Missy Garner, Former Director of Prospect Research
Rick Loveday, Prospect Research Analyst

Part 4: Using the Model

This post is the fourth in a four-part series that will outline how Clemson University’s Prospect Research Team developed a philanthropic model score.

Over the past few months we have looked at how to develop the concept of the project, in this case the model score (Part 1). Next we looked at how to build the model (Part 2). Nothing is ever perfect out of the box, so we then detailed how our team refined and tweaked the model (Part 3). Now that the easy parts were over, the hardest challenge loomed in front of us. We had to figure out how to introduce the score to our Development Officers.

Our Development Officers live in a world of hard assets. They are accustomed to focusing on wealth data like property values, salary, stock ownership, and in some cases personal property such as planes and boats. This model score asks our Development Officers to abandon most of that line of thinking. A full break from asset-based wealth would have been an impossible sell. That was part of our reason for keeping property ownership of $2 million or more in the model. It kept something that was familiar to the Development Officers, while still introducing some new logic.

One of the perks we discovered while doing research in preparation for the project was the analysis that DonorSearch had done on their own philanthropic database. They found some key levels of real estate ownership and how those levels tied into philanthropy.

• An individual that owns $750K – 1 million worth of real estate is 2 times more likely to give philanthropically than the average person.
• An individual that owns $1-2 million worth of real estate is 4 times more likely to give philanthropically than the average person.
• An individual that owns $2+ million worth of real estate is 17 times more likely to give philanthropically than the average person.

*https://www.donorsearch.net/how-to-identify-a-high-quality-fundraising-prospect

Using this information, we were able to show our Development Officers how real estate ownership is more than a wealth marker. It is also a philanthropic marker.

We rolled out the concept at the group, or team, level. We started with the Principal Gift Committee. This served the dual purpose of introducing it to a team and to our Vice President and Associate Vice Presidents, since they were all on the Committee. Simply showing up with a list of prospects would not be enough. We had to explain what they were looking at and why they should care. We included key points such as the real estate ownership stats (listed above) and the political giving stats (from Part 2).

We also created two cheat sheets to help make the score easily understandable. The first was a color-coding system that prioritized what we felt were the important groups. We added the minimum values for each of the scores to give a dollar range minimum for each color.

The second cheat sheet explained the dollar value associated with each of the decimal places.

While the Principal Gift team digested the cheat sheets, we saved the best example for last. In the course of building the model, we identified the perfect prospect to highlight the validity of using philanthropic data over asset-based data. This prospect had a history of over $700,000 in political giving. When we looked the prospect up in our database, we found the estimated wealth rating of just over $500,000. That rating labeled the prospect as a fringe Major Gift Level prospect who would likely never make it on a Development Officer’s radar. We saw shocked looks on the faces around the table as we relayed that information.

We also developed a report that tracked the potential principal gift prospects. It showed the attempted appointments and meetings for each prospect. At the request of the Principal Gift Committee, we agreed to review this report at the future monthly meetings.

As with any good project, our effort is never officially completed. It can always be tweaked or updated. With the success of the initial test batch screening of 5,000, we made plans to screen and apply the model to a larger group of our constituents. We recently screened an additional 25,000 people.

If you have any questions about this project or you want to know more details about building the model, feel free to email me at rloveda@clemson.edu.

Comments have been disabled on the Apra-Carolinas blog. Please visit Rick's post on LinkedIn and share your thoughts there!

Missy Garner, Former Director of Prospect Research
Rick Loveday, Prospect Research Analyst

Part 3: Refining the Model

This post is the third in a four-part series that will outline how Clemson University’s Prospect Research Team developed a philanthropic model score.

Part 1: How to Develop an Analytics Project: Building a Model Score

Part 2: Building the Model

We built our model score using a whole number scale of 0-5, with 5 being the best. As we applied this model score, we realized it did not differentiate between the different levels of giving; it merely stated whether an individual hit the minimum requirements. We had no idea if an individual gave $15,000 or $100,000 to political causes. We also could not distinguish between a person who gave a $5,000 philanthropic gift with one who gave a $500,000 gift. We quickly came to the realization that we had to develop the model further to account for the wide range of gifts. In order to solve this, we decided to incorporate a decimal-based scoring system.

