In 1993, as a new employee at a wealth screening company, I was invited to visit an Ivy League university to discuss a possible project.  I walked into the office of the director of research, a highly intelligent and efficient professional with a great deal of credibility both internally and in the industry, and sat down to discuss what they had done to date and their current needs.  Almost immediately, I noticed a stack of binders almost five feet tall in one corner of the office.  These were the results of the last screening, the director explained, already gathering dust after just a few short months.

Later, I came to realize both in my own work and in talking with other vendors that screening results often languished.  One of the analogies was that purchasing a screening, which then averaged $25,000, and not using it was akin to purchasing a BMW and leaving it parked in the garage.

Today, the cost of a BMW has risen but the cost of most screenings has fallen dramatically.  Screenings have also increased in quality in a way that would be the envy of any automobile manufacturer.  But still screening results can languish, although they are now in the dust free environment of electronic deliverables rather than binders and no longer embarrassingly visible to office visitors.

Why do so many of these screening results go unutilized?  It’s not a lack of value.  In fact, if every organization had the benefit of a screening and made full use of it I am convinced that far more money would be raised.  These are inexpensive instruments that bring tremendous focus and insight to development activity.  Used well, screenings can make fundraisers far more efficient, sensitive and effective.  They can often contribute facts that give fundraisers the confidence to ask for more money.

So if the problem isn’t the screening services, what is the impediment to implementation?  There are any number of reasons, both good and bad, ranging from mistiming the need for results to inadequate planning for review and distribution of data and from a change in staff between the time of contracting and delivery to inability to get development officers to visit with new leads.  In short, it is often a matter of poor planning and communications.

Through the years of watching good screening results sit idle, I began my own back of the envelope list of steps organizations could take prior to conducting a screening which might help to make the process more successful.  So, here is my checklist for the top six things an organization should consider when embarking on a screening:

1)      Define what constitutes a “prospect” for your organization

• For example, you may be looking primarily for stock market insiders, private business owners, women with deceased spouses over the age of 70, or some other combination of characteristics.
• If you’re not sure, you can look at your most successful donor relationships as a guide, determining what they have in common, keeping in mind that this is in part a reflection of where your organization has focused its past relationship building and solicitation.
• Make sure this process involves every part of the development team so that everyone is buying into the concept of a screening early on.

2)      Investigate what type of information is most motivational to your team

• Sometimes what people say they want is actually somewhat different from what they really need.  Since the ultimate measure of a successful screening is new prospects identified, cultivated, solicited and contributing, the information you receive and share with the team must be understandable and motivational.
• Show team members the type of information that is available from screening companies and see how they react, letting that weigh on your decision-making process rather than forcing people to join committees to author requests for proposals or site through multiple sales meetings.

3)      Determine what information you currently have on file

• Look at your file to find out what you need to update and what you need to fill in, using your determinations and investigations as the measure of what you might have at the end of the screening process.
• This is also important as you begin thinking about how to prepare a file for a vendor to screen and how to integrate any new information you acquire through the screening process.

4)      Decide how many prospects you need

• Screening customers often wonder how few names they can screen, often to save costs.  Instead, customers should determine how many prospects they can effectively manage for the project at hand and run a file of the warmest prospects to arrive at that number.  The cost is always small in comparison to the potential reward.  It also increases the likelihood of a successful screening by neither inundating the organization with information it cannot use nor only providing information on previously identified prospects.

5)      Talk to the screening companies

• Tell each company what you are looking for and ask if they can provide it.
• The screening companies can help you to determine the size and type of file you need to run in order to come up with the number and type of prospects you desire.
• If necessary, run test files to see deliverables, check on integration and examine online updating capability.

6)      Begin writing your implementation plan

• Implementation plans for screening are rarer than original copies of the Magna Carta.  Write one!  It need not be long and take forever to draft.  Rather, it can simply and briefly lay out the goals of the project, assign responsibilities (e.g. data review, data integration, prospect management, etc.), and so on.
• Ideally, this plan should be approved by the head of the development shop, shared with the team and ready for action upon receipt of the screening results.

Hopefully, these six items will make clear the goals, roles and responsibilities that will make for a successful project and not be a hindrance to undertaking the screening.  The idea is to add clarity, not time.  In fact, if done in a straightforward and direct manner, it could accelerate the process of reviewing your screening options and, most importantly, putting the screening results to effective use immediately upon delivery.

