Internet Sites That Click for Charity Researchers Seeking Donors

Following is a sampling of some of the Internet sites

ALSO SEE:

The Pitfalls of Mining the Internet

that fund raisers say they use frequently to find information about donors and potential donors. Sites listed here are free unless otherwise noted.

WHERE TO START

For researchers overwhelmed by the Internet — or someone looking for an overview of resources — the following sites are good places to begin a search. They have links to a broad range of sites and are updated often.

Development Research Links (http://www.princeton.edu/one/research/netlinks.html), maintained by the Princeton University development-research office, is a compilation of nearly 300 sites often used by staff members, including links to salary information, on-line newspapers, stock and other business information, and genealogy sites, among others. Links are listed alphabetically by category.

Internet Prospector (http://w3.uwyo.edu/~prospect) has many useful links provided by fund-raising researchers and grouped into categories, such as corporations, people, and on-line news. The corporations page contains links to more than 40 sites, including corporate directories and stock quotes; the grants page has 35 links to information on private funds; the international page contains nearly 100 links to specific-country Web sites, international stock exchanges, and global news sources. Internet Prospector also provides links to news sites that allow users to search hundreds of newspapers at once; links to help find people’s addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses; and information on subscribing to an Internet discussion list in which researchers exchange ideas and information about their work.

Price’s List of Lists (http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~gprice/listof.htm), compiled by a librarian at George Washington University, includes links to such lists as the Fortune 500, National Law Journal’s Top 50 Woman Lawyers, and Red Herring’s Top 10 Entrepreneurs. Those lists help charities find people capable of making big gifts and learn more about people who might already be significant donors.

GENERAL SEARCHES

Researchers often begin a search using Web sites that let users type in key words to find links to sites on a particular topic. Some search sites are referred to as “search engines” because they use computer technology to find information. Others, such as About.com, use people to collect and sort information.

Because each search site works differently, no two will give the same results to a query. For example, some retrieve a large number of links, some are better at tailoring the links to the search, and some are better organized so that the results most likely to be relevant come first. Most researchers have their favorites — and often use more than one per search.

Search engines sometimes retrieve information not easily found in books or fee-based services such as Dialog or Lexis-Nexis. For instance, if a fund raiser types in a person’s name, the search engine might turn up a Web site that lists him or her as a donor or trustee. Even so, searches on the Internet never give comprehensive results. Like many other things on the Internet, these sites make frequent changes, and new sites appear often. To help find the best one, some researchers refer to a site called Search Engine Watch (http://www.searchenginewatch.com), which rates them.

Following are a few of the search-engine sites that charity researchers often use:

Google (http://www.google.com) is thorough and fast, say researchers. Some people like the fact that the site keeps copies of Internet pages even after they have been removed from the Web.

Northern Light (http://www.northernlight.com) is very thorough, say researchers. Besides searching the Internet, Northern Light has its own fee-based collection of nearly 6,000 full-text articles from journals, magazines, and market-research and investment reports. The site allows free searches of news wires and then archives the articles when they are two weeks old, after which they are available for $1 apiece. Most fees are between $1 and $4, though some reports can cost as much as $300. Northern Light shows users an abstract of an article to help them decide whether to purchase it. Other search engines also find fee-based documents but generally require that payments be made directly to the company that provides the information. Northern Light processes the money itself.

A number of sites allow researchers to use several search engines at once, but each one handles the resulting information differently. Each of these sites allows users to choose which search engines to use:

Dogpile (http://www.dogpile.com) uses about 10 other search engines and eliminates duplicate links.

InferenceFind (http://www.infind.com) searches six engines or can be customized to add as many as the user would like. It organizes all the links into categories to help fine tune the results, and eliminates duplicate listings.

Following are the sites that have people putting together information:

About.com (http://www.about.com) offers an overview of complicated subjects. If a fund raiser needed to know about the Mormon tradition of tithing, for instance, About.com would retrieve links to sites that provide an overview of religious beliefs.

Ask Jeeves (http://www.ask.com) responds to questions written in sentence form instead of requiring key words — and will even try to decipher misspelled words in queries.

