We’ve heard it many times before; fundraising is all about relationships. But it’s not just about the relationships between an institution and its prospective donors. It’s also about the relationships between fundraisers, like prospect research and gift officers. Having a good connection with gift officers will benefit everyone. Researchers can provide the right information to major gift officers who are best prepared to cultivate and solicit prospective donors.
But as we all know, sometimes that relationship can be fraught from misunderstanding, past missteps, and even suspicion. Sometimes the problem is not reading between the lines. This article is going to translate some common requests to help the prospect researcher understand what is really underneath and vice versa. This may help improve trust and mutual understanding between prospect research and major gifts.
“None of these new prospects are any good.” Or “I need more new prospects in my portfolio.”
These are some of the most common challenges that gift officers may say to a prospect researcher. But what do these statements mean? That’s where prospect research has to step up and ask a few more questions.
Case 1: Are you having difficulty contacting your prospects?
This is often the case especially if they just got a lot of cold prospects assigned to their portfolio. Calling people cold can be daunting but even worse if when you don’t get any traction. But we all know that every warm prospect started as a cold one. Sometimes, the root cause is outdated or missing contact information. We can offer to find better address, phone and/or email for them. That can really make the difference!
Sometimes the gift officer wants to reach someone who is elusive. That may be a great time to suggest exploring the person’s network and seeing what connections your organization has with the prospect.
If the answer is no, then there’s another possible root cause.
Case 2: Do you have the right people assigned to your portfolio?
This may be a particularly good time for a portfolio review. For some shops, that may mean going through a gift officer’s portfolio and talking strategy for the prospects. For folks who aren’t promising or don’t have the capacity/affinity, it’s time to move those folks into the pool or disqualify them and then reassign some new prospects to their portfolio.
It’s also a good opportunity to find out who actually is in the portfolio. Since portfolios can be reassigned when people leave the organization, there may be people in the portfolio who have never been researched and/or contacted. That might be a good time to do some verification research on prospects to confirm capacity and affinity. Good prospects may be hiding in plain sight.
“I need a full profile on this suspect.”
We’ve all had a version of this request. A gift officer finds a promising lead and asks for “the works” — usually a comprehensive profile of the person, which can take hours. Sometimes those profiles are super helpful, like before a solicitation, but in this case, the major gift officer has only met the person once or twice or only just scheduled the meeting!
We may be tempted to say “no” or discourage the gift officer, but that may result in the gift officer doing their own research instead of spending time reaching out to their prospects. We want to build a good relationship. So instead of no, ask, “What are you looking to understand?” Or “What are you looking for?” You’ll soon realize that they may have something specific in mind like “Does she own ABC company?” or “Has her foundation given to animal causes?” That may be what the gift officer really needs instead of knowing everything findable about a prospect.
For major gift officers and development directors, you may need to understand what your prospect researchers and/or prospect managers may be saying too.
“I can’t give a smaller range for gift capacity. It’s not possible.”
We often say that research is both an art and a science. There are some things we can find because they are public information – frequently real estate, and much less frequently, stockholdings if someone is an insider, a 10% owner of a public company, or an officer. But there’s going to be a lot of wealth we won’t see; we cannot see into people’s bank accounts. They may have just sold their company but we may not know how much it was sold nor do we know what level of ownership they had.
So, we have to make estimates with the indicators we know. We know that generally, the more wealth you have, the fewer assets are visible. Because there’s guesswork, capacity ranges may seem large, but that’s just what researchers have found as a reasonable range of capacity for the person.
We’d love to get more specific but we don’t want to leave money on the table nor overestimate their wealth capacity. We don’t want to give anyone heart attacks during a solicitation! What we are really saying is that given the information I was able to find, this capacity range is the best estimate I can give about this person’s wealth. If you know more information about them, that might help, but a specific number or guess is generally not possible.
“That’s all I could find.”
You have just heard about a wonderful prospect and you make a request for more research. And you get back very little new information. It can be disappointing especially when you get this line from a researcher.
But it’s also frustrating for us to have a name and find little information out there on them.
Sometimes it’s because they have a super common name so figuring out which Jane Smith from all the other Jane Smiths may not be possible. Or maybe they don’t appear to have a digital footprint, due to their age, or they could be intentionally guarding their privacy. Or we don’t know where they live and we can’t figure it out with the information we do have. There is a whole spectrum in between.
So researchers may sound grumpy when they respond like this but they’ve likely been down several rabbit holes to find any nugget of information on this exciting prospect…and found almost nothing.
All is not lost though! Maybe you get a meeting with the prospect and you learn a little bit more about them, like where they work, their spouse’s name, or maybe something about their interests. You can bring that information to the researcher and they can hopefully find more about the prospect.
Ideally, a researcher should note that they did not find information in different categories, so you know they looked. Even better, they may mention that they looked in x, y, z sources but did not find information there. While it’s not necessarily needed in every category, but if there’s an area of focus and they find nothing, at least you know they looked.
A common example is when you hear about a prospect’s foundation but the researcher can’t find it. It’s good to know they checked several sources and came up with nothing. (It could be a trust or a fancy name for a donor advised fund).
These are just a few scenarios where major gifts and prospect researchers can do a bit better understanding each other.
Additional Resources
5 Misconceptions of Prospect Identification l Aspire Research Group, 2024
5 Reasons Why You Can’t Find a Prospect’s Giving l Aspire Research Group, 2024
If you say ‘no’ enough, you will probably get fired l Jennifer Filla Blog, 2024