Northwest Research

Oregon business filings, which until now were only searchable by company name, are now searchable by individual name! With an option to search for all names but resident agent!

http://egov.sos.state.or.us/br/pkg_br_web_assoc_name_srch.main

In addition, you can search by name and by associated name type (only Presidents or only Directors)

Please note that the default settings search only active businesses, and for our purposes it is helpful to look at both active and inactive businesses.

This will be especially useful for finding real estate. I often search the person’s name, and then search the associated businesses for real estate held by those businesses.

I have been using Merlin Information Services for national and Oregon Secretary of State records, and now Oregon’s are free.

Oh Happy Day!

Finding new potential donors is one of the most common and difficult tasks asked of researchers.

Here are some things I have done in the past to find new prospects for non-profit organizations

First thing I set up a spreadsheet to hold these names.

Then I would referenceUSA, a database which you may be able to use at your local library.

With referenceUSA you can do very complicated searches For example, if you were in Ulster County, NY, you could ask for all businesses with estimated sales of over $5 million in Ulster County whose contact person is owner, president, principal or partner.

Depending on the size of your constituent base you could also look for businesses that for whatever reason would be particularly interested in your organization (for example children’s clothing and retail for children’s organization).

If you work for a large organization, like a hospital or a university, you might want to get hold of the major vendor list, and look for any organizations that have done quite a bit of business with your organization.

I would also suggest once again going to the library and using their Foundation Search sources for foundations in your area and foundations that fund other organizations that share your goals. If you are in a very well populated or wealthy area and you have too many to look over, you can throw in the word “family” in the title search. Put those names in your spreadsheet too.

Then, I would use one of the public corporation SEC filing sights to see what public corporations are in your general area. Also ask your local chamber of commerce who the top 25, or 50 businesses are and add those to the list. Also if your city has a “Book of Lists” use the executive names in there.

Also, look at the board and donor lists of other local and national organizations who share your vision. Often, major donors to those organizations maybe be interested in finding out more about your organization.

At this point, you would have a really large group of names, and there are definitely some that will need further research. If you have to vet them yourself, I would see which ones show up in more than one or two places and research those.

However, this may be a place where your board/major gift officers/executive director can help. You can do a little peer screening where you ask each board member if they know anyone on the list, and more importantly, if there is anyone on not on the list that they feel should be there as a new prospect. This is a little labor intensive, but at the end you will have a set ofnprospective donors, and you will know who on your board knows them.

This is a little labor intensive, but at the end you will have a set of prospective donors, and you will know who on your board knows them.

I have been enjoying Google Finance, have you?

One of the things it seems particularly useful for is finding comparable public companies for private companies.

For example, the other day I was researching a large privately held food processor in Washington. The company discloses sales, and number of employees but not much else.

I clicked on the “food” subcategory under related companies, and Google Finance provided me with a list of more than 2000 other companies. Then, I further drilled down into the sub-category “Canned/Frozen/Preserved Foods”, which gave me a list of about 400 companies. Since Google Finance lets you sort by revenue, I was able to find 10 publicly held companies with similar revenues and endeavor.

At that point, I looked at the publicly held companies individually. Reuters provides financial information to Google Finance, including a ratio called the Net Profit Margin for the last 12 months (also known as Trailing Twelve Months or TTM). The Net Profit Margin for these 10 companies was within a few percentage points of each other, so I was able to provide, with some confidence, an estimated net profit based on sales for this family held company.

This was very useful in developing a family gift capacity.

These are from the fabulous Chris Mildner.

The following books are available at the Multnomah County Library

Encyclopedia of Northwest Biography

All of these books, particularly the Encylopedia of Northwest Biography, are great for looking at family trees and the history of some of the founding families of Oregon.