Sandra's Prospect Research Blog

More detail on executive pay

2006-01-17T20:45:00.002-05:00

The Securities and Exchange Commission is my very favorite part of the federal government; they’re the only ones that ever try to make my job easier.

Their latest move is a proposal to overhaul and tighten the requirements for disclosure of executive pay. In the wake of the Enron and New York Stock Exchange scandals in which bloated pay packages became a controversial issue, the SEC’s new chairman, Christopher Cox, wants to limit companies’ ability to conceal the value of perks and option packages.

The New York Times said, “The proposal would for the first time require public companies to provide a figure of total compensation, including significant perks, stock options and retirement benefits for the chief executive, the chief financial officer and three other top-paid officers, as well as all directors.”

The changes will be approved this year, for implementation in the 2007 proxy season. Analysts doubt that executive pay will decline much after the changes are made, because while stockholders may be outraged, there’s not really much they can do about it.

On the other hand, any move to make the impenetrable prose of proxy statements a little more clear is a boon to prospect researchers. So thank you, Mr. Cox!

Business References

2005-10-31T12:30:00.001-05:00

Today’s discovery is a useful site called Reference for Business. It includes four databases: the International Directory of Business Biographies; the Encyclopedia of Small Business; a collection of Business Plans; and the Encyclopedia of American Industries.

Probably the most useful to a prospect researcher is the International Directory of Business Biographies, which includes relatively detailed biographies of business leaders all over
the world, organized alphabetically. Most start with a directory-style listing of birthdate, educational information, and career history, then move on to a longer prose article that goes into greater detail and places the individual in the context of corporate history, plus links to additiona lsources, and often, a photograph. The inclusion of individuals at companies across Europe and Asia makes this a particularly useful source.

The Encyclopedia of Small Business lists business terms alphabetically with brief definitions; most connect to a longer article that provides a more thorough understandng of the term. Use The Encyclopedia of American Industries to find SIC and NAICS codes for different industries, as well as industry snapshots, background and development, trends and industry leaders. This is helpful when you need a larger context to judge a company’s position and potential. The fourth database, a collection of sample Business Plans, is at first glance the least useful to researchers, and is poorly organized; also, the search function does not appear to work in this database. But if you’re looking for an understanding of how a particula r type of business is organized—the different expenses and sources of income faced by a record label or a travel agency, for example—these sample plans provide an impressive level of detail.

Conference Convergence

2005-08-16T11:33:00.000-04:00

Back (though not fully unpacked) from the APRA conference, which by any standards was a big success, with more than a thousand attendees. I met some great people, attended some highly informative sessions, and even got to see some of San Diego. Steven Hupp and I talked about blogs and how researchers and nonprofits can, and should, get into this rapidly expanding sector of the web.

Three cheers to Elizabeth Crabtree, who not only organized this entire extravaganza, but presented a wonderful session on venture capitalists, investment bankers and hedge fund managers, a group of people who combine creativity and energy with extraordinary incomes, making them wonderful prospects. I was thinking about these folks this morning as I got back to work, and lo and behold! I ran across an article that mentioned VC blogs.

Yes, there are a few venture capitalist out there in the blogosphere, and their blogs make for interesting reading. A good place to start is VentureBlog , which has been around since February 2003 and includes posts by several venture capitalists. The topics vary from what do venture capitalists do all day? to the startup ecosystem, a look at why startups tend to cluster geographically in places like Silicon Valley. Links include a list of other VC blogs, posts sorted by category, and “What We Read.” I surfed around these links for a while and found some great posts (not necessarily recent, but still useful!) on VC basics, including Joi Ito on the investment process and David Hornik (he's an investor at August Capital and one of VentureBlog’s most frequent contributors) explaining the terminology of venture capital financing.

If your prospect pool includes venture capitalists (and if not, why not?) and you want to learn more about the world of VC, reading their blogs is a great place to start.

Con Blog! Greetings from San Diego

2005-08-11T18:14:00.000-04:00

It's sunny and lovely here in San Diego where I am attending the APRA conference with a thousand of my dearest friends and colleagues. The hotel is large and elegant (very large, but I'm happy to report that I've only gotten lost once) and I have attended some excellent sessions: Napoleon Hendrix on stewardship and donor relations, and Diane Crane on data mining.

