NW Research Blog
Somewhat off topic–Neat Craigslist Trick
Tuesday, December 12th, 2006Hello All–
This isn’t really a prospect research tip, but I thought it was neat anyway.
I’ve been looking for a car on Craig’s List.
I’ve wanted to buy an inexpensive car from a private seller. I prefer a car that has been with a person for a while.
One of the problems of buying a (not very expensive) car on Craigslist is that there are a lot of people who purchase cars from auctions, or salvage cars from junkyards and launder the title.
These people don’t identify as dealers, and they often lie about the cars they do sell. Using Carfax can help show when a car has been sold, etc, but it doesn’t tell anywhere near the whole story.
I discovered that you can use the Craig’s List to search for phone numbers. So for example, if someone has a car you might want to buy you can search the number, in quotes, to see if they have any other cars available. You can also search the number in Google to see if there are any cached car ads, because Google does index most of Craigslist.
I think there may be other interesting uses for phone number searching, besides reverse phone number/address searching.
Harvard 20th Century Business Leader Database
Thursday, October 19th, 2006I found this today
http://www.hbs.edu/leadership
Which provides little biographies, including birthdates and education
of some business leaders. Not very extensive, but might be useful for
quick and dirty research. I also like how it lets you see the list by undergraduate
college, place of birth, and gender.
Library of Congress Business Services
Friday, October 13th, 2006I stumbled over this today
http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/company/private.html
Which is a guide to private company research available at the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress also has a guide to public company research and international company research. These guides are designed to give someone searching for company information some ideas and strategies for finding this type of information.
The Library of Congress also provides other business services, including a great list of internet resources here:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/subjectlist.php
Enjoy our tax dollars at work.
bizjournals going to subscription model
Friday, August 4th, 2006I was using Bizjournals.com today and found this
ALL stories from the Sacramento Business Journal print edition are available online to print-edition subscribers ONLY.
It appears that bizjournals may be going to a subscription only model, and that there will be many stories not available to us. I have an email in to the company and will update when I hear from them.
Bizstats Update and Comparables Musing
Friday, August 4th, 2006I was using Bizstats today and found this new disclaimer
This benchmarking tool provides national average results of US Sole Proprietorships and does not include operating results for corporations, LLC’s and larger entities. These are nationals averages only, individual results will differ, and the differences may be significant.
Bizstats does offer other business statistics on LLCs, and corporations, but then we have to do the work, not like the nifty benchmarking tool. I have suggested using Google Finance to also look at comparables for larger privately held businesses.
It is important to remember that most of the tools we use only provide us with good estimates, and we use those estimates to create gift capacity. I often include disclaimers in my profiles and I work really hard to explain clearly any estimates I use.
As a freelancer, I am often a nonprofit’s first experience with prospect research, and I try to make sure that my clients understand where these numbers are coming from and how confident I am with the estimates.
For beginning researchers, I suggest using the tools and numbers that you are comfortable with and that you understand. Using a tool without understanding it can really negatively effect your credibility
NOZA Search gifts database goes live July 15th!
Wednesday, July 12th, 2006As any researcher knows, finding the charitable giving of individual donors is like finding a needle in a haystack. Finding gifts required time eating internet searches, using the Charitable Database Online, which isn’t very comprehensive for some parts of the county and combing through news sources. But a few months ago, I received a call from a new company, NOZA, who asked me to look at their new charitable giving database.
Craig from NOZA stated that they had developed the world’s largest searchable database of charitable donations available for use by non-profit organizations. The database covered individual, corporate and foundation giving.
I’ve had the opportunity to preview NOZA’s subscription search service over the past view months and it will be publicly available on July 15th. I don’t usually review for-fee products, but I would encourage people to check it out, as I‘ve been quite impressed.
NOZA is a bit different from other charitable giving databases in that it uses specialized spiders to search the Web for charitable giving. In addition, the search provides links to annual reports so you can verify the information. Currently, the database has more than 10 million gifts, and covers close to 9,000 organizations. Gift information spans from 2000 to the present and NOZA continually adds new gifts.
