By Alice Wen, Prospect Research Coordinator, Nature Conservancy of Canada
BACKGROUND
The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is Canada’s largest land conservation organization with seven regional offices, which are supported by our national office. Our prospect development team is part of the National Strategic Philanthropy and Marketing department. The team consists of three members: our manager working from Guelph, a database administrator working from Toronto, and myself, the prospect researcher, working from Ottawa. We provide prospect research and management services for about 20 fundraisers from the national and regional offices. Like other research workshops, we offer proactive and reactive research services. The prospect identification projects mentioned here fall under the latter category. This kind of reactive research service is gaining so much in popularity that I generally work on a prospect identification project every month.
RESEARCH STRATEGY AND PROCESS
Working together with our partners and landowners, we acquire land, plan conservation activities and manage and restore properties in our care. Our fundraisers constantly work on raising money for both the acquisition and stewardship of various conservation projects in different regions across the country. A typical research request would read like this: “We’re raising funds for Paradise Island. We still have $750,000 left to raise. Could you help create a list of potential prospects that will be further qualified by our volunteers?”
Step One: I firstly contact the research requester, who in most cases is our major gift officer from a regional office, to set up a teleconference. Our national manager of prospect development and the program manager who is familiar with the conservation project will also attend the meeting when possible. It is generally a 30 minute conference during which I gather as much information about the project as possible. Questions I typically ask include:
1. What are special features of this project?
2. What is the project deadline?
3. Do we have government funding for this project?
4. Is the project also attractive to the U.S. Prospects?
5. Who have already made gifts to this project? Who are our project champions?
Step Two: Based on the meeting, I produce a strategy document titled “Prospect Strategy Agreement”, which summarizes the main features of the project and outlines research strategies I would utilize – for instance, “look for major donors who are cottage owners in general area of project; identify corporate prospects with operations in this area of province”.
At the end of the document, I include a customized gift chart which acts as a roadmap for the research. In the past, we didn’t know exactly how many prospects were required for each project, and it seemed that we could easily spend too much time identifying new prospects. With the gift chart, we now know exactly how many qualified prospects and how many suspects we need to identify based on the fundraising goal. The Prospect Strategy Agreement also acts as a contract between the region and myself, and includes a timeline for completion.
Step Three: After submitting the agreement and receiving input and consent from the fundraiser, I proceed with the research. Firstly, I create a spreadsheet to keep track of individual, corporate and foundation prospects. After that, I add column headers like gift capacity, major giving interests, the largest gift to an environmental organization, links to NCC and contact information. The search then begins.
Initially, I identify major gift prospects in our database that have already made gifts to similar projects, live near the project or have interests identified that would attract them to the project, like bird watching, kayaking, etc. I also use charitable giving databases such as NOZA and iWave to identify new major gift donors who either live or give to organizations in the area, particularly to other environmental organizations. Local business magazines and Chamber of Commerce websites also prove to be valuable research sources. In this process, I just forward any worthy information to regional fundraisers and program staff on an “as found” basis. This way, I can garner feedback and fine-tune my research strategies if necessary.
Final Step: I submit prospect lists and suggestions once they are completed. It usually takes a month, but the length of time also depends on each project and other projects on my plate. In an ideal situation, I meet with the original requester, review the list together and make recommendations about which suspects to approach based on Capacity, Affinity and Links (CAL). I also remind the fundraisers to enter any qualified prospects into our Prospect Clearance System to get them cleared to the region. We plan to establish a system to keep track of these suspects to calculate how many of them eventually make major gifts to NCC. Following up with fundraisers and being informed with the project’s progress are important as well in terms of evaluating project success.
Conclusion
With the researcher and fundraisers located in different locations at NCC, nothing is more important than effective collaboration to ensure the success of a fundraising project. It is essential for a researcher to proactively solicit information from fundraisers and conduct a “reference interview” before undertaking research. This year, we also plan to take the same approach for other kinds of research requests to maximize the efficiency of research services.