Those of us who are full-time researchers sometimes forget that for many people research is just one aspect, and perhaps not the most significant aspect, of the work that they do. Many smaller charities do not have the resources to employ a researcher, and so rely on their major donor fundraisers to carry out those duties. And some of those charities will only have one person doing all the fundraising for their organisation.

This week's website of the week is for those people, but also for anyone reading this - researcher or otherwise - who  wishes to carry out a little fundraising on the side; perhaps for a local organisation or group that is too small too have their own fundraiser.

RaisingFunding contains over 60 articles written by fundraising experts, who continually update and add new content. 

Subjects include legal advice on fundraising, using fundraising databases and software, fundraising for an individual cause, planning a fundrasing event, and much much more.

When you join the PRSPCT-L discussion list you get sent a Netiquette email – basically a list of dos and don'ts to prevent or minimise irrelevant, pointless or abusive messages.

And one of those don’ts is the following:

No requests for "a researcher from XYZ University" to contact you. We are researchers - find them.  Why inconvenience 3,499 list members with messages intended for a single member?

Why indeed? It's really fucking annoying and also - this is what really gets on my tits - the people that ask these questions are supposed to be researchers!

Honestly, what kind of a researcher are you if you need to ask for the contact details of another researcher? This must be the research equivalent of asking someone to wipe your arse: lazy, unnecessary and staggeringly infantile. 

And yet people continue to send out such emails. Most recently, someone asked "Could a Yale researcher please contact me? I have a quick question."

Yeah, well I have a quick question too:

"Are you so crap at research, or so lazy, or so bleeding THICK, that you cannot find a Yale researcher for yourself?!"

I mean to say, how fucking hard can it be?

Well, let's find out...

Finding Yale researchers

1. Time to open the PRSPCT-L archive and search for messages with the word Yale – less than a minute.

2. Time to find the first person with a Yale email address – less than 2 minutes.  

3. A quick Google of her name and I had the following information:

Nancy Faughnan

Assistant Director of Prospect Research

Yale University

203-432-XXXX

nancy.faughnan@...

So, in under 5 minutes I had a name, a phone number, an email address, and her title. Everything I need to contact her and ask my "quick question".

The PRSPCT-L archive also found the following Yale researchers:

Benjamin Vossler (message dated November 2007)

Rich Horne (June 2007)

Melinda Papowitz (July 2006)

Rick Gropper (February 2006)

So, if Nancy happens to be away when you try to email or phone her, there appear to be plenty of other Yale researchers available to ask.

And there is more than one way to skin a rabbit, as the old saying goes.

So, with that in mind...

Finding Yale researchers, take 2.

1. Google Yale University to bring up their website: www.yale.edu

2. Click to open the site and then put Nancy Faughnan’s name in the search box on the home page. This brings up a search page with 3 results, none too promising, but there is a Find a Person tab.

3. Click on that, enter her name again, press search and there she is.

All in less than a minute.

And the Find a Person search also found Benjamin Vossler and Melinda Papowitz (but not Rich Horne or Rick Gropper, who I presume have now left Yale for pastures new.)

So, I now have the names and contact details of 3 Yale researchers. Now you tell me, how fucking hard was that?

Yeah, really hard. If you’re a lazy, brainless fucknut, that is.

Oh, and in the unlikely event that the person who wrote the original request should happen to read this and feel like responding - please don't. If I wanted to speak to you I'd find you myself - I do know how to do that.

Most of the newspapers have given a great deal of coverage to Chris Hohn's £466m donation - largest ever, dawn of new era in philanthropy, etc. etc - but City AM's The Capitalist approached the story from a slightly different angle in yesterday's paper: 

The Riddle of Hedgie's Missing Millions

MUCH has been made recently of hedgie philanthropist Chris Hohn's £466m donation to the charity connected to his hedge fund, the Children's Investment Fund (TCI).

However, a quick trip to the Charities Commission website shows that last year, only £11.7m of the gift was actually used - so what happened to the rest? The answer is that much of it is returning to be reinvested in TCI, completely fee-free.

The reason for this, a spokesman for the Children's Investment Fund Foundation charity tells me, is that the gift works on an "expendable endowment structure" - which, after a good few minutes of explanation, I take to mean that its charitable grants are executed over the long term.

"It's essential to take a prudent approach to managing the charity's assets," chides my spokesman. Of course he's right but we remain keen to find out when and on what the money will be spent.

Quite.

We appear to have entered the age of the Super Gift.

Whilst us mere mortals have to contend with rising inflation and falling property values by tightening the belt, the very wealthy are moving in the opposite direction by giving away ever larger donations to charitable causes.

It all started in February of last year, when David and Simon Reuben gave Great Ormond Street Hospital a "multi-million pound donation".