Interestingly, the same buzzword came up in both sessions, and that buzzword is: SURVEYS. Have you surveyed your donors lately, and if not, why not? Napoleon (who, by the way, has the coolest name ever!) made the point that people love to be asked for their opinions, which means that surveys have a cultivation function as well as being a source of information. Diane noted that the simple act of responding to a survey is a data point in itself, in that it shows a level of interest in your organization.

Am I sensing a trend? Is the process of research going to shift to a more interactive model? I'm co-presenting, along with Steven Hupp, about blogging tomorrow, and I'd already planned to stress its potential for two-way communication with constituents. Is your communication strategy working? How do you know? Information is like contributions--you're more likely to get it if you ask for it.

Hmmm...food for thought. Right now, however, I can see the hotel pool from my window, and if I listen closely, I think I can hear it calling my name.

Having a wonderful time, wish you were here!

People who know people

2005-08-01T12:32:00.000-04:00

I ran across a quirky little resource in my web travels recently. NNDB.com is a who’s-who type database of prominent individuals, or as it describes itself “an intelligence aggregator that tracks the activities of people we have determined to be noteworthy, both living and dead.” While it does skew heavily toward celebrities and showbiz types, I’ve also found politicians and businessmen there, and even a few notorious criminals. What makes NNDB different and potentially interesting is its focus on documenting the connections between people. So an entry may list past romantic interests, with links to their profiles. Even more useful are the institutional lists: clicking on West Point in the late General William Westmoreland’s profile leads you to a list of West Point grads in this database, while the entry for Cat Stevens not only lists his birth name, but a link to a list of others who have converted to Islam, and to those who share his Swedish ancestry.

The tone is frankly gossipy---each entry includes not only such basics as birthdate, photo, and name(s) of spouse(s), but also sexual orientation. The ‘executive summary’ for each person may be serious or flippant (Timothy’ Leary’s reads simply ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’). NNDB is still far from living up to the claim of “tracking the entire world” made in its headline. What’s available now is a beta version with about 14,000 profiles, and very basic searching capacity. But the information seems pretty accurate, and the connections are intriguing.

Can it be August already? See you at the APRA conference!

HyperWealth

2005-06-05T19:23:00.000-04:00

The New York Times calls them the “hyper-rich.” On Sunday, June 5, the latest article in the Times' fascinating series on class in America discusses the wealthiest of the wealthy: “the top 0.1 percent of income earners - the top one-thousandth… about 145,000 taxpayers, each with at least $1.6 million in income and often much more.” The average income for this group was $3 million in 2002, the most recent year for which data is available.

The article discusses how the Bush administration’s tax cuts affect this group, and the much greater affect of current tax laws, especially the alternative minimum tax, on the “merely rich”who pull down six-figure incomes. Tax-wise, the Times explains, it’s much cheaper to get your income from investment gains and dividends than it is to earn a similar amount.

The entire series is fascinating, not to mention alarming in its implications. The gap between rich and poor is increasing, and it’s getting harder to cross that gap—at least moving upward, though the middle class is finding it easier to slip into financial struggles or bankruptcy.

For those of us who are professionally interested in the hyper-rich, today’s article is worth clipping.

Beyond the checkbook

2005-06-01T19:23:00.000-04:00

Collaboration , involvement and control look like a continuing trends in philanthropy, as evidenced by a couple of recent news stories. Last week, the Indianapolis Star highlighted the popularity of giving circles , particularly among women. Small groups of friends and associates meet to pool their philanthropic budgets, learn about giving opportunities, and jointly make gifts. This collaboration offers donors a larger impact and a more satisfying experience than individual donations , and probably stimulates more enthusiasm and involvement in philanthropy. Giving circles vary widely, from small groups of friends (even children have formed giving circles) to professional networks, and the amounts they contribute vary just as widely.

A recent report by New Ventures in Philanthropy indicates that giving circles have contributed $44 million to various nonprofits nationwide over the past five years. Three quarters of the giving circles they surveyed have an ongoing relationship with, or are “hosted by” an established nonprofit organization, frequently a community foundation.

Are there giving circles in your community? Do they know about your organization and its needs? Could this be a vehicle to get your constituents more involved—and perhaps, to help your best volunteers bring new donors into the fold? The Giving Forum has more information about what giving circles are and how to start them. It’s worth a look!

