This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2011.
The answer to this question is yes: You can use reporting tools and software that you already have to do some very good basic prospecting. The terms for this go from “deep data dive” to “data mining” to “good prospecting,” and, regardless of how you describe it, you’ll be a hero to find new prospects looking at patterns. Here are some tips to get started using basic reporting skills and/or your in-place software to get a system-managed prospecting project started.
Reporting Tools
We wrote earlier about using trigger reports to discover prospects, from getting a weekly report on donors at a certain level (usually $1,000 or more) to annual reports on donors whose giving moved them up the recognition ladder. You can use reporting for a variety of prospecting projects, and may find that your clients will suggest more. Here are some examples:
Can you find me more of…
- Once you discover the industry or employer who hires your most lucrative prospects, get a report of everyone you know of who works for that company. Use your access to your databases as well to find others in that company or industry, and exploit LinkedIn’s search feature, to round out your list. Present all of your new found prospects at one time in a prospect management meeting. An event at the site, peer solicitation, increased giving through competition, or just plain adding a bunch of Goldman Sachs partners to your major gifts pool can result.
- Get a report of anyone who made an annual gift that equates to one fifth or more of your minimum major gift. Research them. We often neglect to mine our annual giving donors, but someone who can give, say, $20,000 in one year can make a 5-year commitment for $100,000, which would be a major gift. Of course, you’ll run into people who are truly annual giving donors, and that’s fine, too.
Hand Raisers
- A tricky one but I wonder if it would work: find people whose giving last year is more than half of their lifetime giving, or their last gift is their highest gift. Pick a giving minimum (perhaps our standard $1,000)? And then prospect them.
- Run a report showing donors who moved from apartments to houses (this may be complex to do and may yield only good annual giving donors).
- Run a report of all new donors last year. Who gave at the $100 or more level? Prospect them.
Tools in Place: Excel
Our very own Gregory Duke does excellent presentations on using Excel for finding prospects. In addition to what he has shared, consider:
- Calculating donors whose giving last year is more than twice the average of their giving the prior 3 years. Usually you’ll hear me calling this the velocity score. The function you want looks something like [last year’s cell/AVERAGE(prior year, 2 years prior, 2 years prior)] without the brackets and using cell references.
- If your constituency is geographically disparate, consider using the Forbes “Most Expensive Zip Codes” list (See here for the 2011 list: http://www.forbes.com/sites/morganbrennan/2011/10/12/americas-most-expensive-zip-codes/) to identify those in your database that matter for events and for gift officer assignment. Get a count of prospects by zip code from your database and compare it to this list. If you have more than 50 viable prospects (you decide what a viable prospect looks like), then consider asking to have someone assigned to that neighborhood. Or, better yet, learn how to use the VLOOKUP function and append some of the delivered data to your data file, matching zip codes (move your zip code field to the first column and take the left 5 characters).
- Use the census data if you’d prefer to find neighborhoods near you with higher median incomes or, on the planned giving side, more people with no children at home. The 2010 data on median income doesn’t seem to have come out, but go here to explore New York: http://2010.census.gov/2010census/popmap/ipmtext.php?fl=36
What Next?
If any of these ideas sounded like they would answer that assignment you’re struggling with, then do that exercise first. Then try your hand at something that you understand but haven’t done yet. You’ll get more confident with each exercise. You can do this.