The concept behind the whole number score worked well to highlight which groups a constituent fell into. Could that same concept be used on the decimal side to highlight which giving ranges that same constituent met? We decided to use the numbers 3, 6, and 9 for our giving breakdown. The number 3 meant that the constituent gave enough to meet the minimum threshold, which was $15,000 in lifetime political giving or a $5,000 single philanthropic gift. The 6 was applied to those with over $50,000 in giving, whether in lifetime political giving or in a single philanthropic gift. The 9 represented over $100,000 in giving. Since there were two types of giving, we decided to use two decimal places. The first place would represent the philanthropic giving while the second decimal would represent political giving.

When we applied this tweak to the score, it proved, almost immediately, to be a significant upgrade over the first model. We quickly realized some of the major deficiencies in the original model. Using the whole number score, we thought that the more categories a constituent was in, the better that person was as a prospect. The tweaked score immediately proved that to be false.

With the whole number method, a constituent that appeared in all five categories had a score of 5. Another constituent that only met the philanthropic and political giving categories but missed the non-profit/foundation association, the real estate ownership and the SEC insider/business executive aspects had a score of 2. So, according to the whole number score, 5 is always better than 2.

When we applied the decimal score to those same constituents, the constituent with the 5 only met the minimum giving levels and had a new score of 5.33. The constituent that had the score of 2 had a largest single philanthropic gift of $50,000 and a lifetime political giving total over $100,000. This updated that constituent’s score from a 2 to a 2.69.

In looking at the updated scores, we could make the argument that a score of 2.69 is better than a score of 5.33. While both constituents are acting in a philanthropic manner, the constituent with the 2.69 is giving at a significantly higher level and thus is potentially a higher priority.

As a result of this change, the decimal places became the primary focus and the whole numbers became a minor piece of extra information. We found a whole new crop of potential prospects to focus on. Our next task was figuring out how to introduce the model score to our Development Officers and explain how it would be useful. We expected this to be a more daunting challenge than actually creating the model score since our fundraisers lived in a world where hard assets, such as real estate values and salaries, were the basis for determining which constituents they would pursue. We were about to ask them to potentially ignore a constituent who is the president of a company and lives in a $4M home - but had given nothing philanthropically or politically - and instead focus on a constituent who owns a small business and lives in a $200,000 home, but who has donated a significant amount of money to various organizations.

The next, and final, blog post will detail how we introduced our model score to our Development Officers.

Comments have been disabled on the Apra-Carolinas blog. Please visit Rick's post on LinkedIn and share your thoughts there!

Dana Green, Prospect Researcher at Lenoir-Rhyne University, received the Apra-Carolinas Professional Development Scholarship for 2018. This $1,500 scholarship can be applied to any professional development activities offered by Apra Carolinas or Apra International. Dana used her scholarship to attend the annual Prospect Development conference hosted by Apra International.

Christopher Resh, Apra-Carolinas Secretary and Blog Editor, spoke to Dana about her experience.

Christopher: Hi Dana! How was Pittsburgh? Any tourist highlights stick out at you?

Dana: I’ve been to Pittsburgh many times before - I have family there - so I’m already familiar with most of the tourist attractions. I did find an awesome taco restaurant across the street from the conference venue, though.

CR: Have you attended Apra PD prior to this year?

DG: No, this was my first time!

CR: I’m glad Apra-Carolinas was able to facilitate it, then. What made you choose this conference in particular?
DG: The fact that it’s strictly for prospect researchers. I’ve spent a lot of time on the Apra forums learning from my peers, so I knew this would be a good fit for me. I even recognized some people from the forums at the conference.

CR: There are so many opportunities for education in our growing field - does anything unique stick out about this conference as compared to others you’ve attended?

DG: I’ve attended a CASE conference in the past and Apra PD was a very different experience. There were some researchers there, but also many frontline fundraisers and administrators. Everyone at Apra PD, on the other hand, shared a passion for research. This made it much easier to meet and relate to other attendees - everyone was entering conversations with more of a common understanding.

