Wednesday, April 11, 2012

We are working on the next manual in the Prospect Research series, and we need your ideas! The focus of this book is on those of you in fundraising who do not have "research" in your job title. Perhaps you are a small organization and someone adds research projects as an additional activity, or perhaps you do have a researcher but are in need of some ideas for what you can ask them to find for you. This manual will answer those questions and give you a set of resources to use, whether you're doing the research on the fly, or want to ask the best questions of the researchers around you.

Monday, April 02, 2012

This month I get to dive into an online workshop on Private Company research and valuation. These types of companies are generally pretty tough to find information about, since they tend to publish only want they want the outside world to know. So I am very curious to learn about new sources for locating information.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Writing about writing is fun for me, and allows a way to look at what I'm doing in a different way and see whether it makes sense. In this post, I summarize some of the current writing projects I've got on my plate right now, and discuss some thoughts on the value of writing many things at once.

Friday, February 10, 2012

Trying to determine what a donor's goals were when they gave you a gift decades ago can be a challenging task. Especially when you don't have all the original information, no family members to contact, and the donors are deceased. In this post I briefly explore the journey from the sale of land and creation of the  "James and Judy Mars Endowment Fund for Educational Research" (names changed) to the eventual realization that James and Joyce wanted students to be able to study local plant and animal life.

Wednesday, February 01, 2012

Even though we rarely refer to people with their middle initial, it's a very useful piece of information to have. Many people have written about its importance in the field of prospect research and donor relations, but I was reminded again this week about how much it can facilitate accurate search results and save us time and energy, in addition to getting us the most accurate data. If I hadn't known the middle initial for my prospect, I could have been searching for a very very long time to figure out which of these individuals was the right one, and second-guessing myself all along the way.

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

As I begin to implement my development plan, not only do I begin to work on the job tasks involved in each fundraising activity I will engage in, I also muse upon the kind of partnerships I want to develop. Who do I want a relationship with? If you think the answer is someone with money, you are wrong.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Creating a prospect profile can be an interesting expedition when you don't even have a database record to start from. We do, however, have a long series of personal letters that were written between a few individuals and stored in the archives at our institution. So in this week's challenge, I set out to uncover which pieces of these letters will be useful for someone essentially making a cultivation call on someone they have never met.

Monday, January 09, 2012

Writing is a really fun activity for me. So in this first post examining my writing process for Charity Channel, I'm exploring just the first steps when I start a new project.