A Blast From The Past!
Published
The other day while I was in ResearchPoint pulling together some detailed queries, digging into the data available within several fields to find specific criteria, and I was thinking about how far the world of predictive modeling and wealth screening has come in the 20 years (this past March) I’ve been in this industry.
I remember starting out with delivering to clients large 3 inch notebooks full of lists of prospects with a couple modeling and wealth scores on them (one very large social services client with over 50 notebooks comes to mind!), along with a comma or tab delimited magnetic tape containing the results of a couple wealth and modeling scores for upload to their databases – that is for those clients fortunate to have one specifically for fundraising – and producing hand-typed research profiles on a few top prospects for each project. I would dig into yearly purchased hard copies of Who’s Who in America, The Social Register, and Standard & Poor’s Executive volume, and several others, along with having a subscription to Dialog and doing Duns reports, and then starting a Word document of my findings. Any electronic research was done using a dial-up modem from the phone line on a PC (not a laptop or anything mobile).
Wow, we have come a long way! This idea got me thinking about how great it would be to have Target Analytics Community members post their memories of days gone by on how they use to do prospect research, and share some interesting or funny stories, or just recollections of how data use to be gathered. Makes me incredibly thankful for the tools and technology we enjoy today
Please share your memories! It is only by looking at our history can we appreciate how far we have come and how we are able to produce more information to help our organizations realize their missions by producing information that helps us understand our prospects and donors, aligning their interests and aspirations with our own.
Wow, we have come a long way! This idea got me thinking about how great it would be to have Target Analytics Community members post their memories of days gone by on how they use to do prospect research, and share some interesting or funny stories, or just recollections of how data use to be gathered. Makes me incredibly thankful for the tools and technology we enjoy today
Please share your memories! It is only by looking at our history can we appreciate how far we have come and how we are able to produce more information to help our organizations realize their missions by producing information that helps us understand our prospects and donors, aligning their interests and aspirations with our own.
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09/21/2015 10:59am EDT
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