PROPERTY OWNERSHIP

Dataquick (http://www.dataquick.com) is fee-based but offers detailed information about residential and commercial properties that has been gleaned from county records and other sources. The information covers more than 800 jurisdictions in 47 states and includes whatever information that jurisdiction chooses to make public — in many cases, the property’s square footage, acreage, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and names of owners. How far back the information goes — and how often it is updated — varies with the region.

Dataquick allows searches by the name of the owner, the address, or some combination of nearly 30 other criteria. Users can purchase individual property profiles for $9.95 each.

Knowx (http://www.knowx.com) (pronounced NO-ex) provides links to more than 30 data bases with information on real-estate transactions compiled by local, state, and federal government agencies. In addition to information about the real estate itself, users can search data bases on refinancing, foreclosures, bankruptcy filings, lawsuits, liens, and boat and aircraft ownership.

Knowx charges both by the search and for the amount of information that is retrieved. For instance, one search would cost $1, and if it turned up five records, the user could buy one for an additional $6.95 or all five for $15.

Property Assessments Online (http://www.people.Virginia.EDU/~dev-pros/Realestate.html) contains links to assessors’ offices in 40 states and enables searches by an owner’s name or address. It also links to a site that gives phone numbers of assessors’ offices across the country as well as a data base that makes it easy to find the county where a specific city is located.

U.S. Wealthy Zips (http://www.usc.edu/dept/source/zipcode/index.htm) is a list of more than 300 ZIP-code areas that have the highest per-capita incomes in the country, based on estimates by Worth magazine.

Yahoo Real Estate (http://realestate.yahoo.com) lists house prices and sale dates for more than 20 million residences in 26 states plus the District of Columbia. The data, updated weekly, go back at least five years for each region. Users can search for homes by street address or by price range in specific cities or ZIP codes. Even if information on a particular house is not available on this site, data on neighboring properties can help gauge the value of a home. Users can even request e-mail notification whenever a house is sold on a particular street.

BUSINESSES

Amcity (http://www.amcity.com) provides links to 41 city business journals and contains the full text of some of their articles, which include profiles of company leaders. Partial lists such as top law firms and largest private companies in various regions are also on the Web, and the complete lists will be on line soon. These journals also cover small local businesses that are not always mentioned in national publications.

Hoover’s (http://www.hoovers.com) offers free capsule descriptions of 14,000 companies. It also offers more-detailed information on most of those companies for an annual subscription fee starting at $900 a year for non-profit organizations. Many researchers find that all they need is the free information — which includes the company’s sales, revenue, and number of employees as well as a link to the company’s home page. Others subscribe to get more thorough reports with more financial information, access to a directory of key officers (some with their ages and salaries) of more than 6,500 companies, more-detailed company histories, and weekly e-mail updates about plans to take private companies public. Also available to subscribers is a feature that allows users to tailor a search to find, for example, all companies in a particular city with revenue over a certain amount.

InfoUSA (http://www.salesleadsusa.com) gives information about 11 million businesses, including privately held companies. Company profiles cost a small fee — usually about $5 apiece — and include the company’s credit rating code, addresses, number of employees, estimated annual sales, key contact names, and other information.

PR Newswire (http://www.prnewswire.com) puts about 1,500 press releases on the Internet a day and keeps them in a data base for 30 days. The releases come from companies, non-profit organizations, and government agencies, and the data base is searchable by key word. Fund raisers say this site is good for picking up job changes of potential donors that might not be published in major newspapers or magazines.

Information from The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that monitors financial transactions, is available on its own site as well as on several commercial sites. The commission’s site is called EDGAR, which stands for Electronic Data, Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (http://www.sec.gov/edgarhp.htm).

Some commercial sites take information directly from the commission’s site but package it in formats that are easy to use.

10K Wizard (http://www.10kwizard.com), one of the most popular, lets users search S.E.C. filings of more than 68,000 companies using key words, phrases, ticker symbols, names, or even partial names. Users can also monitor certain S.E.C. filings by choosing any words in the text — including people’s names — to get e-mail alerts about any particular kinds of filings. Users can also find out information about trades made by company insiders, as well as about any executives listed in S.E.C. filings, including the person’s position at a company, salary, bonuses and stock options, corporate board memberships, alma maters, and other such information.