Nothing too unusual there, you might think: Wafic Said gave £20m to Oxford University in 1996, a donation equivalent to between £25m and £33m today, depending upon how one measures the relative value of the £, and Gary Tanaka gave Imperial College London £27m in 2000.

But the Reubens' donation was just the start of a sustained run of Super Gifts for UK institutions, the like of which we have not seen before.

In October the financial services firm Morgan Stanley pledged £10m towards Great Ormond Street's appeal, in November the reclusive Barclay brothers, Sir Frederick and Sir David, gave them £11 million, and in April of this year Aditya Mittal, the steel billionaire's son, gave them £15m. 'Gosh!' you might say, if you were one for lame jokes. Which of course I'm not.

Fast forward to last Tuesday, when it was anounced by Oxford's Christ Church College that alumnus Michael Moritz had donated $50 (over £25m) to the college - the largest financial gift in their history.

But this extraordinary gift was itself topped the very next day when it was announced by New Hall, Cambridge, that they would be changing their name to Murray Edwards College following a donation of £30m from alumnus Ros Edwards and her husband Steve (himself an alumnus of Oxford - ooh, that £30m to rivals Cambridge must have hurt! Or perhaps not, given that they sold their software company for £700m in 2001).

Of course, large as they are, all these donations pale beside Lord Nuffield’s £3m donation to Oxford in the 1930s, a sum which would be equivalent to between £98m and £130m today. But this enourmous sum itself pales in comparison to the £466m donation made by Chris Hohn, as reported in Saturday's papers. Although given that this donation was made to his wife's foundation, rather than as a lump sum to a single institution, perhaps it should not be included with the other Super Gifts described above.

All in all, a most extraordinary sustained period of donations. Whatever next, I ask myself?

Wealth estimation is a difficult task, even for the experts, and so it's not surprising that they occasionally get it wrong.

Having valued the architect Lord Rogers and his wife, Ruth, co-founder of the Riverside Cafe, at £52m earlier this year in their annual Rich List, the Sunday Times were forced to offer an apology when Lord Rogers brought it to their attention that he was not nearly as wealthy as they claimed.

He explained the situation in a letter published in Building Design on 9th May:

And correct the mistake they did. On the 11th May, the Sunday Times printed an apology and removed Rogers from the online version of the rich list:

I haven't really had enough time to play around with this one yet, to determine how useful it may be, but I suspect it could prove very useful, so for that reason alone, this week's WOTW is TouchGraph.

Touchgraph has a number of basic functions, but the one in which I am most interested allows you to explore the connections between related websites by producing Google search results in the form of a clustered graph.

You can see the results for yours truly below.

It shows various websites, some directly related to me, others not really related at all, but enough information to allow someone to get an idea of the sorts of things I was into. The left hand column lists the websites, sorted in the same groups as the graph.

As I say, I have not had time yet to really test this sucker, but I have a gut feeling that it could be good. Or I may just be hungry.

TTFN

Tomorrow, the World!

Yup, that's right, my name is up in lights, well, black and white, anyway, in today's Times newspaper.

If you go to Page 5 of the Public Agenda section and look at the “In the Professional Press” column on the right hand side you’ll see that I’m quoted in the second paragraph (quote taken from the article I wrote for Professional Fundraising magazine.)

What larks, eh?!

I have had an article published in the latest issue of Professional Fundraising Magazine.

What fun!

Except for two things.

They spelt my name wrong.

They have edited the crap out of it (although it might heve been too long in its original version).

If you wish, you can read the full, un-expurgated version here.

Why, oh why, can't people spell my fucking name properly?!

Why why why why WHY?!!!

It's Mathew - one T - not Matthew. M-A-T-H-E-W.

It's not hard to spot, it's not rocket science, it's not asking for a solution to the Schleswig-Holstein Question or for a micro-realistic theory of quantum mechanics, it's just paying a little attention to a name.

Normally I don't mind, I'm used to it by now. But when my name is misspelt in a publication that will be read by thousands of people, that means thousands of people thinking that my name is spelt Matthew.

Grrrr.

P.s. more details about the publication in question when the latest issue appears online.

Just been checking out the latest FreePint Bar Digest, the excellent summary of the latest postings at the FreePint Bar, and what do I see?

An advert for the Dow Jones Booth at the Special Libraries Association Annual Conference inviting you to visit their booth to have an expert analyze your handwriting!

What the fuck?!

Dow Jones, as you may be aware, is the company behind Factiva (the news archive) amongst other products, and a serious player in the research/information managment world. Why, then, do they feel the need to attract people to their booth at the SLA Conference by endorsing such fuck-witted mumbo jumbo as handwriting analysis?!

