 Thanks for having me, I wanted to say that if you're watching the recording of this presentation, it will be posted on YouTube and we'll have the slide deck as well posted. But also get on my blog and send me a question. I did a presentation on another topic last month in similar fashion and I had a lot of people inquire one on one afterwards. So that's easy and I'll provide that contact information at the conclusion. So I used to live and work in the 1990s in Dallas. And I actually going back to graduate school I did my thesis research at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth I have a degree in 19th century American art history. So I have some experience in North Texas and I really like it. I've talked at AFP DFW a few times. So I haven't done that for the past couple years but I have really enjoyed it and I know it's a really, really great community actually have also taught at the CFRE review exam have helped do that so have been a fair lot. Well, I'm very familiar with it and like it and love the donors up there I've had some wonderful experiences so my background is more than 30 years now of hands on major gift campaign experience across Texas, literally from end to end. I hold two degrees from UT Austin and was elected in graduate school to the Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi. And so, given my university background, I have a lot of experience with research and writing publications communications and with my art history background actually have a little bit of graphic design and video experience so I'm kind of left brain and right brain at the same time. I've become known for working on challenged, I would say capital campaigns with little or no staff just digging in to those impossible campaigns that are definitely worthy but seem to get stuck. And so my motto is never say never. And today I'm the volunteer organizer, the primary one with nonprofit Tech Club Austin, which is a partnership with N10 TechSoup, our host today, and with our local startup entrepreneurial hub Capital Factory. And I'm also through the Tech Club I learned about QGIF, gift processing and so I'm an affiliate at QGIF actually learned about it at the Tech Club. And then I recommended and installed it myself by hand for a nonprofit and I just became wildly fanatic about it. So, you can ask me about that too. Well, my academic training has been very helpful for research and writing but is it necessary. Well, I would say if you are focused your calm you're determined, and you can sit without interruption and conduct meaningful research. You should be good to go if you don't have to have an advanced degree to do this work but you do have to have to have that mindset. Good habits to have if you're going to be a prospect researcher are, in my opinion, I read every day, read the news, follow trends, and I follow the stock market. I find that's one of the most important things that I've learned after all these years is to see what trends are happening in the stock market, what companies are on the upswing which ones are on the downswing, and other things. It's really helpful to identify prospects in the long run. Now, I call this the online tools for inquisitive minds. I actually use Google news but there are other services for news alerts that you can get right to your inbox. I follow topics and people and I just requested those updates go directly to my inbox so you can make it real easy on yourself by getting those alerts and you can set them up daily, weekly, or monthly, whatever it is. So, I recommend that that sort of helps ping me to say hey there's something going on with this person or this project. And I think also today there's no such thing as being bored how could you possibly be bored when you have the internet it's just an amazing, amazing development and tool for us so one thing that I do that is a little bit unusual I think is I read tax returns, I get on God's story you know you're nonprofits on God's store. So, you're there and anyone can see your tax return, and that is the law but also private foundations are nonprofits themselves so their tax returns are on there. It's sometimes the best information about where they are right now and what they're doing. Our is on God's are so I love to do that and sometimes you need to reach out. There's no website. There's no mailing address there's nothing but you might find it on the tax return so that's really super helpful. And then I follow the business media. So, it is fortune but also Forbes Wall Street Journal does take a subscription so that's a challenge Bloomberg you Yahoo finance and my local business media but you can usually get a lot get the gist of information of what's going on by following your social media. And so I recommend doing that all the time for the big picture. Some people think that social news outlets, you know, Hollywood coverage stars who's doing what are fluffy. And that's not really helpful but really, you can learn a lot from that so I do keep an eye on it it's not my primary focus but really the top concerns and the plan to press active today, locally statewide nationally, that can impact your project. You can learn not just who's funding right and who's endorsing right, but you can also learn how to pitch your own cause. And they, the reason I say that's important is because they have the messaging professionals in place who helped them make those pitches so I would definitely keep an eye on that and see and sometimes you can also that your local nonprofit in with a bigger project like that. And so republications are very helpful. I like Stanford innovation review but lately, I really like nonprofit pro because you're not just looking at case studies of what's happened before you kind of need to know what's going on right now, you know, and sometimes they're a case study that happened and maybe all the money's actually been given and that's done so people have moved on so helpful advice now what's working now actually the QV blog is one place but there are other those platforms several of them provide really helpful advice about what's working and that's what our data is saying about online giving for instance. So, and also I subscribe to philanthropy news digest, and if you'll just go to