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July 31, 2009 As a former trustee of Stanford University and a current trustee of a Children's Hospital where I am also co-chair of a $500 million campaign, I certainly agree with Bill about why these organizations are successful in bringing in major gifts. It has been a wonderful experience working with world class major gift officers who make my job as a volunteer very easy. As we scour the lists of prospects and prepare for the all-important cultivation stage, it is imperative to know as much as possible about each person on the list. What are their major philanthropic interests, whom have they given to in the past and how much, what boards are they on, how big a gift could they make, given their financial capacity? Once we know all this information, it requires some additional synthesis so that we can concentrate on the most likely prospects and not waste time chasing either those with lots of interest in our cause and little capacity or vice versa - lots of money but no interest or inclination to give. It used to be that this required full time prospect research staff, something well beyond the reach of most nonprofits. Even with the enormous amount of information out there on the web, it still required someone to go from site to site to consolidate everything into some kind of usable form. Even more importantly, the prospects need to be sorted into priority levels and then we need to match these against what we know from our own existing relationships with them. Enter DonorSearch.net and Exceed! Premier working in concert. DonorSearch does the scouring for you, finding and consolidating all that information into usable form. It then calculates several ratings to enable you to focus on the most likely prospects. This information can then be imported directly into Exceed! Premier, where is becomes part of the criteria that you can combine with giving histories, affiliations, links to your closest friends, event attendance, and all the other little details that you have been gathering about your prospects and donors. Out of this comes the crucial information you need to build that all important relationship that will eventually lead to the major gifts that your organization deserves. Why let the big universities have it all? Susan Packard Orr |
© 2009 Telosa Software, Inc.