Venture philanthropy is another method by which donors have taken a more active role in supporting the nonprofits they care about. Social Venture Partners, the network of donors launched in Seattle eight years ago to bring a “venture capital” model of involvement to their giving, has taken another step. Today, they announced a partnership with Foundation Source, a private organization that provides back-office support services like administration, compliance monitoring, federal and state filings and grants management to private foundations, serving donors who want the simplicity of a donor-advised fund without giving up the control offered by a private foundation. Now, the donors affiliated with the more than 300 foundations that are Foundation Source clients will be encouraged to follow the SVP model of active engagement with the organizations they support.

I define cultivation as the process of getting donors interested in and enthused about giving. The spread of giving circles, venture philanthropy, and mechanisms that make giving easier are all forms of cultivation—as researchers, we need to be the final link, bringing these newly aware and enthusiastic donors into contact with the organizations we serve.

Boston Globe 100

2005-05-24T10:51:00.000-04:00

The 17th annual Boston Globe 100 is out! This list ranks Massachusetts companies in dozens of ways, from revenues to return on equity to profits, losses, and change in profit margins. It also includes reports on various sectors of the economy and feature articles on some of the more interesting companies. Yes, you have to register to use the site, but it’s free, and its worth it: piles of well-organized useful information. If you’re thinking about raising money in Massachusetts, either from publicly traded companies or their executives, this is a gold mine.

Massachusetts: new regulations and a new resource

2005-05-05T10:00:00.000-04:00

This one’s for all my homies here in Massachusetts.

Today’s Boston Globe has an article on the state Attorney General’s proposed new regulations for charities. The legislation would include “a requirement that board members sign off on financial audits, curbs on executive compensation, and $5,000 fines for violation,” and would be some of the most comprehensive laws addressing nonprofits’ finances in the nation. While the new laws are a response to recent scandals involving foundations in Massachusetts, which were being used as personal bank accounts by their trustees, they will apply to all charities and nonprofits.

The part I found most interesting, from a research perspective, was the note about the establishment of “a computerized database that will allow the attorney general to electronically search charities' filings and potentially highlight abuses. When finished, the database will be made available to the public. [Emphasis mine]. So, the AG’s office will not only be making more work for nonprofits, as we ensure that our organizations are playing by the new rules; it will also provide us with a new source of information about the nonprofit universe.

A hand up for a handout

2005-04-28T17:49:00.000-04:00

As Steven Hupp recently mentioned in his blog, he and I will be making a presentation together in August, at the APRA Conference. Our topic? Blogs, of course! So I’m blogging about talking about blogging, which I suppose is a sort of meta-blog, but what I really want to talk about is what you take away from a conference session.

What you literally take away is the handout. I’ve been thinking about that, because while August 12 in San Diego is a long way off, the due date for getting handouts to APRA is in June, which is a whole lot closer. Not everyone at the conference will hear us speak, but the handouts will be available to all APRA members, even people who don’t attend the conference (they will be on the members-only section of APRA’s website for two months after the conference). I have been thinking about the piles of paper I’ve brought home from conferences: which ones I’ve carefully saved, filed, and referred back to, and which ones wound up gathering dust until they wound up in the recycle bin after one of my periodic office-cleanings.

What do I look for in a handout? It should be more than a printout of the PowerPoint slides from the talk. Ideally, a handout makes it unnecessary to take extensive notes, so you can really focus on what the speaker is saying. It provides a solid outline of what was covered in the talk, along with the sort of supporting detail that helps me dig further into the topic. At the same time, it has enough white space so that I can add my own notes: questions and insights that occur to me and ideas about how to apply this new information back at my office. In addition to recapping the presentation, a good handout includes a source list that helps me look deeper into the topic. Print permits a level of detail that can’t be covered in a talk, at least not one that covers a relatively broad-based topic and allows for a Q&A period.

What do you look for in a handout? Especially if you haven’t seen the presentation? Tell me! I want to hand you something you’ll want to keep, use as a reference, photocopy for others in your office. Trees will die for this, let them not die in vain.

Also, if you’re reading this, even if you don’t have any thoughts on handouts, please comment just to let me know you’re there. I’d like to have an idea of who is reading this. Thanks!

Cutting Edge Philanthropy

2005-04-23T10:04:00.000-04:00

All my friends in the sciences and biomedical-research fundraising—this one’s for you.

