Research has been my passion and my job for many years. It's the daily challenges and uncertainty that keep me coming back time and time again. I've been involved with academic research, conducted surveys in developing countries and have even been a TV programme researcher. But for the past 6 years I've been honing my skills in a completely different branch of research - prospect research. Employed in the charity (or non-profit) sector, prospect research is little known outside of fundraising circles and even less understood.
Although prospect research has been around for a while, it's only really started to gain recognition as a discipline in its own right in the past few years. It's no longer just about producing lists of potential funders; it's about establishing the foundations for long-term relationships with funders that has proven its value. But it's not just charities that could benefit. With its unrivalled ability to adapt to its information surroundings, prospect research also has a lot to share with the wider research community.
So what is prospect research?
You work for a charity as a fundraiser, which means your job is to secure funding to keep the organisation going and carry out its work. It's a tough job. You're in competition with hundreds of thousands of other charities for what is essentially a limited source of money. You need to be focused, determined, persuasive and know who you're dealing with. Understanding the latter is where prospect research comes into its own.
Prospect researchers gather, analyse and present biographical, financial, company, foundation and other philanthropic information using only publicly available information. The aim is to optimise an organisation's chances of obtaining the largest donations (or major gifts) it can from its prospective donors or 'prospects'.
To put it simply: a prospect = a potential donor and developing a relationship with a potential donor is key to securing funding.
Imagine walking into a meeting with an ultra-rich individual who is interested in what your organisation does. They may want to give you a large sum of money or open up their networks to you. Entering that meeting knowing as much about the person as possible - the source of their wealth, their immediate family, positions within companies, their private interests or who they've given money to in the past - wouldn't all that information give you a much better chance of engaging the individual?
Knowledge is power, after all, and using research to produce an accurate profile to better understand a potential donor is vital. Making assumptions and generalisations about people is best left to the tabloids.
What makes prospect research so different?
Prospect research might involve something as simple as finding an address or telephone number or as complex as estimating a person's wealth or personal connections. Yet whatever the motive, the key to being a good prospect researcher is tenacity. You have to be dogged in dealing with the vast amounts of information overload as well as the large array of products and resources available with which to search.
Developing the skills to find and manipulate the diversity of information required isn't the end of the story. One of the biggest problems a prospect researcher faces is how to access that information. A large proportion of information-rich resources are subscription-based and often produced for a corporate market, which tends to make them expensive. With charities operating under tight budgets, finding money to pay for these resources can be extremely difficult even if the return on investment is proven.
So here's the problem - how do you access the most useful, often expensive subscription resources (for finding company and director information for example) that may help you secure funding, but which are out of your price range? The answer is resourcefulness. It requires a combination of in-depth knowledge and the creativity to obtain a free lunch. If you know the resources you want to access, the two most popular methods are to:
Obtain free trials (quick fix solution and very short-term)
Access products via local libraries (long term solution dependant on where you work).
Most experienced prospect researchers will tell you that you can access a huge array of costly databases, publications and directories for free at libraries. It's not the ideal place to be working from but for those charities who really struggle to find money for the basics, it can be crucial.
It's all in the application
For most prospect researchers, researching individuals and companies is the bread and butter of their work. While researching companies is comparatively easy, finding out who's behind them is much more difficult. There are numerous resources that provide information on corporate giving programmes, such as PRO Platinum <http://www.proplatinum.com>, BIG Online <http://www.bigdatabase.com> in the US, or Company Giving <http://www.companygiving.org.uk> in the UK. These do most of the work for you if you're looking for companies who donate money, in-kind gifts or sponsorship to charities.
The challenge comes when trying to research individuals. Prospect researchers build up detailed profiles on individuals, which include information on:
Name, contact details and date of birth
Family and education
Past and present jobs
Business and social networks
Estimated wealth
Philanthropic history (including past donations, trusteeships etc)
Recreations, clubs or hobbies
Relevant news articles.
Unlike companies and grant-making organisations, individuals do not have to disclose their financial, personal and philanthropic activities to the public. So how do you get around this?
But what if these are private individuals who just happen to be wealthy? Working out their business networks might be straightforward, but delving past the public persona is much more challenging. To give value to people profiles, prospect researchers often have to look at their wealth to establish their ability to give and their personal interests and motivations.
Behind closed doors
Estimating wealth is somewhat of an art form, at least if you care about its accuracy. Philip Beresford, author of the Sunday Times Rich List, left journalism 20 years ago to undertake this as his full-time profession. If you don't have 20 years experience, the DIY approach to researching wealth is to go deep, get your hands dirty and look at all possible avenues of wealth creation such as quoted share stakes, proceeds from company sales, salaries, investments, property, inheritance etc. Of course, even with this information it is still very much an estimation as it involves complex calculations.
There are far too many resources used for estimating someone's wealth to list them all, but some examples include:
Building up an accurate picture of someone involves more than just wealth. A person's interests and motivations are just as important, but equally as hard to determine. Researchers must think outside the box if they are to find more insightful information. I often try to put myself in their place and find out what kind of publications they might be in or might buy, for example. It's basic reverse psychology. Accessing specialist magazines that are aimed at the wealthy, such as CityWealth <http://www.citywealthmag.com/>, Alliance <http://www.alliancemagazine.org/>, Contribute <http://contributemedia.com/>, Director <http://www.director.co.uk/> or Real Deals <http://www.realdeals.eu.com/> magazines can prove very fruitful. It's a bit like peering in through a window of a party you're not invited to; it might be depressing sometimes, but it can be good for gleaning information you might not get anywhere else.
So what now?
Prospect research is much more than the sum of its parts. Straddling the gap between the profit and non-profit sectors, it enables charity and business to come together for mutual benefit. There's no doubt that its importance in fundraising is increasingly being recognised, but there's still a long way to go before prospect research is accessible to everyone in the charity sector.
One of the reasons I set up the fResource website <http://www.fresource.info/> was to share the knowledge of experienced prospect researchers with fundraisers who don't have the time to spend days searching for information or the ability to seek out new funding. We provide over 600 resources, both free and subscription, that provide information on everything from finding addresses, postcodes and telephone numbers, right through to corporate databases, rich lists, news sites and publications.
As fundraising becomes ever more competitive, the future of any charity lies in its ability to adapt to changing surroundings and truly understand who it is and where it's going. Prospect research doesn't just provide hard facts; it also enables fundraisers to use that knowledge at the front line of fundraising.
Matt Ide is the Director and creator of fResource <http://www.fresource.info/>, a website that provides links to global fundraising and research resources. He also runs the prospect research consultancy Hands on Research <http://www.handsonresearch.co.uk/> based in the UK, and is on the Institute of Fundraising's Researchers in Fundraising committee. With a Masters degree in international development research, Matt went on to work for a number of development NGOs while creating experience development <http://www.experiencedevelopment.org/> in his spare time, an information portal for students studying development. A chance offering led him unexpectedly to the world of prospect research, and since 2001 Matt has worked full-time as a prospect researcher.
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