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.

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.

Tuesday, January 03, 2012

Sometimes a new year (or even a new week) is a great time to start on a project that's been staring you in the face for a while. This year's activity for my office is to get all the research data into the right parts of the database. We didn't used to have places for it, so we created profiles and stored info in file cabinets. Now we have a place for all of it, so it's time to jump into the mountain of papers.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

Donor record cleanup is (or should be) an ongoing activity in any organization. And it can get