So what should organizations steer clear of as they explore screening services?  There are a number of practices which are big “no-no’s” but unfortunately very commonplace in the fundraising world.  Here’s my list of things to avoid:

A)     Ignoring the Vendors:  Shunning salespeople is entirely counterproductive.  Don’t send them an email asking for costs and no phone call.  After you’ve done some of your internal exploratory work, just bite the bullet and call them up.  You’ll learn things you didn’t know and won’t learn from colleagues in the field.  Besides, if a vendor is either unresponsive or attempts to oversell, that is a legitimate consideration in your procurement process.

B)      Sending out RFPs:  The fact is that screenings are usually too inexpensive to warrant such a time-consuming process.  Some of the best screening companies may not even bother to respond to an RFP because the cost of compiling the response is so high.

C)      Dog and Pony Shows:  Inviting all the vendors in for sales presentations just shows you haven’t done your homework.  While screening companies will do their honest best to listen to your needs and give you recommendations based on their suite of services, inviting all the companies to visit just means you’re kicking all the tires because you don’t yet know what kind of car you want to drive.  Again, as with RFPs, some companies may simply decline the invitation.

Many of these comments assume that you may conduct a screening which appends factual data, especially wealth and ownership data, to your file.  There are, however, other screening services which either create a custom model on your file or provide results which are predictive in nature.  These types of services can be very useful but they cannot replace the value of knowing something factual about specific individuals or their relative financial capacity.  In fact, having a strong supply of factual data on your constituents can make modeling more powerful.

Screening has always been a powerful instrument for development.  The increase in available factual data and the decrease in cost over the last few years make the barrier to using a screening service very low indeed.  Combined with the uncertainties of the impact of the financial crisis on our donors, there has probably been no better or more important time to run a screening.  All the more reason to hold ourselves and our organizations to some strong standards as we decide how best to get started.

Hope Consulting recently released the “Money for Good” report, a robust research study making a case for the ridiculous:  Demographics are irrelevant to fundraising.

Surveying individuals in 4,000 high income ($80,000+) households, with an intentional oversampling of individuals in households earning over $300,000, the authors endeavored to determine how nonprofits could more effectively obtain donations from individuals by understanding their true motivations.

“Money for Good” concludes its section on “increasing major donations from individuals” with five key findings and seven recommendations to nonprofits seeking to increase their fundraising capability.

The key findings begin with the conclusion that there is an additional $45 billion market opportunity for philanthropy.   This they say is “limited in part by high levels of loyalty in charitable giving,” making a perhaps obvious and related point that donors are “generally satisfied with nonprofits,” although they are also frustrated at being “solicited too often.”

The authors also highlight their finding, perhaps unsurprising but in sharp contrast to much of the discussion in donor advisory circles and among watchdog groups, that “few donors do research before they give…and those that do look to the nonprofit itself to provide simple information about efficiency and effectiveness.”

Unfortunately, the authors also draw two additional conclusions which are very difficult to support .

First, in an echo of the old “Seven Faces of Philanthropy” book, the authors conclude that “there are six discrete segments of donors with primary reasons for giving.”  These “behavioral” pools are broken down as follows:

• Repayer:  “I give to my alma mater”
• Casual Giver:  “I donated $1,000 so I could host a table at the event”
• High Impact:  “I give to the nonprofits that I feel are generating the greatest social good”
• Faith Based:  “We only give to organizations that fit with our religious beliefs”
• See the Difference:  “I think it’s important to support local charities”
• Personal Ties:  “I only give when I am familiar with the people who run an organization”

While pouring donors of various backgrounds into behavioral buckets is very compelling in a report of this type, it is difficult if not impossible to apply these simplifications to the fundraising process given that there is no credible research methodology for identifying prospects who fit into these categories or for screening donors on that basis.

In sharp contrast, I do believe that many people would identify themselves as having an affinity to an ethnic group, nationality, gender, age group, profession, political orientation or similar demographic characteristic.  But this, it turns out, is exactly what Hope Consulting soundly refutes as being important to understanding donors and their motivations.

“Demographics don’t matter,” the authors write, “HNW [High Net Worth] donors behave similarly to others.”

If the authors mean to suggest simply that wealthy people and people of modest means make philanthropic decisions in much the same manner, they have no way of knowing this is true without conducting a similar study of individuals in households earning under $80,000 annually.