CR: Did you a have a favorite session?
DG: I especially enjoyed a presentation on using LinkedIn for research. I was familiar with some of the more basic functions before the conference, but there is much more depth to it than I realized. Advanced search, in particular, seems very useful. There are also ways to find connections to boards and other groups for your 1st, 2nd, and 3rd degree connections, which is a great source of information.

CR: Were there any “audience participation” opportunities that stuck out to you?

DG: Yes, there was a “New Researchers Symposium” featuring an exercise in which groups of attendees would collaboratively create a research profile. I especially liked that this activity gave us a chance to talk process instead of just resources - not just where to look, but where to look first and how to move from there.  

CR: Did you notice any common themes throughout the sessions? Anything that was new to you?

DG: The common themes I noticed were shared by my office, actually. One that stuck out was the shift from reactive to proactive research, and the benefits of taking the time to find the best prospects rather than jumping from event to event.

CR: Do you plan to commit to any specific projects or changes in light of what you learned at the conference?

DG: I’ll definitely stay committed to data cleanup. The importance of good data was mentioned many times at the conference. I’m also walking away committed to putting time into data analytics. It’s slower work, but finding the patterns and hidden gems in our database is rewarding.

CR: Thanks for your time, Dana! One last question - would you recommend that the next recipient of this scholarship use their funding on this conference?
DG: Absolutely! It was a great way to make like-minded friends and to network with researchers facing similar challenges.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Comments have been disabled on the Apra-Carolinas blog. Please visit Dana's post on LinkedIn and share your thoughts there! 

Missy Garner, Former Director of Prospect Research
Rick Loveday, Prospect Research Analyst

Part 2: Building the Model

This post is the second in a four-part series that will outline how Clemson University’s Prospect Research Team developed a philanthropic model score.

We sent the data off using DonorSearch’s secure server and received our results within 24 hours. The file contained over 120 data points for us to digest. We wanted to verify our list of philanthropic indicators (see Part 1: Concept Development) fit with the data that was returned. In order to do this, we would need to pore through each and every data point.

The dataset was made up of our principal gift level donors, along with alumni and current parents who had estimated wealth of $1 million or greater based on our ResearchPoint wealth screenings. We reviewed the DonorSearch data for just our group of known principal level donors. This was the group that had the elements we wanted to identify as key traits. We focused on the following five key traits: a one-time gift of $5,000 or more to Clemson or other philanthropic organization; board membership, trusteeship, or other association with a foundation or non-profit; lifetime political giving totaling more than $15,000; $2 million or more in real estate ownership; and listed as an SEC insider or business executive.

Political giving quickly became the dominant trait among the principal level donors. When trying to determine who is a likely major gift prospect, looking at those who have been large political donors is one of the best places to start. Not only is political giving at high levels a knock-out indicator for wealth, but at the higher levels it is an incredibly predictive marker for philanthropy.

When charitable and political giving were combined, those that had given over $2,500 total in lifetime political giving were responsible for over 54% of all philanthropy. An individual whose life-time FEC giving is $10,000 or larger is almost undeniably wealthy. An individual whose life-time FEC giving is $15,000 or larger has almost undeniably made a five, six, or seven figure charitable donation. Out of the principal level donors, over 50% had a lifetime political giving total over $15,000.

As we filled out the model, we decided to assign one point to each of the above listed five key traits. That gave us a scoring system where an individual could be rated between 0 and 5, with 5 being the best. As we applied the whole number score, we realized that this model score did not differentiate between the different levels of giving – it merely stated whether an individual hit the minimum requirements. We had no idea if an individual gave $15,000 or $100,000 politically. We also could not distinguish between a person who gave a $5,000 philanthropic gift or a $500,000 gift. We quickly came to the realization that we had to further develop the model to account for the different range of gifts. In order to solve this, we needed to figure out a decimal-based scoring system.

The next blog post will detail how we tweaked our model score using two decimal places to highlight differences in giving.

From Charlotte to Charleston: A Day at the Citadel

Emily Hinz, Prospect Research Analyst, UNC Charlotte

I often explain how I ended up in UNC Charlotte’s Prospect Strategy and Research (PSR) department as a “happy little accident,” as the great Bob Ross would say, and it’s true. Two years ago, I didn’t even know this field existed. I began exploring the non-profit sector in college as, having majored in an English major but feeling rather unsure of what I wanted to do post-graduation. After spending time with the Boys & Girls Clubs and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, I landed a Research Assistant position at the UNC Charlotte Foundation in May of 2017.