that website and enroll yourself on your email. Really, there's opportunities to get funding from many, many sources all over the nation. So, again, it will help you to with trends. No, I got online and actually just over a year ago, I did a prospect research webinar. And everything's really change I mean Google search is the top and it's always been but all the search engines there's a lot of them today and my message is simply this, I get most everything from Google search but sometimes I can't find some item of information that I know is there. And so I'll get on being or Yahoo and I'll try and track it down and a lot of times, something about the way I'm phrasing the search inquiry will come up better on these other search engines so you need to, you know, use multiple search engines but again Google search is the, the big picture, the biggest one in all of them, and it's really really fabulous they're all really good so, but just know there are more than there's more than Google. A spreadsheet so here is something I find. Certainly the bigger nonprofits that can afford constituent management software platforms, you know, have all of this more or less in one place, but I find a lot of nonprofits certainly in Austin fact most of the nonprofits in the world today are actually smaller nonprofits, they're not those big ones. And so they may have just gotten going on their own independently from a great idea and now they're catching up with their technology but it may be that they're housing all their donor data in a give processing platform back into that or they might have it all in MailChimp or something like that so you have to pull the sources into one. I say just export it in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets and just kind of reformat that to make the type face a little bit bigger so you can really read it and merge everything into that if you can. I know that it these things come from various sources so again if you're using a constituent management software platform where everything's integrated that's going to be an easier process for you to do, but if it's not don't worry, because you're going to find some promising prospects that will do it this way. So I merge everything into one, and you might code it like this came this entry came from MailChimp. This entry came from to give this entry came from ZT, you know whatever it is. It's because inevitably you're going to want to go back and go, where did I, where did I have this person down before so just code it there, and then I remove unnecessary columns you don't do need their full name as best you can their address me address their email address and anything that's really essential but don't get so many columns that it's just so huge it's not worth doing that then grab a cup of coffee and start reading it and this is going to take quiet time this is somebody like me I'm a borderline introvert and kind of introvert extrovert on the line there but man there's something I like better than sitting quietly and reading and becoming a detective and finding great prospect. I think it's like great fun, you know but that might just be me being slightly introverted person but so if you're looking at the email. What's the domain name to see you'll just go through and see if you come up 182.com net suite.com communities foundation of Texas.org. Look and see who's actually on your list getting your information. And that can be a real important way to identify a prospect or somebody who's watching what you're doing. So email and those kinds of platforms like comment center, they can be challenging because it's just everybody's at gmail.com. But if you see the name in front of the domain and it rings any bells. Obviously I made this up Bill Gates gmail.com, because he's probably got taught me frankly but for outlook, apologies. So you're just kind of need to check it out read each one of them I've actually was on a board for five years of a renewable energy nonprofit nationally. And they had a lot of federal grants and they wanted to move toward private sector fundraising. So, I said give me your list of who's getting your email so I just went through it one day. I said okay look at these companies, here we go there's a lot of people we need to reach out to them and see and see if we can work our way up the giving ladder that way get introductions that are more meaningful because clearly they've been on the email list for a while so you can do it that way. Again, just take the time to look and check out those domains. So, what I do I get on Google search and I'm, I look on the email. And then if I found the company with organization, the domain, I'll get on there I'll start looking around there. And that'll lead me naturally to what are they supporting as a company. What are projects are being focused on by the employees because today so many corporate sponsors really follow the guidelines and the interests of their employees, what they want matters so you need to pay attention to that. So I'm monitoring those and highlighting them to say okay I need to go back, then jumping just a little head when you feel comfortable doing it you might reach out to that person, or two at that company and say look, you've been on our list for a couple years and we have a project and we'd like to see if maybe your company would like to partner with our nonprofit on that. Can you help me find the right person to speak with or can you help me with that. Here is my thought though back again to the way corporations are focusing more and more on what their employees prefer. Don't forget the person you may need to speak with maybe the person you're emailing don't always think oh well it's not that person I need to jump up to the CEO. It's not going to work quite that way courtesy counts and everyone matters I know you know that but it could be that person your emailing has influence and will you know vote for your nonprofit to receive support and partnership with some clients so just keep aware of that but also the other thing I did want to mention is they may have been on the list for a while but I get very excited when I find a prospect like this and I immediately just think millions of dollars are going to come and you need to go slow. You know