The Pitfalls of Mining the Internet

Internet makes research on donors easier, but charities don’t use it well

The explosion of data on the Internet is making it easier and cheaper than ever for charities to obtain detailed information on people who have the potential to make big donations.

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But many charities aren’t using those tools very effectively, experts say, nor are they taking sufficient steps to protect the privacy of potential donors.

Conducting research on prospective donors used to be a task that only people with special training in computer data bases and other record keeping could do well. Now just about anyone with access to the Internet can search public records and other resources to find a wealth of information about would-be donors, such as their earnings, assets, and personal interests.

That worries some of the people who specialize in “prospect research.” They say that small charities are starting to assign research on donors to fund raisers, secretaries, interns, and others who have little or no training in the finer points of culling information from public records.

Says Jon Thorsen, director of development research at Princeton University: “Now there is so much more on-line access, people are thinking, ‘Yes, we have high-speed Internet access. Now we’re researchers, too.’ But there’s a skill set that you need that is very different from that of fund raisers or other people in the organization.”

Novices can easily get bogged down in the sheer volume of information and be unable to search for data efficiently, experts say. In addition, they might not be able to distinguish what information is accurate or relevant.

While some charities may be relying on people who don’t specialize in research, others have found that the glut of information is making it more important to find professionals. As a result, some fund raisers say it is getting increasingly hard to find researchers. With demand for their skills on the rise, many researchers are getting new job titles and increased pay.

“You’re not just a prospect researcher now — you’re an information manager,” says Helen Brown, manager for development research at Harvard University’s School of Public Health.

At Princeton University, the job titles of researchers were changed last year to “development research analysts,” and their positions were classified in a higher salary range. As a result, the university’s five researchers saw their pay increase by 5 per cent or more.

Researchers are also getting more involved than ever before in helping to land gifts. They are increasingly being asked to help fund raisers interpret the information they find, plan strategies for approaching specific donors, or find information that will convince donors that they should give to a particular institution instead of supporting its competitors.

Princeton’s researchers, for instance, are now trying to learn more about planned gifts, which often involve complicated tax and financial-planning matters, so that they can offer fund raisers advice about what types of gifts would be most likely to appeal to particular donors, given their age, assets, and other factors.

That’s a big change from previous years, when researchers had little or no understanding of how the information they compiled was actually used, says Mr. Thorsen. They simply picked a name from a list of donors, did research, and wrote a report that seldom generated any response from fund raisers, with whom they had little interaction.

As the skills of researchers become more valued, they are also finding that their jobs are getting increasingly harder.

The Internet, many researchers say, has simply added another layer of research onto their work rather than replacing long-used electronic tools like the Dialog computer data base, or even trips to the library and the courthouse. One reason is that many World-Wide Web sites have information that dates back only a few years — making it hard to put together a full-fledged profile of a potential donor without using conventional research materials.

The growing mountain of information, some researchers say, is threatening their ability to stay abreast of it. At Princeton, where researchers meet three times each month, Mr. Thorsen says every meeting involves discussions of new Web sites that must be evaluated for their usefulness.

Researchers, he says, have to engage in a constant “cost-benefit analysis,” judging whether it’s worth their time to check each site on an ever-expanding list of on-line resources.

With the amount of staff time it can eat up, “the Internet can be the most expensive free service in the world,” says David Lawson, president of Prospect Information Network, a consulting firm in New York that develops profiles of prospective donors for non-profit groups. “The key is to be selective.”

Even seasoned researchers can be tempted to spend too much time on the Internet, missing important information that could be gleaned from more traditional research methods.

Or they may spend hours in fruitless Web searches, when the desired information could be found much more quickly from fee-based services, says Susan Ruderman, vice-president of Veritas Information Services, a prospect-research consulting firm in Arlington, Mass. She says she frequently uses Dialog, and a growing number of researchers are using services such as iWave, which are specifically designed for prospect researchers but can cost hundreds of dollars per year.

“Right now, probably about 40 per cent of prospect research can be done using the Web,” Ms. Ruderman says. “Very often I get an incomplete picture of a person from the Web, and if I stopped at that point, I wouldn’t get all the information I needed.”

For example, Ms. Ruderman says that she has obtained invaluable data on potential donors’ interests and other useful facts from autobiographical reports that Harvard alumni are asked to write up and submit before their class reunions; the reports are bound in a volume that is distributed to everyone who graduated from Harvard in the same year. While that information might be posted on a Web site some day, it is not available currently.

Aside from the difficulty of wading through a growing number of resources, some researchers are concerned about the scrutiny their profession may undergo as donors realize just how much personal information is available on the Internet, including how much they paid for their home, the size of their mortgage, and how much stock they own.

“When the public becomes more aware of what’s out there, there’s going to be a backlash,” says Laura Raymond, an independent researcher in Palm Springs, Fla.

Donors could be alarmed not only that charities are searching Internet data bases for information but also that the ease of on-line communications makes it more likely that confidential information on donors will accidentally be distributed to large numbers of people, says Christina Pulawski, director of development research at Northwestern University. With a single keystroke, she notes, a secretary could accidentally send an electronic file containing confidential information on a donor’s assets and income to all the people on the charity’s mailing list.

Another ethical problem, Ms. Pulawski says, occurs when fund raisers believe that they can use any information they find on a person through the Internet because, once the information is posted on line, it is in the public domain.

For example, she says, Northwestern fund raisers wanted to use the unlisted telephone number of a prospective donor that researchers had found on line. Ms. Pulawski argued that using the number could annoy the potential donor.

Ms. Pulawski said the fund raisers didn’t use the telephone number, but that the encounter gave her an opportunity to start an office-wide discussion about what information was appropriate to use and what wasn’t.

She says such discussions are important, and should extend to everyone who works in the fund-raising office, including volunteers who often are given confidential information about people from whom they are soliciting gifts.

But at many charities, she says, “the training on prospect research has been limited to ‘We use these books and services, but we don’t use these other services.’”

Training in ethical practices, says Ms. Pulawski, needs to go beyond such “do’s and don’ts.” It needs to focus, she says, on promoting an understanding of the reasons behind the rules, and why certain on-line resources are off limits.

“The Internet is bringing the information to everyone,” she says. “In fund raising, that has big ethical implications.”