By Jeff Jones

Qualifying potential donors isn't that easy

Prospect researchers can get pretty attached to the Web sites they use to qualify potential donors.

“This is like asking a mother to name her favorite children,” Beverly Goodwin, corporations editor, Internet prospector and director, development research at University of Arizona responded in an email when asked to name her top five sites.

“It's tough picking because I use different sites for researching corporations, foundations and individuals.”

Topping her list were Google, fee-based Lexis-Nexis for Development Professionals, GuideStar, and Newsbank, which provides a full-text access to nearly 500 newspapers across the country.

Other researchers described where they would go take to qualify a potential donor given the following limited information: A board chair asks for a potential donor's financial profile and supplies a name, spouse and workplace.

First off, ask the board chair more questions.

“I can't overestimate how much more information there is once someone says ‘that's all that I got,'” said Christina A. Pulawski, director of development and donor services at Loyola University Chicago. The lack of information begs the question of why the person is a potential donor, she said.

“The myth is that researchers can find out someone's net worth,” Pulawski said. “This is a business of putting someone in a bucket.”

Prospect researchers are good at putting people in potential giving arenas, such as whether the person could give $500, $5,000, $50,000, $5 million based on wealth indicators, Pulawski said.

But she warned that finding out everything before a first conversation with a potential donor is not the most efficient thing to do. For instance, what if all the research is done and the fundraiser can't secure an interview with the prospect? Researchers should qualify a prospect by providing a preliminary giving estimate. The bulk of information should come when preparing for a solicitation, she said.

Common ways to categorize prospects are income or compensation, stock holdings, real estate, private company ownership, lifestyle indicators such as a vacation home, giving to other organizations, family wealth inheritance, and family foundation leadership, Pulawski said.

Next step is to check your organization's database to see if the person is there, she said. Then, set sights on the prospect's employer. Assuming there's no history, start with the employer business details

“I start with the business information,” said David Lamb, a long-time consultant based in Grand Island, Neb. “I try and find out as much as I can about the person's business and the person's place in that business; how that person is enriched by that business.”

Start at the company's Web site and find a staff directory. “You would hope the prospect is a top officer in the company and has a bio or some pictures on the Web site,” Lamb said. “You want to get a sense of the company size.”

Visit the federal Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) Web site and EDGAR, its search engine for corporate documents. The site could help refine a potential donor's profile and connections.

Check www.martindale.com if the person is a lawyer, Pulawski said. “If they're licensed as an attorney, 95 percent will be in there,” she said.

More and more researchers are using fee-based services that make a profit off otherwise free information because they index it in a way that is easier to search and digest, Lamb said.

The Biographical and Genealogy Master Index is a comprehensive database of biographical publications that could let you know where the person graduated college. Although it's a subscription service, many libraries offer it, Pulawski said.

Lamb suggested KnowX or Hoovers Web sites for corporate details. The latter has a subscription service, but also offers loads of free information on companies.

One of Hoover's most valuable features is translating what a company really does, instead of the jargon found on a company's press release, said Pulawski.

Dun&Bradstreet (www.dnb.com) is the go-to source for owners and officers of private companies, Pulawski said. A report costs as little as $24.99.

Lisa Thomas, director development research and relationship management at University of Washington in Seattle, listed several Web sites in her research toolbox.

The Social Security Death Index (http://ssdi.genealogy.rootsweb.com) may be one of the most obvious but forgotten ones. After all, you want to make sure the prospect is alive and kicking before dumping hours of research into their profile. Still, the Social Security Death Index isn't definitive, Thomas said. “You can be very dead and not listed.”

The price is right, and the free search can be narrowed by geography, crack salary and real estate nuts

Lamb next researches the potential donor's place in the world. Where do they live? What's their property worth? Where do they make donations? Do they make political contributions?

Determining salary is hard, unless the prospect is considered an insider or top officer and has to disclose salary data with the SEC, Lamb said.

If the person works for a public corporation and is a 10 percent shareholder or top executive, “You've hit gold,” Pulawski said.

The SEC requires officers, directors, and owners of public stock to file all sorts of documentation. Two modestly priced, fee-based services that improve upon the SEC's search tool are Edgar-online.com and Tenkwizard.com. They allow text searches using a person's name to locate proxy statements that lay out information about officers and that sometimes list compensation agreements, Pulawski said.

Otherwise, figuring out what a person makes comes down to using a combination of salary surveys and company comparisons, Lamb said. He notes using salary surveys aren't the most accurate way.

Salary.com is helpful if researchers have industry specific information on a potential donor, said the University of Washington's Thomas. Another source is salary reports published by an umbrella organization representing that person's field.

“The other thing you can do is to make a comparison to a public company,” Lamb said. For instance, Hoovers subscription service has a way to compare similar companies of similar sizes, Lamb said.

Real estate is an important wealth indicator.

“Real estate is actually a fairly decent benchmark for the larger picture of somebody's financial well-being,” Lamb said.

The latest Internal Revenue Ser-vice Personal Wealth report (www.irs.gov/taxstats/article/0,,id=96426,00.html) describes distribution of assets across net worth using 1998 data, Lamb said. “Take whatever piece of asset information you know and compare it to that report. And say, if this person were the average wealthy person, the housing would be a certain percentage of their net worth.”

A local assessor's office is a good spot to locate real estate details. Many county offices keep records online, Thomas said. If you can search by name you might be able to find can the property someone owns in a county, she said.

To perform a national search,a switch to a fee-based service such as DataQuick (www.dataquick.com) is necessary, she said.

Yahoo Real Estate (http: //realestate.yahoo.com/realestate/homevalues/) is valuable for determining market value of a person's home, especially in California where Proposition 13 capped the assessed value of houses so they couldn't rise more than 2 percent a year, Thomas said. Researchers can look at comparable properties to get the market value. It's also good for researching an unfamiliar area, she said.

Next you want to get an idea of the person's giving history. A person's charitable donations could be discovered using Donor Series Online (www.donorseries.com), which can be used as a pay-as-you-go online tool, Lamb said.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) Web site (www.fecinfo.com) is good too. It reports gifts to federal candidates, and is easily searched using a person's name, Lamb said. It also could provide information about the donor's employer and address.

Lamb finishes up with a Google search.

“Google is a great tool, but it's often like trying to swat a fly with a shotgun,” Lamb said. That's why he uses more precise tools first.

A Google search can call up annual reports and list the prospect if he's a top person at work, Pulawski said. “What a lot of people are doing now is popping a name into Google,” Pulawski said. More unusual names are easier to find, she added.

Clipping news articles of area promotions is a more traditional way to prospect. Knowing a person was appointed a law firm partner indicates a progressing professionally and means an increase in salary, Pulawski said.

The media is often a researcher's best resource for “life stories,” said

Cecilia Hogan, international editor of Internet Prospector (www.internet-prospector.org), and author of Prospect Research: A Primer for Growing Nonprofits, in an email.

“I reach my local and other newspapers and business journals via their online Web sites. When I want to search for news -- by searching many publications at once -- I use Factiva, a fee-based resource (www.factiva.com).”

Pulawski's Web site (www.pulawski.com) and Lamb's Web site (www.lambresearch.com) provide a bevy of Internet links and are excellent sources for beginning a search.

“You often hear people talking about the fact that you can find out anything you want to about anyone,” Lamb said. “I would say that's not true. There are only a few people you can find very much information about.”

Remember that researching a prospect is done to build a relationship, and researchers are bound by strict ethics. The Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement published a code of ethics available at its Web site (www.APRAhome.org).

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