it's like I get so excited but it's you need to understand they're not quite there yet they are in the loop and they're moving you can move forward but it's not necessarily going to be a quick response or whatever so A zip code search one time I did this in Austin I was amazed what are the wealthiest zip codes in your city it'll come up then go back to your spreadsheet and look up and see if you can find those zip codes and then you can kind of hone down on who those people are. They're in the news they have nonprofits they're working with topics they're interested in kind of work backward through that. One thing I would simply say here though is some who may have lived in the same house for many years may not be a zip code so some people are house rich and they're cash poor as well so there are things that will not make a zip code search all that helpful but sometimes it really will and sometimes those people may be in a wealthy zip code and they may not be able to give the whole lot but they can sure help introduce you to others so you need to research those options and just be you know mindful. Now once you begin doing this you're going to be honing down on prospects and they'll start coming through again donors and influencers are both important and you're going to build your mental database as well as well as your organization's database with really terrific information from this but document everything and just you have to focus and be patient not be interrupted a lot in your work so your director needs to let you have that time. Now three cases I'm going to mention today. What the first one is actually a group I worked with in south Texas, central in south Texas and I literally just pulled up the Excel spreadsheet with the mailing addresses in this case and I was going through it and I thought you know I have to see who's even here who's even getting information so maybe I need to expand my mailing my mailing list so what I found was somebody his name I recognized and they were serving on a family foundation board so they were just giving $25 a year a membership a basic membership so I pulled them out though and pass them along to the powers that be and once they were properly approached cultivated educated and the like, they helped us get $5 million from their family foundation. This is totally worth my entire time, three years of this nonprofit was that one little jam $25 a year. 5 million, what can I say is great. Here's one for Dallas and for those that are in North Texas this is the 90s when I was working with Dallas logical society and at that time, it was pretty much bombed out organization, we couldn't find any donor records. We had to raise, you know, $21 million or something to expand the exhibits and to improve the Dallas zoo so I was really chagrined I thought it was going to be easier than this when I got on board it was just really a shambles the entire situation there so I was out with my patent paper copying down the names of the donors from the plaques on the exhibits is that bad. So, I did meet with a few of those prior donors and they were pretty unhappy. We had given generous gifts meaningful gifts, and no one had communicated with them for five years at all. They just took the money and they ran with it so we did repair those relationships, but what I ended up doing was we had 100 press board members and I didn't know really who they were very much. I thought I would try and find out who they were by doing this project so I printed a list up of, I got primary area foundations that I could figure out and all the companies I listed board members and executive staff everywhere. I put it into a hard copy document printed up at a coffee shop put a cover letter on it, send it back to each person to their homes with a pen and a return envelope with the postage paid already, and I said if you wouldn't mind just, you know, we want to see if there's anyone we're going to keep this list confidential and this information you don't have to make a call. If you'd like to make a call. We'd love that. But if not just, you know, say a few kind words, whatever you want just let us know but we need to develop a more robust prospect list so we what part through this is that our board members weren't major gift donors necessarily themselves but they did know a lot of people who were they had gone to high school with people who become CEOs of major companies for instance so I say put your board members to work I'm a big fan of what some nonprofit advisors would say that is everybody give get off get out of here. You have to be somebody with influence and big money to be on the board. You know a lot of people know people with influence who can make big gifts, even if they can't. So, you need to be a little more flexible with that and thoughtful because you're missing out if you don't. So, you can create your own prospect list from scratch. Again, as with anything cultivation is required you're going to need to put them on a newsletter list and keep them informed and on and on but basically, it's possible. Here's one in Austin I helped add emergency response nonprofit. Create its first real office with a paid staff member and doing everything with volunteers is it's really a great group still today. And they had kept an Excel spreadsheet and it had about 60 records on it. And it just listed the name, the donation the mailing address, you know what they had it very simple, but pretty thorough. And I went through that and that really just took me just about a day to be honest and I found out that we had a important family foundation board member who made a personal gift of $100. And I found a billionaire in another city who had given $100. So we needed to get them going and see if we couldn't approach them for larger gifts. So one thing we did have in the situation is, and that was my job was to do 16 snail mail real thank you letters, because no one had been thanked. It was just a little over a year so we need to do it college is really big time. The other thing this group had done had gotten on go funding to raise money so it was, I don't know, you know with go fund me at that time. But they wouldn't allow direct access to the donor emails you could get kind of the name and part of