Let’s say you’re a prospect researcher in higher education. You’re getting some pressure – from your boss, from some of the gift officers you work with, maybe the campaign director – to come up with a list of new prospects. They use different words, but their message is clear:
“We’ve picked the low hanging fruit. We don’t want to keep going back to the same alums who’ve been helping us out in a big way for a long time. We need to find some new people who have the capacity and willingness to make a nice gift. Maybe not a huge gift, but a nice gift.”
If you’ve been working in the field awhile, this isn’t the first time you’ve faced this problem, nor is it the first time somebody has offered advice on how to solve it. Truth be told, you may have gotten too much advice:
- “You haven’t done a screening for five years. You need to do a new one.”
- “Our company has gotten very sophisticated about predictive modeling as well as gift capacity ratings. Use us.”
- “You’re not using social media resources effectively. Facebook and MySpace are great places to find out about alums who have lots of financial resources and are philanthropically inclined.”
- “You need to learn how to do data mining and predictive modeling or add somebody to your staff who already knows how to do it.
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