We have a rather small shop here in Charlotte, but my boss set me up for success by immediately activating memberships for me in both Apra and Apra-Carolinas. That fall, I received the Apra-Carolinas Road Trip Scholarship – a very exciting endeavor for someone with only six months of experience in the field. I wanted to pick a shop similar to our own, but with enough differences for me to find some achievable new ideas and projects for my team.

At UNC Charlotte, PSR is composed of me (the only prospect researcher on staff), my director, and a temporary employee who assists with data entry. We are in the public phase of a $200 million campaign, a figure we hope to reach by the end of fiscal year 2020. Due to our small size, I’ve been required to learn a great deal in a short amount of time, which I’ve really enjoyed. My experience, however, is still restricted to one phase of a campaign. How can PSR help reach our Foundation’s goals with so little time left for discovery work? What happens to a PSR team after a campaign closes? How does the team prepare for a new campaign? I sought to use the Road Trip Scholarship to answer these questions.

After looking into several schools in the Carolinas, I decided that The Citadel would be the best fit for what I hoped to learn. They recently exceeded a $175 million campaign goal, closing in May of 2018 at $225 million. Wow! This put them in the perfect phase for the focus of my curiosity: post-campaign no man’s land. In addition, their PSR shop consists of only two employees and supports about 15 Gift Officers, a setup that closely mirrors UNC Charlotte. 

After a few weeks of email correspondence, I set out in early May to meet Libby Davis and Lisa Ukuku of The Citadel’s Prospect Management and Research department. This dynamic duo was incredibly welcoming and friendly. We spent much of the day sharing stories of triumph and struggle within this business, and I took away some great advice throughout.

One of my favorite additions that Libby and Lisa have implemented at The Citadel Foundation (TCF) is the research request form. Fields on the form include requestor, purpose of request, format, and other criteria depending on the data being sought. The form can be completed either electronically or by hard copy. I think this would be a great idea for my shop because, even though we use a spreadsheet to document research requests and their completion dates, we do not do a very good job of tracking why someone requests research. If I receive a request for research I’ve already completed, I usually rely on my archived emails – or my memory – to assess why a new profile would be needed. If it was completed before my time, however, I’m plain out of luck. I have started to keep track of requests myself in hopes that we will soon have a form like The Citadel’s.

We also talked about several fundraising methods used at TCF. One I found particularly interesting was their utilization of fundraising challenges based on class. There is a huge emphasis on class at The Citadel; when Citadel alum run into each other, their first question is, “What’s your class and company?” To optimize this, the Foundation created “Class Campaigns.” These are mini-campaigns run each year that challenge a specific class to raise a certain amount of money during milestone reunion years – their 10^th, 25^th, 40^th, and 50^th anniversaries of graduation. TCF even has class reunion gift officers to focus on these efforts. They are currently challenging the class of 1978 to raise $1.75 million by the end of this year for their 40^th reunion celebration at Homecoming 2018. When researching new prospects for discovery, I typically pull alumni based on their school and have never really worried about class. UNC Charlotte is a much younger institution and there isn’t much importance placed on class year or class reunion. I think building a sense of class camaraderie would be a great practice for our Annual Giving team to implement with our younger alumni. Libby and Lisa explained how effective researching annual donors can be, especially when heading towards the end of a big campaign.

Annual Giving was also Lisa and Libby’s answer to my questions about how to direct research work between campaigns. Alumni who have given gifts consecutively over the years are the prospects that become major giving donors. Maintaining a healthy pool of dedicated supporters in anticipation of the launch of a new campaign can have a huge impact in the long term. TCF buckets their constituents in this pool of supporters based on giving level – annual, lead, and major giving capacity. Collaboration with the Annual Giving team and our lead gift officers will definitely be one of my main priorities for the next few years at UNC Charlotte.

