‘analysis paralysis’ trying to determine how the constituent should be assigned. For example, was the prospect capable of making a major gift in the next 2 years or would it be more than 2 years? Had the prospect made their ultimate gift and they just needed stewardship? Also, the admission that it was too easy for them to forget about prospects who weren’t in their primary portfolio made it easy to proceed with narrowing the prospect manager assignment options.

    To rewind briefly, something to think about during a portfolio consultation: it is important to review the constituent’s record when ending a prospect manager relationship. This likely sounds like an obvious suggestion, but it is easy to try and save a few clicks when dealing with a high volume of updates.  Review the constituent’s record for any open stages and close them. Review the status of any asks that may still be open and close them. Are there any remaining assigned managers? If so, what is the assignment and should they remain assigned? Taking the time to do this will help to ensure your pipeline reports and your aging reports are accurate and will prevent you from going back and doing this after the project is over. Trust me, I speak from experience.

    To each portfolio consultation meeting, we brought copies of the portfolio spreadsheet with the reviewer’s notes. There were always questions and always things to follow up on after the meeting. The notes we took helped to make sure we didn’t forget anything post meeting but also helped us to spot check for accuracy. When all of the consultations were over, we split up the spreadsheets and made sure what the development officer wanted was what we had changed (or not) in the database. We try to be paperless as much as we can, but these printouts have been valuable in every phase of the project. For the record, what the development officer wanted to do with the prospect was noted and the spreadsheet was updated with this information and saved. After all of the changes were made, the development officer’s portfolio was re-run and emailed to them along with the final stats on what % of their prospects were kept and released.

    I am sharing these suggestions and our experiences because, in some cases, we learned the hard way some tasks should be done during the project, not after.  If I can help anyone save some time, it would make me very happy.

    You might be asking yourself what’s next for our development officers’ portfolios and how can we keep the momentum going on the progress we’ve made so far? I am currently drafting a schedule of consultations for the next 18 months for members of my team and me to meet with the development officers. Their portfolios will be reviewed again and we will meet with them to discuss any changes, strategies and ways our team can help them. Stay tuned for an update on the progress of our regularly scheduled consultations!


  • 01/25/2016 2:13 PM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    Written by: Beth Inman, Senior Director of Prospect Management & Research Analysis, University of South Carolina and President of APRA-Carolinas


    Picture it: the year was 2015 and the University of South Carolina’s $1B capital campaign, Carolina’s Promise, was coming to an end. And, one of our development officers had 300 prospects in her portfolio.  Yes, 300. I can hear the collective gasps as you read this and wonder how a portfolio could be that big! In the development officer’s defense, there had been turnover in her department and she inherited a lot of prospects.  That being said, 300 is an unreasonable amount of prospects in a portfolio and it was one of the primary motivations to get started on a large scale portfolio review project.

    In the past, portfolio “reviews” in my shop were very one-sided and there was very little actual reviewing going on. A list of their prospects was sent to the development officers requesting they review it and let us know if there were any changes. You can imagine how many changes were sent back to us; not many. I knew the process wasn’t working but I honestly had a hard time wrapping my head around how to do a project like this for 40 development officers. We decided reviewing one prospect manager category for each development officer was a good beginning; every Primary Manager assignment (approx. 3,400) would be reviewed.

    In February 2015, I convened a Prospect Management Committee to discuss the idea of a portfolio review project and came to the meeting prepared with stats to illustrate the project’s importance. I created graphs to show the total number of Primary Manager assignments and from there, broke down how many of those were individual constituents and how many were corporate and foundation constituents. To help make my case, I also included the % of constituents who had not been contacted in the last 12 months (28%) and, without sharing names, included the high and low number of prospects in the portfolios. In proposing the project, I shared that the Primary Manager assignments would be reviewed and one of three recommendations would be made: keep, release or needs attention. The committee saw this as a positive step in helping them manage their portfolios and suggested that my team approaching it from a positive approach would go a long way in the project being successful. At that point, we made the decision to refer to the review process as a ‘portfolio consultation.’  Getting the support of this committee was a huge boost to getting the project started officially.

    One lucky development officer agreed to be our guinea pig; we did a practice review of her Primary Manager assignments and scheduled a meeting with her to discuss. For each Primary Manager assignment, each record was reviewed for information in the contact reports, total giving, date of last gift, # of years giving to Carolina and the status of any major gift asks. We also reviewed the constituent’s philanthropic giving outside of Carolina and their gift capacity rating was reviewed for any changes. This first consultation clocked in at an hour and a half because we discussed every prospect on her list. While this was very informative, we knew it wasn’t logical for each consultation to last 90 minutes. From there, we made the decision to sort the spreadsheet by the recommendation for the prospect – the prospects recommended they keep would be grouped at the top, the prospects needing attention would be grouped in the middle and the prospects recommended for release would be grouped at the bottom of the list.  This helped with the efficiency of our reviews; we would only discuss the ‘keep’ prospects if the development officer wanted to release a prospect we recommended they keep.  This way, our time was spent delving into the ‘needs attention’ and the ‘releases.’

    Other time savers were to have a template email to send out to the development officer when it was time to schedule their consultation meeting and a template in Excel for the review and its results/recommendations.  In the email, we explained the project overall, what data was being reviewed and what we were requesting they do prior to the meeting.  The Excel template ensured the data and recommendations we were providing were aesthetically and analytically consistent; an example of the template is pictured below.

    This project took approximately 7 months; we met with 39 development officers and reviewed 3,545 manager assignments. We recommended that 61% of the manager assignments be kept and 39% of them be released.  After the project was complete, we calculated that, in the end, 59% of the assignments were kept and 41% were released.  It was validating to know that the development officers agreed with almost all of our recommendations.  From the development officers’ view, they often told us how helpful this process was and that they really appreciated our input on their prospects. There were even some who said they had forgotten about a few of their prospects.

