July 23, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Fund raisers who conduct research on potential donors are seeking to improve their images after The Wall Street Journal published an article raising questions about whether nonprofit groups were invading the privacy of affluent people. Some fear that the article could lead to a government crackdown on what information fund raisers can glean.
At the annual meeting of the Association of Prospect Researchers for Advancement, held this week in Anaheim, Calif., fund raisers expessed concerns about the article, “Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You?”
Some worry that the article, which details how some hospitals immediately screen admissions records to find wealthy patients who have checked in, portrayed their profession in a negative light.
“We’re not spying on people, for goodness’ sakes,” says Elizabeth Crabtree, who served as a previous president of the research association. She thought the resulting piece was “really one-sided” and the writer, who interviewed her and other fund raisers, was “intent upon causing concern.”
In the current issue of Connections, the association’s newsletter, she writes about her “disappointment and frustration of seeing our profession and work regarded in such a disconcerting way.” She continues that “the reporter chose to incite rather than to inform the public by manipulating the facts, often by simply leaving out important information or context.”
Asked in a separate interview about what she meant by this, Ms. Crabtree says that the association has an ethics code that ensures donor privacy and confidentiality. She adds that prospect research about donors, such as their real-estate and stock-market holdings, is available public information, and is comparable to the intelligence found in the business world’s market-research divisions.
“Prospect research is an integral part of helping organizations be more efficient and effective in engaging donors for the right project and the right ask amount,” says Ms. Crabtree, director of prospect development at Brown University.
Case in point: For the past six years, she and her colleagues identified 11,671 new potential donors to Brown, 5,284 of whom made gifts of $10,000 or more. This represented $649-million in new gifts and pledges to a campuswide $1.4-billion campaign. More than 20 percent of the people she and her colleagues identified had never made a gift previously.
The fallout from the article, though, has given people who conduct prospect research an opportunity to educate the public about its purpose.
Ms. Crabtree writes: “There is really nothing ‘creepy’ about connecting a donor’s passion and interest to a nonprofit organization’s mission and initiatives.”
