Speaker 1: I did a video a few weeks back on asking for donations, and you can find the link above here. But I wanted to expand on the LIA rating that we talked about, so today I'm going to share my experience with prospect research and putting that LIA rating into action. Because asking for donations without doing research is like randomly searching Amazon. It's going to cost you money. And prospect research is just that. It's the process we go through to gather more data about our donors and prospects. And it's a key part of fundraising success. And proper research not only gives you valuable insights and information about your donors, but it can also help you identify new donors. Now we need to know things like what our donor's connection to our organization is. Their giving motivations, wealth markers, business affiliations, and philanthropic tendencies. Overall, this information helps us determine a donor's ability and desire to donate. And it's not just individuals that we research, but groups, foundations, grantors, corporations. And we use it for major giving, capital campaigns, planned giving, and even annual giving. So before we begin, as always, please make sure to like, subscribe, share, drop a comment. All really helps our channel reach new fundraisers to help them along their journey. So let's get started. So our first step is preparation. We have a project that needs funding. It can be a program, a campaign, a capital project, or even just general funds to help us run the charity. Once we've identified the fundable project, our next goal is to match it with potential donors. This is done through researching our donor or prospective donor to determine what personal need will be met for them by giving to this opportunity, along with several other factors, including how much to ask for. Now I'm going to do a video sometime soon on how to find prospective donors. So again, the first place though that I always start is with our own database of current donors. I start by searching for high quality donors. I'm looking for donors who might be ready to make a larger gift, and those are generally people who have given every year. I want to see our consistent long-term donors. These loyal supporters are the ones who make the larger gifts, the capital gifts, or even the planned gifts. So starting with current donors can also help me identify new prospective donors, which we'll talk about in a bit. So before we go on, I want to talk for a second about what to do with all this research that we're about to do. And there's a lot of great programs like BlackBot or DonorPerfect where you can store your information. But I know a lot of you are small nonprofits that can't afford it, so a Word or Excel file will work. You just want to make sure that your profiles that you set up contain complete contact information, as well as philanthropic indicators, which represent an individual's willingness to give to your organization. So some examples of things to include are their previous donations to your nonprofit, donations to other nonprofit organizations, other nonprofit involvement, as well as wealth indicators. So if you can find real estate ownership, business affiliations, stock ownership, political contributions. And finally, you want some personal information, such as biographical and demographical information, business work history, family, social media profiles, and other general and specific interests. So before we talk about how to find all this information, let's talk about ethics and privacy. And I'm going to leave a link in the description for a download to the Association of Fundraising Professionals or AFP's Code of Ethics. As professional fundraisers, we have an obligation to not disclose any privileged or confidential information. We also should provide our donors with a copy of their records if they've asked for them. We really need to adhere to a strict code of ethics. So the next step is researching. Like database management, there's a lot of programs for donor research out there, like GrantCentral, FoundationSearch, DonorSearch, SecurityCan, and some are Canadian and some are US. And it really depends on where you are in terms of how much research and what the best programs are. So do your research and find what's best for you. And feel free to drop a comment too, I've worked with a ton of them, so I'd be happy to give you my opinion. And you can also consider using a consultant or professional prospect researcher, but again, you're probably a small shop that's doing it yourself. So here are some suggestions for completing your own research. So there are some great books, which I've also linked in the description, but you can do personal contact. So you can do donor surveys, you can go to networking events, and you can call and do interviews. You can ask prospects about themselves. You can also ask your current donors about what other potential donors they know. So just a quick aside, I had to do a fundraising project in a small town in Alberta and I don't even live in that town. They didn't keep any donor records, I was starting from scratch. So I tried to book a meeting with the mayor so I could get the lowdown on who's who in the town. And he put me on to his wife who told me everything about everybody. She even helped me open some doors and made some introductions for me. But there's also publications like business magazines, newspapers, and annual reports. These are great for gathering information. There's the good old-fashioned internet, do a Google search on them. There's social media profiles, you can learn a lot from LinkedIn, Twitter, and other social media platforms. So the next step is assigning your LIA rating. Now your LIA rating is your potential donor's linkage to your organization, their interest in your agency, or the work that you do and their ability to give. So here's how it works. You look at what is the person's personal link to the charity. You score them a 5 if they're heavily involved and responsive, 4 if they're sporadic and don't have a lot of contact, 3 if they're lapsed or infrequent, 2 if there's no contact but a link has been identified, and 1 if there's no direct contact and no link to make an introduction. We go through this same process to determine their interest. So how interested is the individual in your organization or your cause? And again we score 5 for actively involved and have specific motivations and interests all the way down to a 1 where there is absolutely no interest in your organization. And finally we look at their ability to give a larger gift. So this can vary depending on what a major gift is for your organization, and it's pretty easy to determine what a major gift would be. Just take the top 10 highest gifts you've received over the course of the last year, average them out. So for example, if you're a small charity whose top gifts are around 10,000, this is what your score would look like. It would be a 5 for the capacity to make over 10,000 all the way down to scoring them a 1 if they're under 1K. Now one of the biggest questions I get asked is how do you determine how much to ask someone for? And there's a lot of ways to do this through research. Again those programs that I've recommended are great, but you can also search out other charitable organizations, find out how much they've given to them. Check annual reports is a great way to do this. Again, the newspapers, you want to collect this information to find out what they generally give to charities and what they've given to charities similar to yours. So once you've finished, you add up all your scores and the top scores are your top priorities. And the next thing you want to do is match those donors with the right campaign, and you want to develop the right materials so you can ask them in the right way, and this is where demographic information is important. Then you determine the right gift amount, but you also get the right person to go and ask them. Again, you can see my video on asking for donations linked below. A final note is research is not a one and done. It needs to be ongoing. We don't put it off until we have time because you know we never have time, but it is a key part of fundraising success. So thanks for staying to the end. Watching the entire video as well as the likes, subscribes, and comments also really helps us out. So see you next week and have yourself a lovely day.