If they mean that other demographic characteristics are not meaningful, they would have to be far more transparent about the demographic characteristics of their survey pool to be persuasive.

Even if the pool of respondents was sufficiently diverse to draw these conclusions, however, the contention that “demographics don’t matter” would only be credible if the surveys were designed specifically to elicit details on demographic self-definition and its influence on philanthropy, much in the same way that the survey has in fact done by including “faith” among the behavioral markers.  In a sense, people who recognize faith as an important characteristic in their giving are saying that they are defined in part by their relationship to their religion.  Might not “boomers” or “women” or “Latinos” or “musicians” or “democrats” or “environmental donors,” all cohorts defined in large part by their members, also say that their giving is influenced by their own unique self-described cultural identity?

For that matter, even if we were to accept these new behavioral group labels in fundraising, how can we know that they are not just derivative of the more important markers of our donors’ identities, the demographic cohorts to which these individuals truly belong and with which they associate themselves?

But don’t take my word for it.  Just ask your major donor which of these new labels best fits them.  It’s hard to imagine any choosing “casual giver” as their description of choice!

In pursuing the hypothesis that behavioral characteristics are the best measure of commonalities among donors, the authors wisely ignore these types of objections and instead focus on how to implement the labels they have designed.  They provide good practical ideas on tagging and tracking donors, starting with donors surveys and behaviorally segmented marketing.  It should be noted that these same techniques can be used to identify other perhaps more concrete demographic markers as well.

“Money for Good” is right to bring greater discipline to our effort to understand donors.  Where they are wrong is to invent yet another set of terms of art that we might use but our donors would not.  How donors define themselves is far more important than how we define them.  And that is precisely why knowing the demographics of our constituency is so critical.

The World Wealth Report, Cap Gemini and Merrill Lynch’s annual review of the state of the world’s richest people, is now out.  The seventeenth edition of this document provides a mountain of evidence that the environment for philanthropy has changed and that globalization is perhaps its most important feature.

What were some of the key shifts over the last year?

• The world’s population of High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs), or people with more than $1 million in investable assets, grew 17.1% in 2009 to 10 million people
• Ultra-HNWIs, or individuals with over $30 million in investable assets, saw wealth rebound 21.5% in 2009
• While North America remains the single largest home to HNWIs, with 3.1 million individuals and 31% of the global HNWI population, Asia-Pacific’s HNWI population reached 3 million in 2009, matching that of Europe for the first time
• Asia-Pacific wealth rose 30.9% to $9.7 trillion, surpassing the $9.5 trillion in wealth held by Europe’s HNWIs
• Philanthropy was up around the world in 2009—except in North America

The report also suggests that philanthropic giving is expected to grow across nearly all regions by 2010 (with the possible exception of North America) and that the trends toward transnational giving and inter vivos transfers are also expanding as legal barriers fall, donors focus more on philanthropy and the desire to see the impact of giving during one’s lifetime becomes more important to donors.

So what are we doing about all this?

Not nearly enough.

Clearly, we have been living though a very difficult economic climate generally and philanthropy has been hurt dramatically.  Our fundraising activity has been adversely impacted both practically and psychologically.  But the wealthy, both in America and around the world, have experienced a dramatic reversal.  And they are trying to find responsible recipients for their charitable investments.  Are we there for them?

Since the cost of raising major gifts globally can actually be quite modest—one leading California university calculated the cost of international fundraising at just three cents on the dollar—there is no reason for organizations with an existing international constituency, a global programmatic reach or even just Facebook and Twitter accounts to ignore this market any longer.

We are like people panning for gold downstream as someone uphill yells, “there’s gold in this mine, bring your pick axes and have at it!”  We continue to do what we know because it works, not thinking that a potentially larger opportunity is just a short trip and a little work away.  True, more gold is currently coming from the panning, but that’s in part because few of us are digging.

It’s time to go where the gold is.

Three of the world’s richest people have issued a challenge to their peers on the Forbes Billionaires list:  Give half your wealth to charity!

But to what end?

If Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett are any example, it will be for whatever they damn well please.

On one level, who could argue with that?  It’s their money after all.  And they are all successful people who can and do get things done.  Who better then these people to find and fund the opportunities that will transform the world for the better?

