Any good gift officer would always want to be the one who is managing that one prospect who makes a transformational gift. And I’m assuming that’s why a lot of gift officers I speak to tend to keep prospects in their portfolios, even those that… Read More »Letting Go of Your Too Big Portfolio
In conversations at conferences and with clients I hear that, in fundraising, there appears to be a great divide between research officers and gift officers. And the divide itself is made up of capacity ratings. Do you run into these scenarios? If you have encountered… Read More »Are Capacity Ratings Rate-able?
This time of year, many nonprofits are counting up the last of June’s gifts and trying to get to a total that meets their fundraising goals. When the reports come out, most fundraisers will start the new year again – at $0.00 – without thinking… Read More »In the New Fiscal Year, Look Back Before You Start Again at Zero
Nearly year ago, many nonprofit organizations in the United States were scrambling to meet the now passed deadline for GDPR implementation. Last spring, when I spoke with several advancement services and prospect research professionals, there was a great deal of confusion about what GDPR would… Read More »Introduction to the DPR
This post was written for Prospect Research Pride Month in 2019. It is a celebration of what we do and how integral our work is in the success of our organizations. Let’s take a look at our work from a bird’s eye view instead of… Read More »Prospect Research Is More Than Studying Wealth
During this time of year, many of us start to make plans about what we’re hoping to get done next year. If you’re in charge of maintaining a nonprofit database, one of those plans should be to clean up and improve the data about your… Read More »Best Practices for Your Next Database Clean Up
While driving home from Apra Prospect Development, I listened to this TED talk: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509358157/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-friends-we-can-have . The article brought my mind back to some work I’m doing on estimating the number of gift officers needed to meet a campaign goal. For analytics projects like this, I… Read More »Of William the Conqueror and Gift Officers: A Look Again at Portfolio Size
In 2017, Staupell joined Business Networking International, a networking association for small businesses to build each other up through referral marketing. Our goal was to meet and share our expertise with small businesses in Upstate New York, where we’re headquartered. At the same time, I… Read More »What’s In A Word?
Yes, I am of the age where I want to sit around telling “In MY day…” stories. But today is still my day because I get to share this amazing profession with you. And this blog post is a rampage of appreciation over how far… Read More »We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: A Celebration of Research Pride Month
When we think of the science of analytics, we consider it a part of mathematics. And math is a set of instructions, even more than science. For instance, no matter how you set up your equation, 3 + 3 + 5 = 11. Set differently,… Read More »Analytics Is Also an Art