No, I will not call it graphology - I refuse to dignify such infantile drivel with that term, ridiculously pseudo-scientific though it is.

This sort of shit really gets my goat.

"You can have Sarah or Ruth Holmes, both nationally known handwriting examiners, amaze you with their ability to read your personality from just a sample of your handwriting."

I will be amazed indeed, if they can glean absolutely anything of any substance about my personality from my handwriting. Especially as they promise to "get insights into your true self" and "the analysis of your handwriting only takes a few minutes."

Only takes a few minutes?! People have multiple sessions with psychologists to try to discover their true self that may last hours at a time and yet these handwriting people can discern the same information in a few minutes. Fucking miraculous.

Let me guess what form this 'analysis' will take.

It will say that I am a confident/caring/outgoing/sharing/loving/imaginative/compliment of your choice/etc. etc.

I.e. lots of general drivel designed to make me feel better and absolutely nothing about my real personality, except if they hit upon something by sheer luck.

What it will not say is anything that is really about my true self: that I am manipulative, devious, arrogant, hostile, lazy, misogynistic, xenophobic, etc. etc. Not that I am - well, not all of those things (!) - but everyone is a mixture of good and bad things, but you wonlt get that from these people.

And to suggest that the complexities of the human brain, with its billions of interacting neurons, can be discerned in any way from how you write a few words on a page is fucking crazy.

Why of why then, are Dow Jones promoting such puerile bullcrap?

Dumbarses.

There is a new book out about prospect research which could be well-worth reading.

It is written by Bobbie Strand, "a nationally recognized leader in major gift and prospect development, capital campaign planning and implementation, major gift management, cultivation, and solicitation" as the CASE website puts it.

You can read a 'sample chapter' (actually the introduction) here.

It's fairly expensive, at £25, but then again, if it enables you to find the prospects to support your work with a decent donation or two, it's rather cheap!

I shall be ordering a copy forthwith. Well, after lunch probably, now I see what the time is.

Not so much Website of the Week as Website for the first time in several Weeks, but hey ho, what do I care?

So, this week's WOTW is AltSearchEngines, which contains extensive information about alternative/niche search engines (as well as the big boys). Their goal is to make AltSearchEngines “the definitive destination for everything related to alternative search engines - over 1,000 of them!”

Whilst not anti-Google, they do wish to emphasise the very many alternatives to that search engine giant. And let's face it, Google may not be around for ever. Or rather, it may not be the best search engine forever. After all, it was only a few short years ago - well, the late 1990s I guess - that Google was the young pretender and Yahoo, Hotbot, AltaVista and so on were the major players. How quickly things change.

But just who will replace Google? AltSearchEngines has a go at picking a few contenders.

Feedback from the ThirdSector Major Donor Conference (13th May 2008)

I meant to write this up a week ago but various things, work and illness, got in the way, so...here is a shortened version of what I was going to write because, quite frankly, I can't be arsed to write a long version.

In fact, here is an ultra short version:

No matter how much you know (or think you know), go to conferences! You never know what useful information you may pick up.

And boy did I pick up some useful information.

For example, I learned from one speaker that Patrons to their appeal have all given the charity at least £100,000.* And a quick check the next day showed me that Patrons to their appeal are listed on their annual report. The upshot of this is that I now have a list of almost 100 prospects each of whom I know is capable of a donation in excess of £100,000. Cool.

So, to keep this short and sweet, the conference theme was Identify and Cultivate Major Donors, although the bulk of the day was about cultivation rather than research.

In fact Bugger, used that phrase already And I have to say, those parts that were about research were rather weak. For example, the title of the first talk began with "Implement the Latest Techniques to Successfully Identify your Potential Prospects..." and what was said, whilst being interesting (and informative to those new to prospect identification), most certainly did not include the "latest techniques" in prospect research.

And although some of the other speakers touched upon research, they just spouted the usual ignorant guff. E.g. "Find out about your prospects through Who's Who and Lexis Nexis" (and what else??? These are not the only biographhical or news sources!!!) Or, "Get your database screened" (but none of them pointed out that data screening companies have substantially different data sets and so you need to get your data screened by more than one company to  maximise your chances of identifying prospects. I made my concerns known in the feedback sheet, so perhaps the next conference major donor conference will be different. Or perhaps they should have a conference devoted to prospect research (is that a pig I see flying overhead?)

I must add, though, that there were some very good speakers: Ben Morrison of Jewish Care, Rob Aldous of Moorfields Eye Hospital and the very entertaining Mide Akerewusi, lately of SCOPE, but now heading off to Canada. Although with Mide, I did get the slight feeling that there was more style than substance to his talk. But what style!

