Prospecting the Web for Donors

Up-to-the-minute news delivered to fund raisers automatically

Top officials at Bucknell University were all set to ask a wealthy alumnus

to give $10-million for a new campus building. But just days before the scheduled visit, Bucknell’s fund raisers learned that the potential donor’s stock holdings had fallen $300-million.

They received the crucial news from a free, customized e-mail alert service offered by Yahoo. Fund raisers at the university use the service to monitor the stock holdings of several dozen prospective donors, including the billionaire whom university officials had planned to visit.

After learning the dismal stock news, Bucknell’s president and chief fund raiser decided not to ask for a big gift, but simply updated the donor on the university’s plans. Several months later, after the stock had recovered, university officials went to see the alumnus again — and got the $10-million.

A growing number of fund raisers use e-mail alert services, such as the one offered by Yahoo, to cope with the vast amount of information about donors now available on the Internet. The services work like a robotic personal shopper, searching a Web site or a collection of sites for a specific piece of information the fund raiser wants monitored regularly, like news articles that mention a charity’s trustees, and then sending an e-mail with the results of the search — typically on a daily or weekly basis. Fund raisers say the services save them hours, and sometimes days, of Web research time.

“Start to think about how you can get the information to come to you, rather than having to go out and get it,” Poonam Prasad, a donor-research consultant in New York, advises her clients.

Fund raisers use the alert services to keep track of developments related to major donors and other charity supporters, such as career changes, compensation, real estate and stock holdings, positions on corporate boards, and other information. Such details can help fund raisers strengthen ties with major donors, as well as figure out when best to approach them for additional gifts and how much to ask for.

Because many of the services are free, notes Michel Hudson, president of the Association of Prospect Researchers in Advancement, nonprofit groups with small budgets can take advantage of them just as easily as large groups can. “It’s not a matter of resources, it’s just a matter of knowing about it,” she says. “All you really have to do is have access to the Internet.”

New Efficiencies

Shelby Radcliffe McClintock, Bucknell’s director of prospect research and management, is viewed by her fellow fund-raising researchers as a particularly savvy user of the alert services. She has advised many of her colleagues on where to find new alerts, as well as on which alerts work best for which uses — and which services aren’t worth the time or money they require.

The screen saver on Ms. McClintock’s computer repeatedly scrolls a quote from a Zora Neale Hurston book: “Research is formalized curiosity: It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

Poking and prying with a purpose is exactly what Ms. McClintock does for a living, collecting and compiling information about Bucknell alumni, parents, and volunteers. Among the details she seeks: when potential donors sell stocks, get married, change jobs, get raises, or sell their homes.

In the pre-Internet days, she says, “if you wanted to look at a company proxy statement, you sent away for it, and it might take six months for you to get it.” Even after a researcher had such information in hand, there was no way to search for key words in the way that one can in an electronic document.

Once many of these records became available online, Ms. McClintock recalls, she still had to visit dozens of Web sites each week and manually enter the names of each donor she was tracking to locate any new information about them.

With the e-mail alerts, “what used to take literally months can now be done in minutes,” she says.

Ms. McClintock estimates that from March to May, e-mail alerts helped her office identify 40 new prospective donors who the university estimates have the potential to give a total of as much as $15-million. In addition, new information from these alerts led her and her colleagues to upgrade their estimates of how much donors they already knew about could give. If the predictions are right, Bucknell can count on up to $17-million more than it initially expected from those donors.

Favorite Sites

Ms. McClintock has identified 17 Web sites with e-mail alert features that she can use to track information about initial public offerings and stock holdings, real-estate transactions, obituaries, and general news about alumni.

A check of Ms. McClintock’s inbox on a recent visit, for example, revealed three e-mail alerts based on customized searches she had set up.

The first — from Northern Light’s Web site, which searches national, regional, and college newspapers; news wires and transcripts; press releases; corporate, education, and nonprofit Web sites; and personal Web pages — informs her about 15 new items from 13 different Web sites that contain the key words “Bucknell University.” She uses those to keep abreast of Bucknell news and look for information about alumni.

Another message, from Forbes magazine’s online “People Tracker” service, lets Ms. McClintock know that the salary of a young alumnus, who recently took his technology company public, has risen from $127,923 to $437,539. Ms. McClintock notes the new information in the person’s file in a database kept by the development office; the fact will help shape a donation request the university soon hopes to make.

The third message, from the site 10Kwizard, states that a Bucknell trustee has been appointed a director of a biomedical company. Reading the message, Ms. McClintock discovers that the company is one the trustee’s company plans to buy. Ms. McClintock notes the detail in the trustee’s database entry and makes a mental note to watch for news of the forthcoming acquisition, as well as its effect on the trustee’s capacity to make a gift.

