Northwest Research

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.

finance.google.com

Google Finance offers an easier way to search for stocks, mutual
funds, public and private companies. Further, Google Finance also
offers a broad range of company news and information in order to
deliver more relevant, unbiased results in a clean, uncluttered user
interface.

I haven’t looked very carefully yet, but I especially like the fact that
you can search on name and come up with everything, so you don’t need to
know the stock symbol.

I also like that the site correlates market data with news stories, so if you
see a spike or a dip, you don’t have to chase down the reason.
It also provides executive pictures, compensation, stock holdings and
biographies and even a link to any Wikipedia information.

This is all web based information, so there isn’t a lot that is new
here, but it’s nice to have it in one place.

I will post more when I have examined this a little closer!

This is the first in a series of posts with a focus on research on a very tight budgets.

The first thing I recommend to any researcher on a very limited budget is to make an appointment with the business librarian of your local library (or the largest regional library that you have access to). If you work at an educational institution it can be helpful to meet with your librarian as well.

I have found that librarians who specialize in business resources can be extremely helpful to donor researchers. Here in Portland, the library has a wonderful business section as well as online databases that can be accessed from home, including Reference USA, Gale’s General Business File, and several other databases that I use on a daily basis from home.

When I met with the business librarian, she shared several more local resources that have been really useful to me and was able to show me some advanced searching strategies that made my life much easier.

I am working on a database cleanup project and found this wonderful resource

http://www.secstate.wa.gov/charities/charities_store/ctdwcover.pdf

This is a 225-page PDF that provides full information on all charitable trusts in Washington! A great resource if you don’t have access to FC Search or a good foundation directory.

It includes both grant making and grant seeking organizations, average size of grants, contact information including email and phone numbers, geographic limitations etc.

According to Search Engine Watch, Firstgovsearch is now live.

First Gov search is the search engine of Firstgov.gov the U.S. government’s official web portal, but it also appears to search some state and local resources as well.

I think this site can be very useful for researchers in two ways:

A quick search on the word “salary” provided me with various Federal, State and Local salary tables including retirement tables. The search seems pretty flexible to me, so you can look for salaries by title, area, etc. It seems a bit easier than sloggin through Office of Personnel Management and state website.

First Gov search also is a useful place to search for a biography if your potential donor is a government official.

The URL is http://firstgovsearch.gov/

There are also advanced search possibilities.

Enjoy!

I just suggested this to someone on the ‘L as a way of confirming deaths.

Obituary Archives is Newslibrary’s (Newsbank) Obituary Archive. Like other Newslibrary’s products, it is a little expensive to actually see the article/obituary, but searching is free.

Often I am able to confirm someone’s death using just the search, and don’t pay for the obituary.

Allbusiness.com is a free resource which provides a variety of business resources, business blogs, forms and other advice.

The following is a description of from the website:

AllBusiness.com is an online media and e-commerce company that operates one of the premier business sites on the Web. Founded in 1999, the site has received critical acclaim from The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Business 2.0, Fortune, and other publications. AllBusiness.com helps entrepreneurs, small and growing businesses, consultants and business professionals save time and money by addressing real-world business questions and presenting practical solutions. The site offers resources including how-to articles, business forms, contracts and agreements, expert advice, blogs, business news, business directory listings, product comparisons, business guides, a small business association and more.

Allbusiness.com is particularly useful for prospect researchers as it provides a great range of full-text searchable free business periodicals. I found an excellent biography of a potential donor from the October 2001 edition of Inside Business.

You do have to sign up, and make sure you don’t accidently deluge yourself with newsletters, but I think this is a wonderful resource.

Periodicals by title can be found here

http://www.allbusiness.com/periodicals/

And appear to go back quite a bit (for example the ABA Journal goes back to 1989). The search interface isn’t the best, but is adequate.

Enjoy!