Overall, I was very impressed by the way TCF and their Prospect Management and Research team operate. When an institution has exceeded their campaign goal by $50 million, one can’t deny they must be doing something right! Not only were Libby and Lisa brilliant prospect managers and researchers, they were warm and welcoming hosts – even giving me a tour of the Citadel’s beautiful campus despite the Charleston heat. I truly enjoyed the day I spent at The Citadel Foundation, and am forever grateful to Libby and Lisa for their fantastic advice, tips, and tricks for me as I continue to grow in this field.

How to Develop an Analytics Project: Building a Model Score

Missy Garner, Director of Prospect Research
Rick Loveday, Prospect Research Analyst

Part 1: Concept Development

This post is the first in a four-part series that will outline how Clemson University’s Prospect Research Team developed a philanthropic model score.

This project began as a way to identify key philanthropic characteristics in our constituent base.  We wanted to know what types of attributes drive people to be philanthropic. This brought us to a specific group of our constituents who had donated at the principal gift level. We wanted to see if this subset exhibited any shared characteristics beyond the standard information contained in our CRM such as event participation, board membership, demographic data, etc. No matter how strong our data is, it only provides information about a constituents’ relationship with our institution. Our data won’t tell us how our constituents are interacting with other organizations or institutions. This drove us to look for outside resources that would fill this gap in our data.

We previewed several products and found that DonorSearch provided the largest breadth of philanthropic data. They have developed their own database to track specific philanthropic history. This allows them to identify key attributes such as donations to other organizations, political contributions, board or non-profit affiliations, and high-level business positions. While other companies such as Blackbaud and iWave track these data points as well, DonorSearch made these philanthropic indicators their main focus.

We decided to send a test batch of constituents as a proof of concept. We also needed to determine whether the Development team would embrace the results, since our previous models for determining a prospect’s value were primarily based on hard asset screenings. This new model would focus on where a person donates their money - not on how much money they have.

The original test group was made up of just our principal gift level donors. We wanted to work with a larger group, so we included alumni and current parents who, based on our Research Point wealth screenings, had estimated wealth of $1 million or greater. This provided us with an adequate sample size to hopefully apply some of these philanthropic indicators to our group. After signing a contract and a non-disclosure agreement, we determined what constituent information should be shared for this screening. In order to screen our group, DonorSearch, at minimum, needed constituent name and address, with the option to send other data points as we saw fit. We also included date of birth, spouse name, and employment information. Since this was our proof of concept we consciously chose not to send any specific giving information.

We sent the data off using their secure server and received our results within 24 hours. The file contained over 120 data points for us to digest.  We wanted to verify these philanthropic indicators fit with the data that was returned. In order to do this, we would need to pore through each and every data point. 

The next blog post will detail how we determined which data points we would use to build the model.

This month's blog comes from Elizabeth Roma. Not only is she the Assistant Director for Research with The Helen Brown Group LLC, but she is also our chapter's president beginning in 2018. 

ICYMI: 2017 (Philanthropy) Year in Review

 Looking at my calendar and counting the number of days left in 2017, I find myself wondering where the year went! Time has flown, but so MUCH has happened, that at the same time, some days feel like they’re a week long. (What’s that expression? “The days are long, but the years are short.”) As prospect researchers, it is part of our job to keep an eye on all that’s happening and think about its impact (both immediate and potential) on our organizations. Doing that while trying to crank out profiles, run reports, and identify new prospects (not to mention process gifts, write grant proposals, and all of the other things that you might be doing if you work in a small shop) can be challenging, to say the least. If you are like me, you probably have a folder full of bookmarked articles that you saved for later reading. I know that folder can be overwhelming sometimes, so I spent some time tackling mine and pulled out some of the top themes that I’ve been observing over the last year, along with some articles that I think are worth reading and contemplating. I hope that you will have some down time over the next few weeks to read some of them and that they will help inform your work in 2018!

 

Growth of new philanthropic vehicles and types of gifts

Foundations and cash gifts are still around, but donors are looking more and more to non-traditional philanthropic vehicles (like DAFs and LLCs) and forms of giving (like impact investment and donations of art—or bitcoin.)

