Inappropriate Requests Put Donor Researchers in a Tough Spot

Early in her career conducting research on potential donors, Tiffanny Walsh received a research question that still gives her doubts about her actions years later.

A fundraiser at a nonprofit where Ms. Walsh worked nearly a decade ago, and which she doesn’t want to name, had met with a prospective donor and was convinced that the person was transgender. The fundraiser didn’t want to risk offending a potentially generous supporter by asking directly and so turned to Ms. Walsh.

It was an easy search. She found out that the donor was transgender through an article that discussed the transition.

“The development staff decided that the person would not be a viable prospect for that project,” says Ms. Walsh, now the annual-fund manager at the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “Unfortunately, it was because the person was transgender.”

She says the organization felt that accepting money from a transgender person violated its principles. “I think today I would feel differently about it,” she says. She would have asked why investigating that aspect of a person’s background was necessary.

“I thought it was a shame,” she says. “That decision didn’t sit well with me.”

‘Stump the Researcher’

While most requests that fundraisers make to donor researchers are designed to help win a big gift, Ms. Walsh is hardly the only fundraiser who has faced uncomfortable situations when asked to conduct research that ranges from borderline inappropriate to zany.

For instance, Lorie Hoover, prospect management and stewardship coordinator at the University School of Nashville, a K-12 institution, says one co-worker asked her to find an ex-boyfriend and another a long-lost family member.

“We do get requests to do crazy things,” she says.

To prevent unusual inquiries that can detract from research on more important projects and may result in misuse of an organization’s resources, some nonprofits spell out for employees what’s fair game to pursue as a research request and what isn’t—but most don’t. More often than not, it’s up to the researchers themselves to educate their co-workers on a case-by-case basis about what kind of questions are inappropriate.

Some researchers, though, confess to being tickled by strange requests for data, seeing them as challenges to their gumshoe skills.

“Some of them are really kind of fun,” says Chris Dawson, a senior prospect-research and management specialist at University Hospitals, in Cleveland. “They’re almost kind of like ‘stump the researcher.’”

But he sometimes wishes more fundraisers who make the requests would just dig for the answers themselves. “My job is to answer questions,” Mr. Dawson says. “Every so often I do have to pour water on some of these requests.”

Simple Litmus Test

Most fundraisers adhere to strict guidelines outlined by the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement, the membership organization that represents donor researchers and analysts. Among other things, they require prospect researchers to be cognizant and selective about the sensitive public information they collect.

But Liz Rejman, a member of the association’s International Board of Directors and head of development at the Museum London, in Ontario, has a simpler litmus test for handling strange research requests.

“If the donor said to you, ‘How did you find out about that?,’ would you be embarrassed?” she asks. “If you’re embarrassed, then that’s your gut telling you that’s not ethical.”

When getting these requests, she says, prospect researchers should also stop and ask: “How does this help the fundraiser positively move a relationship forward with a donor?”

“If you can’t answer that question,” Ms. Rejman says, “then there isn’t a need to be gathering that information.”

Need to Know Why

As a director of prospect research at Carleton College, Mark Egge admits that getting odd search tasks from other fundraisers elicits immediate Pavlovian responses from him: skepticism and reluctance. But if he figures out why the information is needed, he’s all in.

For instance, he saw the goal clearly when his institution in Northfield, Minn., was trying to capitalize on the big oil boom in northwestern North Dakota. Carleton fundraisers wondered: Who’s grown wealthy in that region from leasing their land’s mineral rights to mining companies? And do any of them have Carleton connections?

So Mr. Egge picked up those shot-in-the-dark questions and found one Carleton donor in western North Dakota. The college’s fundraisers had noticed he’d given one modest gift, then a larger one, but “we weren’t sure where the wealth came from,” Mr. Egge says. “We put the dots together: This is why he has been able to support us.”

As a result, Carleton fundraisers asked the donor for bigger gifts. Since then, he has made multiple contributions, increasing his total giving by about 25 percent, Mr. Egge says.

“We had more reason to pursue a relationship with that person,” he says. “It wasn’t a one-time thing.”

Too Little Information

Sometimes the requests are too vague or too broad. Like the time Ms. Hoover, of the University School of Nashville, was asked to find out who was moving into a big house in town and what the person’s assets might be worth.

The request came from a trustee and a school vice president, but what little information Ms. Hoover had originated from the trustee’s mother, who had overheard it in a conversation in a nursing home. Ms. Hoover had no name and no address—only a street name—but was told she could drive up and down the street until she saw a house that looked like someone had just moved in.

Ms. Hoover found such a home, but the sales record hadn’t been updated. Ultimately, the director of development registered a complaint on her behalf with the vice president’s office, and the problem dissolved.

Sometimes the search tasks simply try prospect researchers’ patience.

A fundraiser at University Hospitals, in Cleveland, recently sent Mr. Dawson the following instruction: Find a celebrity who has ties to Cleveland, who has charitable interests involving children, and who starred as a hero or superhero in movies or television.

The email left Mr. Dawson scratching his head. He was tempted to write back to his co-worker: “Hey, have you ever heard of a little thing called Google?”

The fundraiser wanted to invite a celebrity to an event called “Superheroes Unite,” a party that aims to entice donors to give $10,000 to the organization. A similar event in 2012 had brought Emeril Lagasse, the celebrity chef, who flew in and cooked for about 75 VIP guests at a donor’s house.

Mr. Dawson gamely spent time trying to find “a speck of dust in a needle in a haystack,” he says. He made a list of known Cleveland celebrities. Then it hit him. He recalled that Halle Berry is from Cleveland and had starred in several “X-Men” movies.

When Mr. Dawson told the fundraiser, he received this reply: “Can you get me her phone number?”

The researcher dutifully retrieved contact information for the actress’s management company, but Mr. Dawson disliked being treated like a reference librarian. “To be honest, there is a frustration factor,” he says. “Can’t they dig some of this stuff up themselves?”

Personal Requests

Since prospect researchers have specialized data-search skills, they sometimes field personal requests from colleagues. Some balk, while others have no qualms about helping out.

Ms. Walsh, the ACLU fundraiser, says that earlier in her career, a co-worker asked for help when her ex-husband disappeared, owing thousands of dollars in child support. State officials who were supposed to track down people fleeing their child-support duties said they couldn’t find him.

Ms. Walsh’s boss approved the request, and it was not difficult to locate the runaway father, says Ms. Walsh, who added that she did the search at home on her own time. “It took me five minutes, and I found the guy,” she says. “The state-enforcement department couldn’t find him for months. Come on!” She used Google.

But this type of request, she says, happens far too often at nonprofit organizations and puts researchers in the awkward situation of deciding whether to violate the APRA’s ban on using prospecting tools for personal reasons.

But, she adds, “when you hear something like that, how can you not help?”

It’s a “personal choice” on whether prospect researchers should help colleagues find information, says Ms. Rejman, the board member of the researchers’ association. But she adds that they should not do it during working hours or use their nonprofit’s databases or other resources.

Ms. Walsh counsels prospect researchers to maintain a sense of humor about the odd requests that come their way. But she also asks their colleagues to think carefully about what they ask for and how they ask for it.

“When a person making the request is someone who doesn’t recognize you as a member of the team or doesn’t value you as a professional, it makes it really hard and stressful,” she says.

Now that she is in charge of seeking annual-fund gifts, not doing prospect research, she says she tries to be very careful about the requests she makes.

“To me, it’s common sense that you can’t ask somebody: ‘Can you look up that person who did that thing the other day?’” Ms. Walsh says. “I’m not going to waste researchers’ time on things that are ridiculous.”