Yet here’s the wrinkle: With a few notable exceptions, like the Gates’ and Mr. Buffett, the Forbes Billionaires are not experts in making charitable investments.  At their best, they might carefully consider projects, closely scrutinize organizations and budgets, interview organizational leadership and compare notes with peers.

They will have several significant disadvantages, however.  First, they will not have at their disposal the quality and depth of information available to them if they were considering a financial investment.  Second, the same types of analysis used in assessing the wisdom of a financial investment are not necessarily the same as those which would guide a good charitable investment.

This may explain in part why major donors typically rely on some level of familiarity with and trust in an organization in making a decision to make a major gift. That type of trust and familiarity comes with relationships built over time.

Here, therefore, is the potential difficulty of sudden, massive infusion of philanthropy in the third sector:  Since time is limited and trust takes time to build, donors might consider taking matters into their own hands, simply because they haven’t yet had the opportunity to meet the organizations which are the best fit for them.

This is the route of many duplicative efforts.  New operating foundations.  New social entrepreneurial ventures.  All launched with the sincere wish to get something done and often innocently unaware that some organization is already doing the same work quite well but without sufficient financial support.

Now imagine that this is all happening on a massive scale.  Just consider what would be possible if all those on the Forbes billionaires list accepted the challenge and committed half their wealth to philanthropy.  Fortune magazine suggests that another $600 billion could find its way to charity.  That’s almost twice current annual giving levels in the United States and likely many times the goal of all capital campaigns currently running combined.

Absent many new big projects conducted by organizations the Forbes Billionaires already know and trust, or a new body of data and set of analytics to make significant new charitable investing more efficient and effective, these donors will have nowhere to turn but to their own devices to take on the challenges of the world.

Of course, we could fix that.  Charities could view the Gates/Buffett announcement as a challenge not only to billionaires but to nonprofit organizations worldwide as well.  A set of once in a century goals could be developed which brought charities together to address problems too large for any to deal with individually.  Perhaps plans to build model sustainable cities, develop clean energy, provide food and schooling for every child or eradicate major diseases.  Something big enough to capture the imagination of big thinkers and warrant significant charitable investments.

Most great philanthropy occurs not because of the charitable impulse alone but as a result of the marriage of ideas from solution providers (nonprofits) to visionary individuals with significant resources (major donors).  Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett have issued a global challenge far greater than simply asking wealthy people to give up some cash.  They are, in effect, asking the world to rethink what philanthropy can and should do.  Donors will need our help to fashion that vision and we owe it to them, ourselves and our beneficiaries in this generation and the next to dream bigger than we have ever dreamed before.

So, what would you do with $600 billion?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

If you read or heard many of the leading voices in philanthropy recently, you might well come away with the impression that fundraising is in tough shape.  The comments have been so dour you may have missed one very important detail:

Giving in the US is at near historic levels!

Here are just a few examples of how industry leaders and media outlets are saying that the resource development glass is half empty.

• At the annual conference of the Association of Fundraising Professionals in Baltimore, AFP CEO Paulette V. Maehara told attendees that “we’ve never seen so many organizations raise such few funds.”
• PNN Online reported it as “the worst year for charitable fundraising in a decade…”
• The much anticipated Giving USA 2010 introduced its Executive Summary with the sullen statement that “This is the steepest decline in current dollar terms since Giving USA began its annual reports in 1956.”

The Chronicle of Philanthropy went even further, challenging Giving USA’s overall characterization of the fundraising marketplace as overly optimistic.  “Evidence that giving might not be as strong as Giving USA suggests can be found in numerous studies conducted over the past year,” wrote Holly Hall.

There is no question that 2009 was a difficult time and 2010 offers continued challenges to nonprofits.  Unemployment, while just half that of the Great Depression, is significant.  The US stock market, although significantly rebounded from the crash, is way off its highs.  The real estate market, although now apparently turning a corner, had collapsed and triggered near historic defaults and foreclosures.  Businesses retrenched.  Foundations saw shrinking endowments.   And yet…

Giving in 2009 exceeded $300 billion for the third consecutive year!

2009 is one of the three biggest years in the history of US philanthropy!

That’s right.  Buried in the bad news that both confirmed our worst suspicions and excused our greatest failures is a harbinger of hope.  But within that hope is a challenge that many of us have yet to confront directly.