    Why bother with a portfolio review project? We learned a LOT! By meeting with every development officer about their portfolio, there was valuable dialogue about their prospects and their strategies and we also heard some really great stories!  We updated a lot of solicitations, we adjusted manager assignments when the development officer felt like their prospect was better suited for another division, we updated a lot of records with information on divorces, deaths and we now have a much more accurate picture of the total number of real prospects under management.  This helps with gift forecasting, campaign planning and staffing requests.

    This project was also a good opportunity for my team to show how valuable we are to the division of development. We have access to a lot of information and we are the experts on finding, interpreting and analyzing this information.  Our hope is the directors of development will continue to utilize our expertise and view us as the valuable partners we are in the University’s fundraising efforts.


    *This project would not have been possible without Kristin Richardson, Vicki O’Brien, Abigail Mann and Matt Bundrick.  This was an enormous project for my team and they were invaluable throughout the entire process.


  • 12/17/2015 9:45 AM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    December's blog comes to us from Barbara Chadwell, Director of Prospect Management and Research at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC.

    When an organization has a change in leadership positions there is often a mixture of excitement and uneasiness in the air.  Existing procedures, protocols, and reports will be used or seen for the first time by new players.  Assembling information that will help assess the soundness of your fundraising operation will be a given.  Those of us that work in prospect management and research should be among the most important go-to persons because we have one of the best “big picture” views of the fundraising operation’s strengths and weaknesses. We see the work of most everyone and we know the ins and outs of the giving and prospect data.

    During times of transition, hopefully it is revealed that your prospect management system is one of your organization’s most important assets and not one of your weakest links.  Many of us have spent a great deal of time establishing and refining a prospect management and reporting system that captures the basics:  prospect ratings, assignments, external screenings, contact histories, solicitation data, and action items.  We have reports that can be sliced and diced numerous ways to reveal the big picture for anyone who will take the time to review them.  The system shouldn’t be complicated.  It just has to be kept up to date!  If you haven’t been successful in eliminating shadow lists and gotten your leadership to support the idea that “if it isn’t recorded in the database then it didn’t happen” then your big picture view will be incomplete.  The database must be the central point of information sharing; otherwise accountability and progress reporting will continue to be a difficult and time consuming task. 

    To this end, one of the most fundamental things you must stress with every new member of the fundraising team is the importance of documentation.   Be specific about your standards.  Share examples.  Give them feedback.  Show them the work of the person that does this the best on the fundraising team.   When you see gaps, keep after them to do better.  In our respective areas we all have a responsibility to record value-added information and leave a plan of action for the person that may come after us.  Without a shared trail of activity, you can have potential chaos when a key position becomes vacated.  You will lose momentum and you may even run the risk of looking unprofessional because you’ve let something important fall between the cracks.  Why risk that happening?

    We should never quit being among the loudest advocates for recording and centralizing information.   When you have a simple prospect management system that everyone buys into and leadership commits to reporting from, then there is no angst in accurately answering questions such as “How many major gift solicitations did your team make last year?” or “What asks are currently outstanding?”  In the end, the prospect management system that you maintain on a daily basis will be an everlasting gift to your organization.

     

     

     

  • 10/30/2015 11:43 AM | Apra Carolinas (Administrator)

    October's post comes to us from Mary Collin, who is the Director of Research/Alumni Relations/Special Projects at Central Piedmont Community College.

    I have been very fortunate in my professional career in prospect research. In my early career, my employer brought in two power-house women who at the time were working for a consulting firm. They helped me set up shop, trained me on the available tools, and ignited my already abundant curiosity. They helped me refine and deliver gathered information into a workable, cohesive format that would come to define me as a solid and reliable prospect researcher.

    I have watched the stellar careers of both these women over the years. How fortunate I was to have been schooled, tutored, and mentored by these women.

    One of the most important lessons I learned during training was to ask questions. I proudly delivered a project to a development officer only to have it handed back with a note that it was not what was needed. When I called the consultants, I got this sage reply, “You gave her what she asked for, but it was not what she wanted. Did you take the time to ask her what she needed, how she was going to use it, or what the overall project was?”

    Keeping those questions as my focal point has helped me through the years. It keeps me humble, reminds me that while we are all working towards a common goal, the delivery of research goods needs to be in a usable format for the development officer receiving it. As a single-person shop, that means I sometimes have to append my delivery to meet the audience.

    Am I spoiling my development officers? Maybe.

    Getting to know the development officers, their personalities, and needs, gets me invited into their inner circle. I get called into strategy meetings to weigh-in and offer opinions based on findings. I have learned to trust the development officers and they have learned to trust me.

    Developing relationships with the development officers also led me to join the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) and to gain certification as a Certified Fund Raising Executive (CFRE.) Was this necessary? No.  What it did, was to give me insight into the dynamics of fundraising and the challenges of being a development officer. I believe it made me a better researcher. It helped change my mindset, and chinked away at the wall that sometimes separates “us” from “them.”

    The great thing about our profession is that we all have the opportunity to be great, to find our niche, our specialty and to create a dynamic working relationship that will advance the field and the profession. So take the chance, strike up a conversation with the development officers and ask what they need from you. You might be pleasantly surprised.

    I will always be indebted to Karen L. Green and Diane Crane, for their knowledge-base and mentoring skills that helped launch my career.

     

  Apra Carolinas. All rights reserved.

For any questions or corrections, please reach out to ApraCarolinas@gmail.com
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