In the Wake of NPR’s Scandal, Nonprofits Rethink Donor Research

After charity officials around the country got over the shock that NPR’s top fund raiser had been caught in a video sting by a conservative activist, many nonprofit executives started asking tough questions about their own operations.

Many wondered how the fund raiser got lured to a lunch meeting with prospective donors who turned out to be from a fake organization.

That concern has put the spotlight not just on senior fund raisers but also on the people behind the scenes who do research on potential donors. Did they do enough? And did anybody listen to what they found out?

That last question is especially touchy because at many charities, donor researchers are “treated like a glorified secretary or stepchild,” says Armando Zumaya, chief development officer at the Center for Public Integrity, in Washington. But in his experience, he says, “the more you listen to prospect researchers and the more you have them in a management role, the less likely you’ll be talking to prospects you shouldn’t be talking to.”

Lack of Information

At NPR, the scandal came at a time when fund raisers were already discussing how to upgrade the role of researchers.

Tanya Scott-Thomas, manager of development research at NPR, says she and her two colleagues were upset when outside observers suggested that they had fallen down on the job of conducting research about an organization that approached NPR saying it wanted to make a $5-million donation.

The organization called itself the Muslim Education Action Center and invited two senior NPR fund raisers to lunch, but researchers couldn’t find any information about the group other than its Web site. Ms. Scott-Thomas says she relayed the lack of information about the Muslim Education Action Center to an assistant who works with NPR’s senior fund raisers.

“I did think it was strange,” she says. “I communicated that to the executive assistant, but neither of us had the authority to say, ‘Don’t go to this meeting.’”

In her experience, she says, fund raisers “always want to take the meeting to learn more about the organization.”

The fund raisers, of course, found out the hard way that the meeting was a ruse. Ronald J. Schiller, who was senior vice president for development, resigned immediately after a videotape of him with the fake donors showed him making controversial political remarks. Betsy Liley, another top fund raiser, accompanied him to the lunch meeting and was placed on administrative leave after the tape was released.

Growing in Importance

To be sure, there are legitimate reasons why an organization might not have much of a record.

A group that is less than two years old or is based outside the United States might not have filed much data, says Dean Dietrich, prospect-research manager at the University of Nevada at Reno. Also, it’s hard to learn much about some charitable trusts, he says, or about investors or entrepreneurs who want to keep their wealth hidden. But at NPR and elsewhere, the focus is not so much on what could be found but how researchers and fund raisers collaborate.

Jaime Porter, who took over as NPR’s interim vice president for development after Mr. Schiller left, says the organization is trying to change with the times as donor research grows in importance. In the past, she says, researchers were viewed as “back-office” support. “There was no partnership,” she says.

Now “researchers are much more involved in prospect identification and prospect development,” Ms. Porter says.

When the videotapes were released, she says, NPR was in the middle of an effort to pair fund raisers and researchers more regularly, she says.

“Tanya and her team pulled all the information that they could find,” Mr. Schiller told The Chronicle in an interview. But what they found didn’t answer NPR’s questions about the group, so the fund raisers went to the exploratory lunch, which raised further concerns. So “we engaged an outside firm to secure additional information,” he says. “The outside firm’s findings were inconclusive.”

Nonetheless, Ms. Porter says she doesn’t think that the problem at NPR was caused by miscommunications between fund raisers and researchers about whether to accept the lunch meeting with the Muslim Education Action Center.

“It’s usually up to the fund raiser if they choose to take the meeting,” Ms. Porter says. “That’s very common. I would even venture to say some people take the meeting without the research.”

“I don’t think taking the meeting was the problem at all,” Ms. Porter adds. “It was what happened at the meeting that was the problem.”

Mr. Schiller agrees. “We addressed our concerns through questions to the potential donor, and we never received the information we requested,” he says. “We never accepted the gift. The process worked.”

Still, many prospect researchers hope the NPR episode will help them elevate their role in the fund-raising office.

“NPR has done the research field a favor by shining the light on the necessity of due diligence,” says David Broussard, a grants and research officer at the WellStar Foundation, in Atlanta.

Ms. Scott-Thomas wrote to her colleagues on an e-mail discussion list for researchers that she wishes that her department had a stronger voice. She wrote, “Our value is not only our ability to find information on potential donors but also our unique expertise in interpreting that information.”