Ms. McClintock finds another potentially lucrative detail in the third alert. A biography of the trustee mentions his affiliation with a venture-capital company, a fact she was unaware of previously. Ms. McClintock plans to investigate the company further to learn what it is investing in and how the investments are performing.

Using the Internet Well

Now that e-mail alert features are becoming more widely available, the challenge for researchers and fund raisers is learning how to limit the incoming information to a reasonable volume. “People think using the Internet is easy — and it is easy,” Ms. McClintock observes. “But using the Internet effectively is hard.”

Her advice on how to make the best use of the e-mail alert services:

Less is more. The No. 1 mistake new users make is that they sign up for too many alerts, or they try to track too many different people or organizations, says Ms. McClintock. “They get so excited and then they get so much information and get overwhelmed with it, and then give up,” she observes. Ms. McClintock recently wrote an article on the topic entitled “Help! I’m Overwhelmed with Information and I Can’t Get Up!”

For people first starting to use customized e-mail alerts, she recommends limiting the number to one or two to start, and also limiting the number of prospective donors, organizations, or stocks they track on each alert. Once researchers see how much e-mail an alert or two produce, they can gradually add more until they find they are getting the right amount and type of information, she says.

“You can set up a whole bunch of alerts, but if they just pile up and pile up, they are no good to you,” she observes.

Keep track. Ms. McClintock says that once she started subscribing to alerts from multiple sites, it quickly became difficult to keep them all straight, since they often required remembering different user names and passwords.

So she set up a card in her Rolodex for each alert site, noting the user name and password she uses for each site in case she forgets it. She has also created a cheat-sheet file listing each alert she is using and a reminder of why she set it up. For alerts with which she tracks information about many people, such as Forbes magazine’s “People Tracker,” which she currently uses to monitor 28 of her top prospects, she keeps a summary sheet nearby listing each person’s name, title, company, and other basic information.

Revise frequently. It takes a certain amount of tinkering until an e-mail alert provides the right amount and kind of information. Ms. McClintock says it is important to edit alerts regularly, revising them by changing key words slightly, or limiting or expanding the type of material the alert is searching, until it yields the most fruitful results. “Don’t get everything they offer just because you can get it,” she warns.

Know when to give up. Sometimes it is just as important to know when to stop following up on a lead generated by an alert. A recent Northern Light alert, for example, informed her that a Bucknell alumnus was mentioned in a wedding announcement at a newspaper site, but the link the e-mail included didn’t have the information. While she could have continued searching the newspaper site for the announcement, Ms. McClintock decided to call it quits and not waste time on a search that may not yield useful information. “You have to pick and choose,” she says. “You can’t follow every lead or you would go nuts.”

Measure results. Perhaps the most important thing Ms. McClintock has done to manage the influx of information is to set up a system to track and assess her results.

Whenever she is trying out a new alert service to see whether it is worth her time, she sets up a spreadsheet file. Each time she receives an e-mail from the site, she records the date and whether, for example, the hit was a “bad hit” (it contained erroneous or unhelpful information, such as being about a different person with the same name) or a “duplicate hit” (she received the same information from another site already).

Tracking results helps her figure out how valuable an alert service is, and whether she wants to continue using it. She finds it most helpful in determining which alerts are not worth spending time on, so she can discontinue those that aren’t getting results and focus her energy elsewhere.

Ms. McClintock also notes whether an alert provides new information about prospective donors the university already knew about, or helped her identify new prospects, as well as whether it changed a potential gift rating for a potential donor. Such information “helps the frontline fund raisers understand the value of what we do,” she says. Ms. McClintock also encourages the fund raisers in her office to set up alerts at their own computers, so they receive information on their top prospects directly and can see firsthand how useful they are.

Scott Rosevear, Bucknell’s interim director of major gifts, uses the alerts to monitor five top prospects he believes are capable of making at least a seven-figure gift. He also tracks information about specific stocks.

One alumnus, for example, told him he would make a major gift once his A.O.L. Time Warner stock hit a particular price. So Mr. Rosevear uses an alert he set up at Yahoo’s finance site to track the price of A.O.L. daily, and when it hits the right price, he will know it’s time to make a telephone call. While that is something he could have done before by checking the stock listings in the newspaper, the new technology makes it far easier for him to keep up with more information about more individuals, and to do so more thoroughly.

Best of all, says Mr. Rosevear, is getting an alert relevant to a person he is about to visit to ask for a gift. “There is nothing better than, the day before you go on a trip, you get something pushed to your desktop with up-to-date information about the person you are going to see.”