How To Speed Up Your Prospect Reviews
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Ask any researcher who has done a wealth screening and they’ll tell you that the best practice is to validate the results by a manual review. I heartily agree!
ResearchPoint assists you in that review by using an extremely conservative auto-confirmation rule (exact name and address), and by allowing you to sort the unconfirmed results by confidence. You may find that you often need to click open the item in question (a record for real estate, business, giving, etc.) to look at the details before you can confirm that it pertains to your prospect or, conversely, reject it.
What if you could see enough of the record on a single line of the summary screen without opening the item? That would save you loads of time. Let me suggest some column changes to several of the data sources that will speed up your prospect review.
When you expand out the list of items from any source, you’ll see a row-by-row listing of all items found - all of the real estate records, for instance - that may be associated with your prospect. Above the header row of this spreadsheet view are some command buttons and fields. One of those is "Columns". Click that and you’ll see some additional columns you can display. You would not want to display them all, but some are more useful than others. Here are the additional columns I display and why:
Real Estate:
What if you could see enough of the record on a single line of the summary screen without opening the item? That would save you loads of time. Let me suggest some column changes to several of the data sources that will speed up your prospect review.
When you expand out the list of items from any source, you’ll see a row-by-row listing of all items found - all of the real estate records, for instance - that may be associated with your prospect. Above the header row of this spreadsheet view are some command buttons and fields. One of those is "Columns". Click that and you’ll see some additional columns you can display. You would not want to display them all, but some are more useful than others. Here are the additional columns I display and why:
Real Estate:
- Assessee #2 – this is often the spouse, sometimes new information.
- Assessee address – this tells you where the tax bill is mailed for the property. Usually this is the home address or a business address. Seeing it can instantly tell you how the match was made and why it was or was not confirmed. And if you weren’t already sure, it might confirm a home address.
- Property use – this could be “SFR” (single family residence), “Condominium”, “Commercial”, “Agricultural”, or any of dozens of other designations. Very helpful in deciding whether or not an item should be confirmed as personal property or considered an asset that belongs to the prospect’s business.
- Display the company’s address, city, and state. Businesses that have the same or similar address and your prospect’s name as an executive are certainly related. If any of them have high confidence, you can increase your confidence that the others are good matches as well.
- Direct transaction date and indirect transaction date – you can sort by the dates and get an instant read on how current the insider’s affiliation to the company is. If they haven’t traded in a couple of years, it’s possible that the person isn’t affiliated any more. If it’s four or five years or more, it’s certain the affiliation is historical.
- Symbol – If the symbol is blank, the company is no longer public.
- Location – this is the city and state of the nonprofit that received the gift. The match codes and confidence indicators give you a sense of geographic proximity, but sometimes the prospect’s address and the nonprofit are too far from each other to get any higher than a confidence of 1. Seeing the location may help you raise the confidence of some of those low confidence matches that are still in the same state.
- Occupation – If you know the prospect’s employer, and the named that business under occupation when they made their political donation, you have your perfect match. You can use the “Search” field to create a filtered list of all of the gifts that name that business and confirm them all at once.
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ARCHIVED | Blackbaud Target Analytics® Tips and Tricks
05/24/2016 5:06pm EDT
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