the you know, so I literally got on there and with 80 donors, I hand. Thank them, because they hadn't really been thanked or updated on go fund me I couldn't pull the list off and mail them letters or anything like that or even the letters I had to go through go fund me so it took a long time but it was totally worth it to get a reformatted or go fund me page to make it an update page like every couple of weeks. Oh, here's an update here's what we're doing we're going to get on I contact now if you'd like to join our mailing list here is our new address to do that from our website on and on and on. So, we did have to thank everyone but what we did was, we've really got people engaged again we updated them which I find over and over a major gift and other campaigns. The problem nonprofits have is they think they just don't have time to thank those donors or bring them into the pool by educating them that's the key issue there so make sure you thank everyone and make sure everybody's receiving information. And if you have to get on go fund me and just communicate there definitely do that make it come alive so that really really helped and really propelled this organization forward so now library and other resources. As we all know candid is the parent organization of the foundation center online directory and guide star. We can get that in person by going to the library. If your library is now open after COVID. And the foundation center is just this incredible if you don't know it already it's fabulous resource and probably the most powerful database of its kind of world, in my opinion but what I found during coven this is news. It's not available for this, but you can access that database online if you have an e card here in Austin, it's called an e card. It may be something else at your local library. But basically, it's expensive to subscribe yourself, the organization to the foundation center directory, you're, you know, by yourself. So, I normally would go in person just sit there it's to me that's a pleasure to go to Austin public library and do that but you can access it remotely and that's what I've been doing lately, and for $22 instead of several hundred dollars. It's totally worth it. So my annual e card that's part of my regular business experiences now it's really terrific and to find a library location where she can see that this is places resource centers that have access available to the public for the foundation center library. So I did do that search for North Texas, and these are the places that do have access to the foundation center. What I like about it, whether you're at working from home remotely with an e card review there on site is you can search on that database you know the arts Dallas or performance for worth. And it will generate results from your search, you can then PDF that search result and you can email it to yourself at home, your office so I can just download it in my case to my files for my project so this is really convenient I notice that there are not any resource centers for the foundation center online database in for worth. So, but again, hypothetically, you could do this by having an e card from Austin public library it's all remote, everyone's remote so check your local resources for that it's totally worth it. This is powerful, wonderful information. Now, if you're going to really raise lots of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, I think you might want to consider wealth screening. So what this will do, it will take your Excel spreadsheets very simple straightforward, you know if you have that or that you have an integration with well engine or highway for something like that through your constituent management platform. Either way, simple Excel spreadsheet will do it so it will help narrow your search for promising prospects and what they do is they have a variety of publicly available databases for say real estate stocks for like guide star board positions. You'll find this thing auto auto or vehicle ownership that type of thing, and they'll run it your through all those databases and pull up the results and once you get those results. You can then go through them and you'll find there probably a lot of people that might be good prospects for you people you need to cultivate and then ask for gifts who are not names in the news necessarily. I like it because I've done this three times for major gift campaigns and I can tell you what it turned all the prospects research on its head, and we were focused off of people we thought we give was a whole new set of people and that was really good news and okay so a spoiler alert. Now if people have privately held companies and of course many do. You can't really find information about them this way you'll have to do it in another fashion by asking friends of friends or professionals about that. I once had a prospect in south Texas who I knew was worth hundreds of millions because I knew some of their close friends and. But no hard information all that came up from the wealth screening for this person with a privately held company was that they had a car that was valued at $25,000 and that was it so. It doesn't do everything but it'll do a lot. So now some resources for you research and screening kind of mixed them all up here, but if you join tech suit, which is free of charge to be a nonprofit to join, but you can get a discount on several different platforms that can help you with research and flux is one of those Grant station is another one of those. So get the discount whatever you can get an e card from the library and get a tech suit discount on your platforms here. There are some that are free of course like you can certainly do what state of Texas here grantsmanship center grants.gov there's an app for grants.gov so you can get a lot of this for free but basically I would just say set up a demo check out the site see what you think. I last spoke on this topic, just over a year ago, as I mentioned, there are new faces here instrumental is really coming on strong windfall I didn't know about until recently, I have worked with wealth engine several times as I mentioned earlier. But I have taken an eye wave demo and really impressed with that you're clean looking, easy to read, really