WealthEngine

Having been with WealthEngine for 12 years, there is much to reflect upon; creating the foundation of our search platform out of my home office, developing FindWealth Online with trusted staff who still arrive at our offices each day with fresh ideas, listening to and leveraging our client’s knowledge to share fundraising best practices and further hone our products. Together with our clients, partners, staff and a culture of innovation, we’ve built products that support fundraising at the highest level. Indeed, much of our massive company growth has been based on thinking outside of the box.

The fact that our 3,000+ nonprofit clients get up each day to make a difference is a shared passion; we too want to solve our world’s most dire needs. On our side, technology is the means, and we look forward to releasing a major upgrade to FindWealth Online this year that will streamline prospect research. As well, we’re expanding our offerings to better aid the fundraising community through stronger analytics, research, prospecting and consulting services.

As a philanthropist and a practitioner, I’ve spoken with many prospect researchers and fundraisers on where we as a community need to go to advance the profession. I continue to believe that one of the most obvious opportunities lies in how one approaches fundraising strategy. To put it simply, the key to success is a disciplined, analytical approach. This comes through clearly defining the need, goals and budget of each fundraising initiative, and then moving through the steps to deploy, analyze and optimize throughout. Documenting knowledge management ensures that lessons learned are retained even when key staff moves on.

Second, we collectively need to challenge conventional wisdom and redefine the traditional fundraising approach. For example, I find feasibility studies puzzling. Why would you spend time to look back at past campaign performance and then conduct interviews to define your gift pyramid? Both practices are useful elements to campaign strategy but I think they could be renumbered in the process through the application of data driven fundraising. Starting with a wealth screening of donors and prospects will help to segment and define your constituent pool. Then, your organization can review past gifts and launch interviews, with solid data in hand. The result is a gift pyramid based on what can be achieved (data supported ask amounts) versus what was achieved (prior campaign giving and speculation). Feel free to contact me at tony@wealthengine.com to discuss—I’d love to hear your opinion.

WealthEngine has also taken a hard look at our company strategy and how we serve our nonprofit clients. We’ve hired a cadre of experienced statisticians and analysts over the past 2 years to redefine fundraising planning and analysis. It is no stretch to say that if you want to uncover donor giving trends, predict future behavior, identify donor look-alikes from prospect lists and answer the question “Who today are tomorrow’s donors?,” our team can do it. They have refined our proprietary ratings and scores, added a few new ones, challenged them against a live truth file and have found unparalleled accuracy. We would be hard pressed to tell you “no” if you came to us with a complex research and analysis request or that we can’t help you yield a strong return on investment (ROI) for your next initiative.

Great companies are in a constant state of learning from the good and the bad. We live in that mode and to that end, have made a commitment to do the same in the sector. This year we will broaden our thought leadership—publishing more Best Practices reports, case studies, white papers and workbooks. Our popular, free webinars will be tiered for the fundraising newcomer up to the experienced prospect researcher or fundraiser. We are also traveling around the country hosting roundtables and seminars to engage, listen and learn from clients and colleagues. Over the next three months we plan to visit Philadelphia, San Francisco, New York and Boston; please join us if you can.

In the meantime, best wishes for a productive and successful 2012. All of us at WealthEngine appreciate your work and look forward to an even stronger partnership in the future. As we collectively challenge the status quo, I am confident we will do great things.

PS: I’ll be discussing these topics and more during our January 30th webinar: Key Trends in Data Driven Fundraising. Please register to participate here