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, 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.