If you want to find potential major donors among your existing contacts, Jo’s your woman. Based in South Oxfordshire, she takes the lead on our wealth screenings – a role that gives her ample opportunity to indulge her love of spreadsheets! Here she talks us through her job and shares what she enjoys about supporting not-for-profit clients.
“I spent 15 years working as a statistician and project manager with a market research company before joining Prospecting for Gold in 2013. It was only ever meant to be a temporary job, but it has worked out so well that I’m still here a decade later!
What I love about this job is that it’s so flexible and family-friendly. There’s no sense of presenteeism here – as long as you get the work done, there’s a lot of give and take. The team is really supportive. They understand that life doesn’t always go quite according to plan, and everyone always tries to help one another when it’s needed.
I run our wealth screening service. First, our client sends us their database through a very secure transfer site. If the client is a charity, this is likely to be a supporter database, or if it’s a school or university, it could be a parent or alumni database. We then screen our client’s data against the data in our Wealth Intelligence Database, which has information on over 270,000 wealthy people.
If our client gives us, for example, a database with 2000 records, we might find up to 80 matches on our database. In other words, that’s up to 80 wealthy people who currently support our client who have the potential to become a major donor.
Wealth screenings can be exciting. Clients tell us they can’t wait to see the results. It’s lovely if we identify more wealthy people than they were expecting and find out about people on their database they didn’t know were wealthy, and potentially in a position to give them higher value gifts.
I also work on what we call ‘big data’ projects. For example, we’ve just updated our Million Pound Property dataset. This is a massive project: we’ve moved from 240,000 records to nearly one million. Previously the data went up to properties worth £3 million plus, and it now goes up to £5 million plus. We’ve also gathered information on the next bracket down – £750,000 to £1 million – because in some parts of the UK, you don’t need to spend £2 million to live in a six-bedroom house. Conversely, £1 million in London doesn’t mean quite the same!
What’s nice about working with charities and not-for-profits is that you’re not just lining someone’s pockets. Everything I did in my previous job was fundamentally to help the client companies make more money. Of course charities are trying to make money too, but they’re doing it to make the world a better place.
I’ve also noticed a difference in the level of friendliness in the not-for-profit sector. It’s much less cut-throat; ‘urgent’ means something is needed within the next day rather than in the next hour. I did meet huge numbers of lovely people in the commercial sector, but they were often working to crazy deadlines and under enormous pressure, which got passed down the line. There’s pressure and deadlines in the not-for-profit sector too of course, but it doesn’t feel quite so stressful because people are generally nicer about it!
It’s really lovely when we hear back from clients with positive feedback. They’ll say they contacted the list of people we gave them and they got pledges for this or that amount of money, or they invited them all to an event and 50% of them came. You think, ‘Ah, the information’s been helpful – it was worth doing!’
Why should organisations come to us for prospect research? Because we’ve got the skills and resources for it. There’s nothing to stop them doing at least some of what we do themselves, but it will probably take significantly longer. And it will take them away from other stuff, like building relationships with donors. We can give them the information they need to go and build those relationships far more quickly than they can find it. And, because everyone in the team cares about the quality of work they produce, our clients can always be confident that whoever’s done it, it will be the best it can be.”