That challenge is to first better understand what we are doing, to do the best of it more often when times are lean and to expand our market to new audiences.

This is not some abstract concept.   It is routed in one core belief and a series of specific measurements.  The belief is that fundraising drives philanthropy.  That our acquisition, cultivation and solicitation are the reasons that people give to us rather than to some other institution or perhaps not at all.  The measuremeants are all about the numbers and type of people we contact.

By way of example, businesses routinely make sales projections by estimating the ratio of suspects to prospects to sales.  In other words, it might take 600 people vaguely interested in a service to come up with 100 who would actually consider buying it and, finally, 25 who will decide to buy this year and to buy from you.

This is pretty similar, in fact, to planning for a capital campaign and using a gift pyramid.  Or perhaps to assembling a portfolio for a major gift officer.   Or conducting donor acquisition.  The ratios are all different but the process of estimating based on historical averages, and then learning to modify those ratios in good and bad times, however difficult and inexact, is the way to determine if you are doing the right things, in the right volumes, with the right people and at the right times.

Unfortunately, without knowing whether more or fewer solicitations were conducted last year, and without knowing whether we asked for more or less money in 2009 than in 2008, we really can’t judge whether Americans were being more or less charitable or, for that matter, how much the economic crisis had to do with the outcome.

Sure, times were tough.  But if the Giving USA numbers are in any way close to reality, it is helpful to note that the $300+ billion given in 2009 was raised by an ever growing pool of nonprofits.  According to Giving USA 2009, there was a 53% increase in the number of nonprofits in the decade between 1999 and 2009.  In short, more institutions likely received these donations, driving down average cumulative giving per institution.  Additionally, certain types of charitable activity are particularly appealing to donors in times of public hardship, making it more difficult for some types of organizations to raise money than for others.

In short, if an institution did the same things in 2009 that it did in 2008, they would likely have seen a different result since there was more competition and the public’s attention was redirected to the needs so vividly displayed in the media.

As everyone in the nonprofit world knows, difficult doesn’t mean impossible.  In the world of fundraising it simply challenges us to commit to a higher ratio of suspects to prospects to donors, to continuing to ask for support even when times are tough and that we need to open the doors at the base of the pyramid to a much wider spectrum of support.

What if Google charged you $3.00 to conduct a search?

When your organization looks up constituent contact information on the web, it is likely spending that much or more.  Not in fees to Google, of course.  Nor in technical or software fees.  That is all “free.”

So where is all that money being spent?  Your time.

In addition, what you are not doing when you are conducting these ostensibly free searches may be costing your organization far more in something you may vaguely remember from your school days: Opportunity Cost.

Put staff time and opportunity cost together and it’s quite a bit of money.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t conduct research, of course.  Knowing more about constituents helps us to focus our time on the right opportunities in the right ways and to treat our friends and contributors with intelligence and sensitivity.  The question is rather how we use the vast treasure trove of data now available to us efficiently and effectively.

In order to make that leap, it’s important to first face the reality that our time isn’t free.  A staff member paid $35,000 plus benefits costs $0.39 per working minute.  A supervisor paid $65,000 plus benefits is clocking in at $0.73 per minute.  Assuming you had a staff member engage in a five minute internet search and that you also applied a reasonable supervisory time allocation (20%) to that activity, the cost of time would be $2.68.  (Yes, that’s 5 x $0.39, or $1.95, for the staff member and 20% of 5 x $0.73, or $0.73, for the supervisor.)  Do it another way—say an Executive Director or Vice President for Development searching for something on the web—and the staff time costs could be significantly higher.

In the grand scheme of things, $3.00 may be a small price to pay for vital information gathered quickly and efficiently by a knowledgeable and responsible member of the staff already under salary and working for you.

To make clear the cost implications, however, let’s look at the matter more holistically.  Rather than doing one lookup, we might perhaps do this simple task 25 times a month.  Just like those occasional calls on your cell phone that surprise you when they all show up together on the bill at the end of the month, little things do add up.  Those 25 lookups are over 2 hours of time and a minimum of $67 per month or $804 annually.  Just imagine how you might spend that money differently if you could!

But of course you can’t.  This is staff time not cash.  So perhaps an even more important consideration might be whether you could apply that time to a task that would generate more revenue.  In other words, what is the opportunity cost, or the cost of passing up another opportunity, of having people typing searches into web browsers.  This is, of course, even more critical when we have line fundraisers conducting their own research since the alternative could be actually visiting with donors and asking for gifts.