There was a great article in the New York Times today (free registration required) about Dr. Gary Michelson, a spinal surgeon and inventor. After four years of litigation with Medtronic, Inc., over patents, the company has agreed to pay him $1.35 billion for his 700 or so existing patents and the right to his new patents for the next fifteen years.

The good news for nonprofits is that Dr. Michelson plans to put at least $200 million into a new medical foundation. While the plans for it are incomplete, he wants “to have a big impact in some new area of medicine like stem cells or nanotechnology.” His patent licensing company, Karlin Technology, is now owned by a trust that will benefit the foundation.

The Medtronic deal isn’t set in stone either: an antitrust clearance from the federal government will be required before the money changes hands. But it looks like there will be a new name on the Forbes 400 next year, and if your organization does any kind of cutting-edge biomedical research, you may want to start tracking the good doctor. He’s got the potential to become a first-rank philanthropist.

Together at last

2005-04-18T11:22:00.000-04:00

Long ago, in a galaxy far away… a new discipline was emerging in the world of fundraising. There weren’t many people doing prospect research in the 1980s, and they mostly worked for large universities. But they reached out to each other, and started talking, about their work, the resources they used, the ways they could make research better and more professional and more useful to their institutions.

In was 1987 when these conversations resulted in the founding of the first professional organizations for researchers. One group started in the Boston area and grew into a strong regional organization: the New England Development Research Association. (For more on the history of NEDRA, read Susan Cronin Ruderman’s article in the Spring 2004 NEDRA News, available here). The other started in Minnesota, and the Minnesota Prospect Research Association generated chapters in other states, evolving into the American Prospect Research Association. Later, its name was changed to the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement, recognizing the growing community of researchers in Canada.

Now, I’m second to no one in my love and respect for NEDRA. I got involved in NEDRA early in my research career, and spent six years on its board, and eight years editing the quarterly newsletter. But I’ve also been a member of APRA, and enjoyed attending the big national conference, spending three our four days meeting and learning from researchers from all over the country.

Last week, at NEDRA’s annual conference, a big step was taken. NEDRA became affiliated with APRA as a chapter. Because NEDRA is so large and has been autonomous for so long, the terms of the chapter affiliation allow NEDRA to maintain its independence, gaining networking and information-sharing opportunities as well as more practical benefits like access to liability insurance.

The formal network of researchers now stretches coast-to-coast, and a new step has been taken in the evolution of prospect research as a respected specialty within the field of institutional advancement.

The case of the disappearing resources

2005-04-04T10:17:00.000-04:00

Not long ago, Lexis-Nexis discontinued the Assets section from its Pay By Credit Card option. I really liked the fact that L-N allowed people who didn’t want or couldn’t afford a subscription to access the bits of its database that they actually needed. I used it to find real estate data across the U.S., and with free searching and records downloadable at a dollar each, it was amazingly cost-effective. I suppose it wasn’t profit-effective enough.

Even worse, I made a trip to my local public library a few days ago. I was tracing a family fortune back to the ancestor who made it, and wanted to look at Who Was Who, a multi-volume compendium of entries from old Who’s Who volumes, dating back to the nineteenth century. It wasn’t where I expected to find it. I looked around for a while, figuring they had rearranged the reference section, and then asked the reference librarian. They had gotten rid of it. Why? Well, t was old, and “nobody was using it.” I explained that I had used it, and would have been happy to give it a home if they needed the shelf space (which they didn’t—there was an empty place where my beloved volumes had previously lived). They directed me to another local library that was still willing to give space to such an outdated and unneccessary reference. All I can say is, if you use references at your library—old, out of print things that you can’t find anywhere else—let them know. Ask if you can have right of refusal on references that are being de-accessioned, offer to haul them away on short notice. Otherwise you risk being blindsided.

The information landscape changes with incredible speed, and depending on any vendor for consistency is a strategic mistake. The only thing you can rely on, as far as I can tell, is that costs will continue to rise.

Good news about nonprofits

2005-03-12T15:28:00.000-05:00

At least in Massachusetts, nonprofit organizations are a growing sector in a struggling economy. A recent report from the Massachusetts Institute for a New Commonwealth (MassINC) says that nonprofits now employ 13% of the state’s workforce—outnumbering workers in manufacturing, retail, finance or the public sector.

