Is Every Prospect Research Request in Your Office an Emergency?

Many of our community members have expressed the same problem – gift officers have Great Expectations when it comes to prospect research.  They want as many details as possible and they want them now.  

I was thinking about my own experiences as both a researcher and gift officer and I identified 2 areas where you could make some changes and manage some expectations. 

First, specificity - they’ve asked you to research Mark Jones by the end of the day today.  But before you spend an hour running down everything there is to know about Mark, did they say what they really need? 

• Where is Mark on the gift officer’s radar?
• Are they in the solicitation stage?  

A prospect research request form for the gift officers to fill out can help you a great deal.  You could have spent hours researching Mark only to find 10 minutes of research would have been sufficient.  A request form might also show the gift officer that there is a great deal of source information to weed through and that they will need to give appropriate notice to expect a detailed research report. (If you have a Professional level ResearchPoint subscription, you have access to “My Prospect Research” for officers to request research within the software). 

They should think of it like walking into a library and speaking to a librarian – would a photocopy of an article work for you at this stage or do you need 8 volumes on the topic? 

Secondly, spinning privacy.  They are sure a prospect has a condo in Switzerland, and since your sources haven’t found it, all the other research you did is missing something.  I find this mistrust is commonly is accompanied by the words “net worth”.  This buzz phrase gives me a migraine each time I hear it – in order to calculate someone’s net worth, we need to see into their bank account, know their savings, their debts, what their jewelry is worth – it’s invasive. 

As researchers we can see some real estate, some public company stock, some private company equity, some philanthropic giving. Thank goodness we can’t see into bank accounts and have some measure of privacy and I hope your gift officers would agree with us.  That and the law stand between us and “net worth”! 

For their further education, there are some gems that you can borrow from David Lamb’s white paper “Prospect Research for the Non-Researcher” on www.blackbaud.com (Resources>White Papers) or if your organization uses ResearchPoint, you might find that having them attend the one hour complimentary online class “Introduction to WealthPoint” may clear up some of the confusion.  

We want to hear from you. How do you manage your co-workers expectations? Let us know by leaving a comment below!