Again, none of this is said to dissuade us from conducting research.  Quite the contrary!

In fact, if we truly recognize the value of our time, both in terms of cost to our institutions and in the opportunities that we can pursue when focused on our most important work, then we can sharpen the edge on research and make a greater commitment to it as well.

How do we begin?  Make a general plan for research which is centered in the belief that knowing donors better can bring efficiency to our offices and more money to our institutions.  This plan might define what constitutes a prospect, for example, so that everyone is operating with the same concept in mind, both bringing the right prospects to the table and taking action on those provided to them.  The plan might also determine what type of research is most desirable and establish the preferred sources to be used in order to discourage staff from looking endlessly for information or checking source against source in an effort to understand a person or institution perfectly before engaging them.  In addition, the plan might address how and when it’s best to use products and services to take care of functions like ongoing address updating (batch processing through a vendor) or large scale prospecting for a campaign (with a database screeening).  Finally, the plan can establish research goals, determine research priorities, make a commitment to resources and staffing and set down policies and procedures for obtaining and handling information in a secure, ethical and confidential manner.

Such a plan could be written in a day and be no more than three pages long.  It could written by the Director of Development or, if you are lucky enough to have one, the Director of Research.  But it should be written down, approved by the top of the shop and made an integral piece of the development plan.

It is precisely because most organizations neither have the benefit of professional prospect research staff nor any policies and plans governing development information that we get confused about what research is, what it can be, what it costs and how much more money it can help us to raise.

To many around us, it might appear that “Googling” is research.  And a pretty cheap way to do it, too.  But it’s not.  And in fact the “free” aspect of it is precisely what makes it so very expensive. So the challenge to us all is to stop dabbling and to take the research opportunity seriously, making a plan and providing the resources and staffing to do so.

If fundraisers are good at anything, it is remembering to say, “thank you!”  So why is it that nonprofits seem to lose all their manners when it comes to social media?

Most of our offices have a rule, whether written or just generally understood, that a gift acknowledgement should go out within a day or two of receipt.  We do this because we know it shows appreciation, caring and respect.  We also understand that it builds a bond of loyalty.  And that loyalty equals sustained giving.  In short, it’s both good and profitable to be nice.

Some fundraising legends have suggested that we need to thank more often and in more ways.  Fundraising lion Jerry Panas goes so far as to suggest that every gift of over $100 should be cause for a thank you by phone.  When challenged by already overworked fundraisers, he cheerfully asks, “what is a better use of your time?”

I agree.  And I thought we all did.  That is until I started spending more time on Twitter.

First of all, Twitter is a marvelous resource generally and a fantastic place for nonprofits specifically.  Contrary to its image as a forum where people report on what they had for lunch and other silly stuff,  Twitter is in fact home to 100 million people and organizations where rapid information exchange is made possible through an implicit social contract: You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.

That means that my “tweet” or message, if of interest to my “followers,” will likely be “retweeted” or shared with many other people.  As people read my message, clicking through on links provided within it, I can both learn what truly interests the marketplace and I start to pick up more followers.  I learn and I earn.  If I post consistently and artfully, listening all the while, I can probably start acquiring a good number of these new friends and followers on my web site.  All of this, of course, at no cost.  You can see how this can be invaluable to a charity which wants to reach many new friends without spending much money.

But here’s the challenging part about social media.  What we don’t do is almost as important as what we do.

For example, if you are kind enough to Retweet my message, possibly earning my organization a few new friends, it might be a nice gesture to acknowledge your effort.  But only a small percentage of nonprofits take this little step.  And not doing so may convey the message that they are either not paying attention, think they are too busy or just don’t care.

Case in point:  One of the greatest social media experts on Twitter encouraged followers to make a contribution to her favorite charity to celebrate her birthday.  I was one of the many who did so, both out of appreciation for this person’s work in the field and because I approved of the charity’s work as well.  Although I had never met this person, I made a point of dropping a note to let her know about the gift.  No response.  However, I did find I was on a list of those who had given on one of her blog posts.  More than three weeks later, I received an acknowledgement from the charity via email.  Still, nothing from the “honoree.”