More on this theme:

“When M&A money goes to charity: EscrowUp closes second transaction”

“More donors give bitcoin and assets other than cash to charity”

“SharesPost and Fidelity plan to make private shares a force for charity”

And anyone with even a passing interest in art will enjoy reading about two auctions in which significant works were (or will soon be) sold to benefit nonprofit organizations.

 

GDPR legislation and privacy

A new law, the general data protection regulation (GDPR), will take effect in the EU in May 2018, replacing the current Data Protection Act. This law is expected to have a major impact on nonprofits and fundraising in general, and prospect research more specifically. Our counterparts in the UK and the European Union have spent much of 2017 working to ensure that their organizations are compliant with the law, but lest you think that those of us in the US needn’t follow this too closely, you should know that the law applies to any organization that holds data about citizens of the UK or the EU. If any of your constituents live in the UK or the EU, this affects you.

 

Philanthropy steps up where government fails to meet needs…and also grapples with its role in (democratic—small d) politics

More and more, we are seeing organizations and institutions that have traditionally been funded largely or entirely by the government relying more heavily on private donations for funding. Although this has been the case for a while now in education and the arts, it is an issue that seemed to intensify in 2017 and to expand to other areas.

A few examples:

“Donors pledge nearly $200 million for family planning”

“Michael Bloomberg Offers $15 Million to Make Up for Washington’s Share of the Paris Accord Costs”

“Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Helps East Palo Alto with water shortage, affordable housing”

“Will private funding save public arts education?”

“Foundations commit $5M to ensure an equitable recovery in Puerto Rico”

 

At the same time, nonprofit organizations and individual philanthropists have begun to do some real soul-searching about what role the third sector should play in a healthy democracy. For thoughts on this, see:

“Is Big Philanthropy Compatible with Democracy?”

“How Trump Has Changed How We’re Giving to Charity” (This one, and the report it links to, has some great stats on giving—it’s worth a close look.)

“As Government Retrenches, Philanthropy Booms”

“Trump Era Requires Surge of Grant Making to Aid Democracy”

“House GOP’s Tax Plan Would Open Up Politics to Churches—And Charities”

 

Paradise Papers

In November the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) reported on a months-long investigation of a trove of leaked documents centering around the Bermuda-based law firm Appleby. The documents reveal many details of the complex offshore holdings of many of the world’s high net worth individuals (HNWI), demonstrating that the practice of holding wealth offshore is more widespread than many have realized and that the amount of assets held outside the jurisdiction of many nations is enormous. There are many, many fascinating articles on the ICIJ website, so give yourself some time to wander down the rabbit hole.

If you prefer to listen rather than read, check out this podcast about the Paradise Papers investigation, and if you are interested in a deep dive into the world of wealth management, I highly recommend Brooke Harrington’s book “Capital Without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent.”

 

Collaboration

In a world that seems so divided, one of the most encouraging trends I’ve observed this year has been seeing groups of donors and (smart, in my opinion) nonprofits working together to make big progress against big challenges.

More on this theme:

“Inside a Funder Collaborative Seeking Social Justice Through Pop Culture”

“Adding Pantries and Spice to New York’s Hungry Neighborhoods”

 

…and to energize you for the work that awaits in 2018, don’t miss this love letter to prospect research. We already know that the work we do is important, but it’s nice to have that knowledge confirmed by donors too!

 

I’d love to hear about what caught your attention this year. Please share some of your favorite articles too, and happy reading in 2018!

The Impact of Thanking Annual Fund Donors

When I was younger, my mother forced me to write thank you notes to anyone who had given me a gift for my birthday. It seemed like a chore at the time, but as an adult, I came to appreciate when I was thanked for sending a gift – and I certainly remembered those that never thanked me. Today, sometimes a simple “thank you” seems like a dying art.

As nonprofit organizations, it’s critical that we thank our donors promptly. That $25 annual fund donor could turn out to be a $25,000 donor in the future if he or she feels appreciated right from the start. But every organization sends a thank you letter. What if you took it one step further?

A couple of years ago, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center supercharged its annual giving program with the addition of two special gifts officers (SGO). One of the roles of the SGOs is to reach out to annual fund donors to thank them for their first-time gift or for finishing paying a pledge. They also call other donors that our prospect research/management team identifies as having potential for making larger or additional gifts but who aren’t yet major gift prospects.