easy to use it appears anyway so get get the demo and see it, it may totally be worth it, I would say, actually that if you'll do well screening some major gift campaign, that that will be better for your nonprofit than feasibility study would be because you're already going to know kind of who's back there to work on to receive major gifts. So, that is just something you might think about. Now the other sources for funding today as we all know donor advice funds and very, very popular donors they make like life easy for them it's very secure way for donors to be giving. So, I would say, check your Community Foundation website for funds that they're holding deadlines, general grants a lot of times they have and check on bank websites and, you know, professional advisor investment house type websites. Well, I am actually on one of those right now, and I searched on arts in Austin, and came up with a lot of great prospects that way so they're, they're not necessarily going to be entities philanthropists that appear as a separate website online or anything like that. So, what I do though I just say if you'll get on guide star, like it'll say okay well great so I got five prospects here of foundation so I'll be able to buy online to this, to this bank set. Basically, I look at the tax recurrent I'll search on guide star, just to be sure because I'm, you know, it's like you don't want to waste a whole lot of time doing a lot of the posts that aren't really fitting for a prospect, but never know. So, I did that actually this week, done guide star and bingo this does look like a good prospect and I'm going to go ahead and apply so they'll have of course the online links to apply and all that but it's a whole nother level and I think this is probably going to keep increasing donor advice funds every single year more and more donors turn to donor advice funds and to community foundations banks and all that so just be sure to check the banks and community foundations wealth of information and maybe I'll just go ahead and give it a try. So to recap, you can do a lot yourself. Take the time to review your own list for hidden gems and even a small list can yield dramatic results. A lot of times we'll think Oh, I'll read the newspaper and hey it's Michael Dell or Bill Gates, they, they'll find it they have a lot of money. I hear that from board members who really mean well, but you know of course that's not going to work that kind of a kind of thinking and a lot of times there's a jam right in your donor database right now or your mailing list right now that you just need to take them to the next level so it's like being a detective. You know you want to use ethically sourced information that's publicly available. And I would also say you don't need a consultant to do this you just need that mindset that I mentioned at the outset may need to just be focused and quiet time document and read often news is helpful. Certainly the financial news is the most helpful in my opinion, but see what's going on keep kind of keep abreast of what's happening and always your brain is amazing. Use it. Now security, I want to close with that. If you do a well screening, for instance, or, you know, if the information you research is a year old, like we had pre COVID, then we had COVID some people manage just fine through code that financially but some of them did not so you're going to need to start over. So screening is not something that's just good one time and it's done because people's fates their investments everything changes so I would say if you have hard copy shred it. If you're keeping that stuff in the cloud, you might want to, you know, remove that over time, keep all your research results secure and confidential and clear your computer's browsing history routine. And if you're going to do this a lot, you might invest in a virtual privacy network VPN to to help protect you just don't you want to protect your donors you're doing good work you're supporting a social good and a non great nonprofit and has a wonderful mission. Your goal is a positive one but people out there on the internet and hackers and, and all don't have those same positive motives to have to be careful. We also need to respect that some people have paid professionals remove as much as possible they have paid people to do it and I have seen that happen over and again so you may again I mentioned that earlier you need to ask professional colleagues and conduct verbal research and can see friends of friends see what might happen might be striking out in the dark a little bit but it works. That is work fine for me in the past. Also, I wanted to mention this because they actually do have a branch up in North Texas, the APR a association of professional researchers for advancement. In my opinion, the way we are going with data, and how important data has become to actually be effective nonprofit meeting your mission really really on target is this this, I think, is an association needs to grow well need to be members of it because this is for researchers and it is about data and so there's your north Texas link and also the home organizational link, you do not hear much about this group, but I think it's probably one, you know, need to be paying attention to and help it grow, especially in our tech. So, there you go. So, that's those are my thoughts, and that's my mail, and here's my blog, you can also join our tech club nonprofit tech of Austin. It's all free of charge we have a Facebook group page or the new tech soup connect link on baby lab so you can join our programs as well they're all free. So, that's what we're all grateful for that. But and Jean is going to be speaking this summer I can hardly wait for that but there you go. And I'll post these slides in my slides here as well. Thanks so much Carolyn was excellent. I love the, the be curious be creative use the resources you have. The event on our side is June 16, and it'll be how to find the right consultant for your nonprofit. So whether you register via the meetup, or register via the new bevy system the new platform that we're migrating to, you'll be in the right place, and be able to attend so we hope to see everybody on June 16. Thanks, Carolyn. Thanks. Talk to you later. Bye.