The NOZA search interface is both flexible and easy to use. You can search by individual name (NOZA actually lets you search for free before purchasing), and you can narrow the search by city or gift year. The search interface allows Boolean searching, which is very helpful when you are looking for John Q. Smith.
NOZA also has a great search function called Create-A-List that comes in handy for finding new prospects. Create-A-List allows a user to search for gifts in a variety of ways: gifts to a particular type of organization (arts, social services, higher education), or in a particular geographic area (including searching by a range of zip codes which is great for us in urban areas that stretch over several cities, like Phoenix, Seattle, or Portland), or gifts for a particular purpose (annual gifts, campaign, or operating funds).
As an example, I ran a search for donors to arts organizations in Los Angeles, who had given over $100,000 and received 212 records back. Some of these were corporations/foundations, but you can play around with it to build potential individual donor/peer screening lists. The user can exclude foundations, but I would like to be able to exclude corporations too.
You can read the results on the screen, or even better, download them in Excel spreadsheet form!
According to the company’s promotional material, NOZA’s database will be available through Blackbaud Analytics, Target America, and Pro Platinum, as well as by individual subscription.
The pricing for NOZA is quite reasonable. You can start a subscription for $10, which will allow you to see 100 records. NOZA allows anyone to search free, even without a subscription, so you can figure out whether your donors are in their database or not for nothing.
NOZA doesn’t have as complete coverage in some areas as I would like, but they are continually adding gifts. Because NOZA has clearly stated that they only index annual reports and donor lists that are available through the web, I still found myself searching for individual gifts the “old fashioned way”, but NOZA does save a great deal of time and energy.
It is important to note that a record is equal to one gift (not one individual) and that gifts are only searchable by organization city, not by donor address. In addition, many of the gifts are annual fund gifts, however if a person has a large number of gifts you can sort them in Excel by gift amount.
Despite these caveats, NOZA has quickly become the first resource I use for finding charitable gifts. It’s an impressive new tool and affordable on even the skinniest of shoestring budgets.
NOZA Search will be available July 15th at http://www.nozasearch.com
Factbites.com
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006I found a new, or new to me anyway, search engine today called
Factbites bills itself as a topic-based search engine. It appears to search wikis and open encyclopedia as well as providing other answers. According to Factbites’ marketing it offers users meaningful, relevant sentences from every site in the search results.
I found it useful for searching for biographies on major, high profile donors (in this case the person I am researching is a member of the Forbes 500)
Although many of the individuals who I research will never be prominent enough to appear on Factbites, or in the Wikipedia, this can be very useful for finding concise biographies on very prominent individuals. In addition, it gave me some sites that Google, alltheweb, and Yahoo hadn’t picked up.
The site is in beta, and I don’t know how extensive it is at this point, but it could become a very interesting resource.
Enjoy!
Links for Financial Resources in the Pacific Northwest Presentation
Tuesday, July 11th, 2006Hell0–
I’ve had some emails requesting the links from the APRA-NW presentation on June 28th.
They can be found here:
http://www.backflip.com/members/maryrose
Then click on PNW Financial Resource
If anyone who missed the conference is interested in a copy of the presentation, email me and I will be happy to send you one.
Useful free tools from the Foundation Center
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006It appears that the Foundation Center has improved its free tools.
Today, I found the new improved Foundation Finder
Which according to the literature, provides basic information on more than 86,000 grantmakers in the U.S.-Âincluding private foundations.
They seem to have also improved their 990 search, which provided four years of 990s for a small Portland Foundation. Guidestar Basic only provides three years of 990s.
In addition, I found this alphabetical list of foundations, officers, and donors. I find this very helpful. I usually use Wealth Engine for this information, but I have found foundations and officers on this list that aren’t listed in the Wealth Engine database, so I have started using this to double check.
These will in no way replace a good Foundation Center/Big Online product, but can be very helpful for researchers with limited resources.
Oregon Business Magazine now (somewhat) searchable
Tuesday, June 6th, 2006Hello–
Although the interface doesn’t work perfectly for me, Oregon Business now has its archives online.
I spent some time poking around today, and it looks like they also have their 2005 top business lists
Enjoy!