Delighting the Donor

I love reading our SGOs’ contact reports. It is not unusual for a donor to be taken completely by surprise by our thank you calls. Unlike major donors, a thank you call is unusual for lower-level donors to receive, and they’re delighted to be recognized. This leads our SGOs to ask what motivated them to make a gift, and we’ve heard some wonderful stories from our medical school alumni who valued their time here as well as patients who were pleased with their care. When we hear, “You saved my life,” we know we found a potentially loyal donor. This opens the door for our SGOs to ask for continued giving, and I’m amazed at how many donors say, “Absolutely,” and proceed to give a credit card number over the phone or ask for a reply envelope in the mail.

In addition to phone calls, our SGOs visit patients in the hospital. We monitor a daily list of inpatients looking for unmanaged alumni, current or former board members, recent annual fund donors, and lapsed but previously consistent donors. The SGOs stop in to say hello, bring a medical center tote bag or other swag, a handwritten get well note, and a business card. They thank the donor for being a friend to the medical center, and of course there is no solicitation at the time. It’s simply a thank you visit. These visits have gone very well, and many times we’ve seen gifts come in after the patients have been discharged.

Uncovering Major Gift Prospects

When SGOs are engaging these donors, they listen for clues that someone could eventually be a major or planned gift prospect. After some cultivation and at an appropriate time, the SGO may hand off these prospects to a major gift officer for further cultivation. However, there have been times when a significant gift came in before re-assignment. For instance, one of our SGOs really bonded with one of our medical school alums, who revealed that he had included the medical school in his estate plans. Teaming up with a major gift officer for a visit with the donor, the SGO was able to document this gift. This alum had barely been contacted before the SGO reached out to thank him for his loyal giving.

By having the prospect research/management team work in conjunction with the annual funds team to identify prospects for SGOs to call or visit, the number of annual fund renewals has increased, and donors are left feeling good about supporting our organization. We’d like to think our efforts would have made Emily Post proud.

Rick Loveday’s Two Days in the Triangle

We were excited to award 2017’s Apra Carolinas’ Professional Development Scholarship to Rick Loveday of Clemson University! The “road trip” is a scholarship program to cover travel expenses for a member to spend a day with someone within the Carolinas to learn about processes, procedures, CRM, a specific project, or so forth. One road trip scholarship is awarded annually and covers travel expenses (gas, meals, and 1 night of lodging) up to $300.

Read on to learn where Rick went and what he learned…

Two Days in the Triangle

I have been in Prospect Research at Clemson University for about a year and a half. This job has been my first foray into non-profits, higher education, and fund raising. I had garnered plenty of research experience in previous jobs, from journalism to fiction to legal. I also had extensive report development and Excel coding experience. Despite jumping into a completely new field, it was a fairly seamless transition. Since about my third week on the job, before I even had any teams of my own to support, I started developing reports to improve some of our methods of tracking portfolio details or created new reports that filled in areas our team had not been tracking yet. Every couple of weeks or so, my boss would drop some idea she came up with or some new aspect she wanted to track. I would take that idea and come back with a prototype report. That process went on for about eight months. By the end of the year, we had a full suite of new reports to help our Development Officers. When the Apra Carolinas’ email went out with the information about the Road Trip Scholarship, my boss made sure I saw it and urged me to apply.

As I pondered where I might want to visit while writing my application essay, I thought about where we were trying to go as a department. My boss has made a big push to increase our analytics offerings since I was hired. I decided I wanted to take a look and see how other similar institutions got started in analytics or ran their departments. Since I am at a university, I wanted to visit another university and that narrowed my list down to a manageable few. I figured if I visited a higher concentration of universities I would get more bang for my buck. That led me to North Carolina’s Research Triangle.

Wednesday, July 19.