Data are available on 10K Wizard as soon as it is available on the S.E.C.’s site and can be downloaded into formats that fund raisers can use with other programs, such as Excel.

SALARIES

Several sites help researchers estimate a potential donor’s salary based on averages that are sometimes adjusted according to what part of the country they live in. Some of these sites also include information on bonuses. Among them:

Town Online Salary (http://townonline.com/working/careerres/salary.html) has links to a variety of on-line salary surveys. Among them: the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 1998-99 Occupational Outlook Handbook, which provides earnings for 250 occupations; Working Woman magazine’s survey of gender differences in salaries for 78 professions; and WageWeb, which offers free national averages for salaries in 160 positions, as well as fee-based information for those positions by geographic region and size of company.

Wall Street Journal Salary Tables (http://careers.wsj.com) gives the annual average salary base — and sometimes bonuses — of people in more than 30 professions. The data come from the National Business Employment Weekly, which interviews corporate officials and recruiters in search of industry trends.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Family Search (http://familysearch.org), a genealogy site produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has information on family trees regardless of religious affiliation.

Lives, the Biography Resource (http://members.home.net/klanxner/lives) contains links to 2,000 biography Web sites, updated weekly. They can be searched by name or browsed by category, such as African-Americans, Holocaust survivors, or Canadians.

Michigan Electronic Library (http://mel.lib.mi.us/reference/REF-biog.html) has more than 60 links to collections of biographies, such as CelebSite (with profiles, interviews, and news about models, musicians, and people in show business), the National Women’s Hall of Fame Biographies, and African-Americans in the Sciences.

Social Security Death Index (http://www.mtjeff.com/~bodenst/ssdi.html) searches the more than 60 million names in the Social Security Death Index — a data base of people with Social Security numbers who have died — and provides the person’s date of birth, date of death, county and state where the person last resided, and Social Security number. It also allows users to get copies of the original Social Security certificate. It often takes a few months for deaths to be recorded on the site.

FINDING PEOPLE

Several sites provide addresses, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of people and businesses, some with “reverse searches” that allow users to plug in a phone number or address to get the name of a person or business.

As is the case with search engines, plugging the same information into different sites can produce different results, so using more than one is sometimes worthwhile. Among the most popular:

AnyWho (http://www.anywho.com) includes toll-free numbers and reverse searches using the phone number. The business listings include the Web address, e-mail address, fax number, and toll-free numbers. It also gives maps and directions.

555-1212 (http://www.555-1212.com) lets users do reverse searches by phone number, fax number, address, or e-mail address. It also includes international directories and country telephone codes.

PROFESSIONAL SITES

Several sites list addresses and business phone numbers of professionals in particular fields. Some also include information about where the person went to college.

Finding out if potential donors have received certification by professional boards can be a clue to how much they make, say researchers. Those with board certification tend to be at the upper end of the pay scale. Among the sites with such information:

American Medical Association’s Physician Select (http://www.ama-assn.org/aps/amahg.html) gives office addresses and phone numbers of 650,000 doctors as well as information on where and when they got their medical degrees, where they did their residency, whether they are board certified, and their primary and secondary specialties.

Martindale-Hubbell Lawyer Locator (http://www.martindale.com/locator) provides information on 900 lawyers in a data base that is searchable by name, address, language, and practice area. It includes profiles, with birth dates, phone numbers, and e-mail addresses as well as information on their bar association memberships and where and when they got their bachelor’s and law-school degrees. It also links to law firms’ Web sites and to Martindale-Hubbell’s profile of the law firm.

POLITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS

FEC Info (http://www.tray.com/fecinfo) is run by Public Disclosure, a Washington consulting company, and contains information from the Federal Election Commission’s record of political donations. Researchers often use those donations to figure out the interests of potential donors. It is searchable by name, ZIP code, and occupation.

NEWSPAPERS

These sites offer links not just to major newspapers but to small local papers as well — and sometimes even to school papers — that are not available in most libraries or reference books:

American Journalism Review (http://ajr.newslink.org/statnews.html) provides links to nearly 5,000 newspapers by state. Includes dailies, weeklies, alternative papers, and special-interest papers such as religious, business, political or promotional. It also links to sites that allow searches of several news sources at once.

Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org) contains links to hundreds of newspapers from around the world, including small local papers.