Not only have nonprofits added 33,000 new jobs between 2000 and 2003, during a time when the high-tech sector was collapsing and nearly 133,000 jobs disappeared. Better yet, these are not McJobs, but careers that pay a living wage. The median pay of nonprofit employees here is $30,700, less that a thousand dollars under the median for for-profit and public-sector workers. The gap between the household incomes of nonprofit and for-profit employees is similarly narrow.

Medicine is a large part of the picture—Boston in particular is a medical Mecca, and while healthcare makes up 12% of the state’s employment, it accounts for just over half of the 420,000 nonprofit employees. Another 100,000 work in education, making up one-third of the state’s work force. Doctors, nurses, professors and researchers are part of the reason that nonprofit workers here are more likely to have a college degree and hold a professional or managerial job than their profit-sector neighbors. On the other hand, the traditional underpayment of social-service workers holds steady, despite their educational attainments.

There’s no mention of prospect research in the report, but I can’t help believing that the growth in the nonprofit sector in recent years is partly due to the efforts of researchers. It’s good to see nonprofits recognized as an important part of the economy and as a valid professional career path.

Foundation abuses: here's the story

2005-03-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

The Boston Globe special report I mentioned in my previous post is still available online. The articles describe financial abuses by foundation trustees, who used foundation assets to pay for personal expenses and live the sort of luxurious lifestyle that most of us in the nonprofit world can only imagine.

Take a look.

Accountability and Ethics in the Nonprofit Sector

2005-03-02T11:20:00.000-05:00

While a lot of attention has focused on ethical lapses in the corporate world over the past few years, nonprofits are, sadly, not immune. Face it: any place where there are human beings and large sums of money—which describes many nonprofits—there is temptation to behave less than honestly.

Remember the 1992 United Way excessive-compensation scandal? Or the tales of bribery that surrounded the U.S. Olympic Committee in 2002? More recently, the Boston Globe did a series of reports in 2004 on abuses in local foundations, including trustees who treated foundation assets as their personal bank accounts, taking huge salaries and luxurious benefits while spending limited funds on their ostensible charitable goals.

In response, the Independent Sector formed The Panel on the Nonprofit Sector in October 2004, at the encouragement of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Its interim report was released today, with a final report to come later this spring, and makes interesting reading.

Their recommendations include tightening and enforcing the reporting rules for IRS form PF-990, requiring regular audits; establishing and enforcing conflict-of-interest policies. The report also suggests that rules regarding in-kind donations, donor advised funds, and nonprofits that support just one organization (“friends of…”) should be better defined and enforced, and that penalties for self-dealing be increased. The panel’s not done yet, and is still examining issues including financial disclosure, governance and compensation, accreditation, and government oversight.

If your organization isn’t talking about this report and the changes it may need to make, it should be. Starting points for this discussion can be found at Nonprofit Ethics, which also has resources aimed at Canadian organizations, and the Ethics Resource Center, especially the October 10, 2003 issue of their newsletter, which focuses on nonprofits. Florida Atlantic University also offers a source list on nonprofit ethics. I’m sure many other nonprofit sites will be weighing in on the issue soon, if they aren’t already.

Finally, let me note one more thing. The report issued by the Panel on the Nonprofit Sector states “The vast majority of charitable organizations conduct their work in an
ethical, responsible and legal manner.” I can add my vote of confidence to this—I’ve been consulting to nonprofits for more than a decade now, and have worked for more than a hundred clients. None of them, ever, have left me unpaid (though a few have left me waiting a while). I doubt many consultants in the for-profit sector can say the same.

But perception is stronger than reality, and if the public starts seeing nonprofits as unethical and greedy, the money supply is going to dry up pretty fast. So let’s make sure our employers’ actions, and our own, are beyond reproach.

Location, location, location

2005-02-23T11:24:00.000-05:00

Real estate assessments are not hard to find. This is public information, and more and more assessor’s offices are making their databases searchable online; at most, it takes a phone call or two. Frequently, a prospect’s real estate holdings are the only asset we can confirm and quantify.

However, the value of a house is an extremely context-dependent number. There are neigborhoods where a $250,000 house is a mansion, and others where a quarter of a million will buy a two-bedroom fixer-upper, which will be torn down rather than fixed up, in order to build a house more in character with its expensive neighborhood. Without some local demographic and economic information, a real estate value can be a misleading piece of data.