On my first day, I met with Pitt Tomlinson and Justin Woodard at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. One of Pitt’s primary goals when accepting the job as the Director of Prospect Management, Research and Analytics a little over two years ago was to create a new analytics team. His first, and to date only, analytics hire was Justin Woodard as Assistant Director of Prospect Analytics. The word “Analytics” was already part of Pitt’s title when he accepted the job and part of UNC’s strategic plan. I took some time to go over our current setup at Clemson. I explained how we had just been focusing on developing new reports and introducing them. Some reports were modifications on existing IT created reports that took a deeper look into certain aspects not previously tracked or recorded. Pitt was impressed with the way we were going about getting our foot in the proverbial door. He encouraged us to continue doing exactly what we were doing. People don’t realize what they are missing out on until it gets put in front of them. The more products we create and push out to our development officers, the more they will realize the additional benefits we can provide.

Justin’s journey to his present position followed a similar trajectory as my own. He had experience in the legal field and was well-versed in various methods of research. But when he took the Assistant Director position, it was his first trip down the fund-raising rabbit hole. He’s spent the last year getting a stronger handle on the position and what all it entails. Pitt explained they could have hired a couple additional analysts, but decided to hold off. He wanted Justin to be fully immersed in the position and go through all the growing pains before bringing in additional staff. In doing so, Justin would have a stronger grasp on the position and be that much more of a leader; it is a concept I could whole-heartedly get behind. I always want to be a master of something before I have to go teach it to others. I love hitting the roadblocks and breaking right through them.

Thursday, July 20.

On Thursday morning, I made the short drive over to Duke University to meet with Natalie Spring and her team. Natalie is the Director of Prospect Research, Management and Analytics. The thing I found most interesting about Duke’s central development office was they do not have a CRM. At Clemson, we use Raiser’s Edge and know a few other schools using Millennium. I couldn’t imagine not using some sort of software to access our constituent database. Natalie first joined the department working in statistics and analysis. She left Duke for another position then returned as the Director of Prospect Research, Management and Analytics. Her biggest piece of advice was to figure out what they were doing and to mold their job descriptions to that. As you adapt jobs, continue to adapt the job descriptions to match. I believe she said they were currently in the middle of the fourth rewrite of job descriptions. The positions they originally had when creating the department no longer existed and have evolved into completely different beasts.

In addition to Natalie, I requested to meet with Ian Conlon and Chris Coutlee. Ian is the Associate Director of Prospect Management and Analytics. Chris is a Data Analyst. Chris’s background really intrigued me because he listed all the online classes and certifications he had gained through Coursera, which were the same I was looking at or already taking through EdX.org and Coursera.

I spoke to Ian and Chris about some of the types of projects they’ve worked on. Chris mentioned they had a script they run that would de-duplicate their constituent lists by removing separate lines for spouses, including all activity for the whole family on the same line. I thought that was an interesting process I needed to look into since we currently have to de-duplicate our lists by hand, depending on the data, or by using the remove duplicates feature of Excel.

Ian explained the typical life-cycle of their projects. They tend to start with something small, usually confined to just one of the departments. They develop a report or application just for that department and try to work out all the bugs. Once that is done, they bring in another department to increase the user pool. This typically leads to more bugs being discovered. They repeat that process until they feel the tool is ready to present to the major stakeholders; I really liked that concept. With what I had developed at Clemson, we generally created something, tested it ourselves, then took it to the stakeholders for approval. We never really went through a beta testing phase or included groups of development officers to get their input or thoughts.

Another key concept they realized quickly was the need for a formalized list of research offerings, that way everyone stayed on the same page. The development officers knew what they could ask for or what research could provide them. The researchers and analysts didn’t have to worry about five different development officers requesting five different variations of the same report. I quickly saw where that would make life much easier.

I also got to spend some time with Chris one on one to see some of the projects he was working on. He showed me a travel list they put together that had some interesting geocoding features built into the report. That took the top spot of ideas I wanted to implement into my own travel lists when I got back to Clemson.

After lunch with both groups from Duke and UNC, I hit the road back to Clemson, fresh with new ideas. Some I can immediately start working on, while others, I know will need more training and experience before I start. In the end, the visits gave me a goal to work towards and a bright horizon to look forward to.

Thank you, Rick, for sharing your experience!

Many thanks to UNC’s Pitt Tomlinson and Justin Woodard and Duke University’s Natalie Spring, Ian Conlon, and Chris Coutlee for hosting and taking time to speak with Rick!