Of course, things get lost on our to-do lists and in cyberspace just as they do in the mail.  Knowing that this was likely an oversight, I decided to test acknowledgement practices with a variety of nonprofits on Twitter.  These included retweeting messages, posting message with links to their job announcements, notes of congratulations and other similar actions.

Fewer than 10% of any group of messages or actions were acknowledged.

That made me wonder if this experience was one unique to me—perhaps they just didn’t feel like responding to me personally—or if it had to do with the way nonprofit organizations were using social media.

To find out, I ran one last test:  I sent messages making reference to organizations where I have donated.  Since my Twitter handle is the same as that in their files, I knew they could identify me if they 1) saw the message, 2) looked in their database and 3) had a policy of responding to donors.  Again, fewer than half of these charities responded, including two organizations which know that I have included them in my will.

This would all seem to suggest that the charities on Twitter do not have an acknowledgement policy for social media, do not follow “mentions” of their organizations or both.

How simple a correction would be for nonprofits!  So here it is:

1)      Review your communications and gift acknowledgement policies and have them apply to social media as well, adapting them as necessary.

2)       Monitor “mentions,” which include the Twitter handle of the organization (e.g. @donorperfect or @gordonjayfrost) and respond as directed by your policy.

Believe it or not, this will not take much time to do on a regular basis.  Sadly, there are very few people on Twitter chatting up your organization today.  What we want is for more people to do so.  And to make that happen we can’t just rely on their good nature and luck.  We must do in social media what we do in every other aspect of fundraising: build the bond of constituent loyalty through a consistent patter of touches, including foremost among them acknowledgements.

Fundamentally, our donors and prospects should be treated with the same degree of courtesy whether in person, through the mail, on the phone or within the world of social media.  What we do—and don’t do—to show we care speaks volumes and will be likely reflected one day in the bottom line, too.

Late last week, the Wall Street Journal’s online edition published “Is Your Favorite Charity Spying on You?”  The very clear message: nonprofits are digging into the very corners of our personal lives.

The media is once again channeling Casablanca’s Captain Renault who said, “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!” while collecting his receipts.

Every day, business journalists and marketers in virtually all industries use research services to identify new markets and tailor their messages to maximize profits.  Then some of these same people look at nonprofits and utter two contradictory complaints:  1) Nonprofits are not efficient and should find better ways to raise money; and, 2) using research violates the public trust and is not in keeping with charitable culture.

Then again, look at the glaring examples of impropriety the Journal cites.  According to the article, nonprofits “can survey your salary history, scan your LinkedIn connections or use satellite images to eyeball the size of your swimming pool…the charity can even get an email alert when your stock holdings double.”  It does sound intrusive, doesn’t it?

Except, of course, it’s not true!

Apart from the top five officers at a public company, salary information is not public and could only be estimated based on salary surveys and industry journals.  Connections on LinkedIn cannot be viewed except by first level contacts.  Stockholding data is available only on stock market insiders and any other such information is estimated based on proximity.  And as for eyeballing those swimming pools, well, Google Earth is the culprit, not prospect research.

Of course, the Journal already knows this because they and their subscribers are among the best users of research tools in America.  They are subscribers to many of the same tools, in fact, as their nonprofit colleagues.

The difference, however, is that fundraisers have very high standards for determining which types of information to use and how to use it: The Donor Bill of Rights and the APRA Code of Ethics.

As you can imagine, ever since the article’s publication, researchers have been up in arms, exchanging notes on their listserves and asking their trade association to defend their honor.  But this matter is much bigger than the interests of the important but small prospect research profession.  This is actually an attack on the character of the nonprofit community generally and fundraising specifically.

And we have only ourselves to blame for it.

The truth is that the public does not understand how nonprofits work.  In the absence of that information, charities are placed on a pedestal.  Any misstep and we easily come crashing down in the eyes of the world.

The media, on the lookout for these missteps, is right to look at how nonprofits raise and spend money.  The problem is that they measure our success or failure by an idealized and ill-informed standard.

Where the Journal is right is in claiming that information gathered through the legal, ethical and efficiency-promoting process of prospect research can be used to personalize solicitation.  But rather than the scurrilous implication that different types of healthcare are administered on that basis, instead nonprofits employing research information can better understand the needs and interests of their constituents.

On one level, getting to know people is always uncomfortable.  We are asking questions and wondering when we may be crossing a line.  If done ethically, sensitively and with the donor in mind, however, it can and should be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.