Here are some places to find “community standards” for comparison.

Zipcodes.com markets a database of 77,000 zip code records. While you may find the entire database ($77.95/year) a useful tool, individual zip code records can be looked up for free. This source provides census data from 2000, including population, households per zip code, average house value, and average income per household.

MelissaData is another company offering free lookups as well as selling a variety of database products. The most useful items here are Income Tax Statistics by zip code, which currently lists Average Adjusted Gross Income for 2001, 2001 and 2002; and Home Sales by ZIP, which lists the number of homes sold and the average selling price on a monthly basis, starting from the current month going back to August 2001.

Number, please

2005-02-18T10:30:00.000-05:00

In research, everybody likes numbers, especially ones with dollar signs in front of them. Numbers are seen as “hard” data--reliable, easily compared and ranked. But the fact is, without context, numbers can be meaningless.

One tricky question is inflation. What’s the value of a gift made in 1985 or a fortune inherited in 1972? A number that no longer meets your institution’s standard for a “major gift” may have been much more significant at the time. There are several inflation calculators that help put historically appropriate frame around a numerical snapshot from the past:

The Inflation Calculator provides an adjustment based on the Consumer Price index from 1800 to 2003, based on Historical Statistics of the United States (pre-1975), and the annual Statistical Abstracts of the United States. It also links to other CPI-related sites, as well as inflation calculators for Canada and Italy.

NASA offers the Cost Estimating Web Site . There are a few different calculators here, using various indexes which may help you compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges: the Consumer Price Index; the Employment Cost Index, which measures changes in wages, salaries and benefits; and the Import Price Index, which measure the transaction prices of goods and services exported from or imported into the United States.

If your data gap is geographical rather than temporal, a good currency conversion site can be found at Oanda.com. From dollars to drachma, the site allows you to translate between 164 different currencies, listed by country, and to enter a date for historical conversions. For example, 100 Finnish Markka was eqivalent to $22.76 back in 1995. It can also print handy “cheat sheets” for those overseas trips. I'm still waiting for a client to send me, all expenses paid, to the Land of Euros, but hey, a researcher can dream, can't she?

Coming soon, my take on another easy-to-find, hard-to-interpret number: house valuations.

From the vague to the specific

2005-02-15T14:38:00.000-05:00

Ah, the vague request. Ever feel like the girl in the fairy tale, who was asked to spin gold from straw? In the case of prospect researchers, sometimes we’re expected to spin a golden pile of prospect information from the straw of a note scribbled on a cocktail napkin. “I met a guy at the airport….” Sigh.

One form the vague request can take is “find the company.” Mabye it’s a specific firm you’re looking for, but you don’t have the company name, or maybe the name that was supplied is wrong and you’re coming up blank. Maybe you’ve just got a line of business and a not-very-specific location. “His family owns a company that makes equipment for breweries; they’re either in New York or New Jersey.” Alternatively, you may be asked to generate a list of companies in a specific line of business. “Find me all the companies in Idaho that make roofing supplies; we’re going to try and get an in-kind donation for the repairs on the dormitory roof.”

A great place to try this kind of search is Thomasnet. Brought to you by Thomas Register® and Thomas Regional®, it’s an industrial search engine designed to bring together suppliers and customers. The simple interface allows a search by product/service or by company name, and can search across the U.S. and Canada, or limit it to a single state or province. You can also search for companies by name or product within a set number of miles of a specified zip code, which is good for narrowing a search by location. If you’re not sure what you’re looking for, you can browse the product categories, and each search result also includes a list of related categories to try. At minimum, it provides names, addresses and phone numbers for the resulting companies

Thomasnet has its limitations: it’s heavily weighted toward industrial and manufacturing firms, certainly not comprehensive (but what source is?), and some of the indexing seems whimsical at times, with a few companies in every batch of results seemingly tossed in at random. But it can narrow the field when you’re facing a vague request.

Did you miss me?

2005-02-15T12:52:00.000-05:00

Hi.

Ok, I know this blog hasn’t been updated in way too long, and I apologize. Part of the problem was that life got in the way, but I also confess that I started this blog without a strong sense of what it should be.

For now, I’ve decided it’s a place to tell other researchers about places on the web that may be useful. Once or twice a week, I’ll offer up an interesting site and talk about why I think it’s worth checking out. Occasionally, I may also post ~~rants~~ thoughtful essays about various aspects of research. And if you’ve got a site you think I should know about, please email me.

All Hail Amazon!

2004-09-20T10:00:00.000-04:00

If any dot-com deserves to be making a profit, it’s Amazon. Second only to Google as the Prospect Researcher’s Friend, Amazon.com can save you time and effort—and not just by allowing you to do your holiday shopping from your desk.

Here’s how:

Say you’re researching a partner in a prominent financial firm, or a member of the Rockefeller family. You know the library has a book on the firm, or the family—but does it mention your prospect? Is it worth going down to the library to check the index?

First, try Amazon. Look for relevant books: let’s say, David Rockefeller’s Memoirs, published in 2003. Check for a little green box that says “Search Inside This Book.” Enter a name, or a word, or a phrase.

Amazon will do a full-text search, and give you links to every page on which your search term appears, including its entry in the index. (Did you know. for example, that the word “Harvard” shows up 49 times in David Rockefeller’s memoirs, while Yale appears five times? Of course, he attended Harvard.) Click on a link, and you get an image of the page on which your term appears--and the two pages before and after it.

The “search this book” link doesn’t appear for everything Amazon sells, of course. But it seems to be getting more common for nonfiction. And when you do find it, it’s a gold mine—it can save you a trip to the library, or tell you when it’s worth buying a volume to keep on your shelf.

It's not all in the numbers

2004-09-16T14:00:00.000-04:00

A follow-on to yesterday’s post: more thoughts on details that give insight into a prospect’s personality, background and interests. These are most likely to be available on high-profile clients, and are usually found in newspaper or magazine articles about the person. Such “soft” information is useful for:

• Determining the most appropriate person to cultivate/solicit a prospect
• Identifying conversational starting points, letting the development officer know what to expect
• Deciding which of your organization’s progams is most likely to interest the prospect
• Making up invitation lists, based on an individual’s preferences and connections

When incorporating these into a profile or memo, I find a judicious use of quotation is preferable, since the information is secondhand at best. Conveying useful information while maintaining a respectful objectivity can be a writing challenge.

An example:

“Words used to describe Mr. High-Tech-Executive include “flamboyant,” “arrogant,” and “brilliant.” He is chronically late to appointments. In January 2002, the Times wrote “He typifies the extremes of the technology industry, its wealth, brilliance and speed as well as its ego, hype and ruthlessness.”

The development officer who is meeting Mr. High-Tech-Exec now understands that being kept waiting for an hour and being repeatedly interrupted doesn’t mean the fundraising relationship has no chance. He’s like this with everyone. The DOalso knows not to schedule another appointment immediately after Mr. H-T-E, because of the chronic lateness factor.

What sorts of “personal” details do you think are important to include? How do you handle these details tactfully? Please comment at the link below!

Great Minds Think Alike

2004-09-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

When I launched this blog, I didn’t realize that Steven Hupp had created his Prospect Research Blog in August. He’s already got a lot of interesting information and links there, so check it out.

Welcome to the Prospect Research Blog!

2004-09-15T16:16:00.000-04:00

The Prospect Research Blog is a new place for the research community to hang out. I’ll be sharing interesting ideas, new sources (and old favorites), questions and answers, and you can do the same! I hope to spark some interesting discussions.

In that spirit, today’s tip is that you pick up a copy of the October issue of Vanity Fair. Turn to page 232 for The New Establishment 2004, their listing of “the top leaders of the information age.” There are fifty entries, but more than fifty individuals listed, since some entries list multiple executives at the same company. Like the rest of the magazine, it’s light and gossipy, but it includes some interesting tidbits you might not find elsewhere.

For example: Sergey Brin (new Google billionaire) is the son of a math professor and a NASA scientist; Richard Parson’s (Time Warner CEO) is interested in improving New York City Schools; Kevin Rollins (CEO of Dell) trained as a classical violinist and now plays “rock fiddle” and races motocross bikes. These are the kinds of details that liven up a profile and give a fuller picture of an individual’s personality, which I think can be just as important as financial details. It also lists which presidential candidate each person is supporting.

There’s no explanation of how they chose or ranked the entries, but it’s worth stashing in your files if you’re looking for top-level prospects in the communications/media/high-tech industries.