There was also an informative talk from Sophie Hackford of New Philanthropy Capital, who is coming to speak at the forthcoming Researchers in Fundraising conference.

OK, now I've got the plug in, I tire of this post. Laters...

* EDIT (22/05/08): I originally said the figure was £12,500, but that was for something else - doh!

The Jewish Chronicle has just published its second annual list of those Jews and non-Jews who wield the greatest influence on British Jewry.

The JC Power 100 lists, as the name suggests, the top 100 movers and shakers as chosen by JC readers and an expert independent panel representing all strands of Jewish life.

Unsurprisingly, it includes a fair number of philanthropists and others of interest to fundraisers and researchers, but equally surprisingly, it does not include Sir Alan Sugar. I know, cor blimey! Or rather, Oi Vei! *

* Oh come on, surely you don't expect me to write a post about the JC Power 100 without at least one hackneyed, stereotypical Jewish phrase. I think that I was very restrained. But then again it is Monday; I'm just warming up.

This is a question for those of you who get this blog by RSS.

On the front page of my site I have the following information:

Or, how to save the weeble!

This week's tip is courtesy of Melanie Matthews of TB alert (her second tip on The Prospect Research Toolkit – you can read the first one here).

How often do we see the following question on the Trust & Statutory Discussion Group?

I'm looking for a trust that will fund a new database/internet site/minibus/rainforest/my breast enlargement*

* Delete as appropriate

I.e. the person thinks that to fund an unusual item, such as funding for a new website, you need to find a trust that specifically funds new websites.

You do not.

Here are some of the options you should consider.

1.Your overall fundraising strategy. 

Are you relying simply on trusts for your income?  If so – eggs and baskets come to mind.  Other types of income are non-restricted and could be used for these things (events, appeals and many more) if you don't do them then maybe your fundraising department should think about its long term strategy of getting core unrestricted funds and start to include ways of fundraising other than trusts. One small sponsored event could raise enough for your needs.

2. Not all trusts insist on giving restricted funds. 

So raise more unrestricted money from trusts and use it for any of these items.  These trusts want to know examples of your work and why you are a good charity and benefiting people in a way that is really positive – then you can spend the money however you want.  If you don’t know who they are ask if they need a specific project or not before you make the application.

3. Fundraising for a specific item. E.g. you work for a charity that studies infant deaths and you need a new website. 

Change your thinking. You do not need a website. You need what? An awareness tool?  An information service/support tool for mothers who have lost an infant? A resource for social workers to be able to access support for those mothers? A resource for healthworkers to share information in order to help increase their knowledge of the study of infant deaths (all of these being, for many charities, direct charitable objectives)

The application should say:

The problem: Not – we need a website and we don't have enough money! The problem is that there are still too many infant deaths, no-one knows why or where to get the right information, and so on.

Your solution: Providing a website which will let people know about this, and provide an awareness tool to make more mothers/doctors aware of what could happen and how they can do their best to prevent it, or an information service/support tool for mothers who have already lost an infant, to help them through the grieving process and help their other children deal with it, or a resource for social workers to be able to access support for those mothers so that mothers are given the support they need, or a resource for healthworkers to share information in order to help increase their knowledge of the study of infant deaths so that the research that is done is more widely known and more effective. And so on.  

What you want:  £XX,XXX

What that money will do – Not pay for a website!  The money will ensure that X number of mothers/doctors are helped with information or X number of social workers get quick access to information they need or X number of researchers have a focal point to look at all the studies that have been done and their results so as to make their research more effective.

Let’s look at it another way…

Imagine that you work for Save the Weeble (the weeble is now sadly endangered by loss of its habitat - oh yes it is) and you need a new database.

The application should not say – we need a new database but we don't have enough money to pay for one.

What it should say is that weebles - cute, wobbly, lovely weebles - are needlessly dying! 

We need to tell the world about this travesty, we need to lobby parliament and governments all over the world, we need to gather together a database of weeble-workers, we need to reach out to the caring British public to give us money – and we know they will. 

But wait!

We cannot do any of that at the moment because we only have one old computer and a home-made database.  The fate of the weeble lies in our hands, as we alone have the knowledge and experience, we alone can save them but we cannot currently do so because we don’t have modern IT equipment!

The solution is a database and server which will ensure that we can let people know about this crisis, provide information for weeble watchers, help us communicate with and lobby decision makers, and most importantly raise hundreds of thousands of pounds from the general public for a weeble sanctuary.

As Melanie says, this formula works for any charity, any need.

Except possibly breast enlargement. I made that one up. Still, you never know...

Once again, the Sunday Times Rich List is upon us.

This Sunday, the 27th April, to be precise.

Ooh, how exciting?!

Well, not very, quite frankly.

Yup, it's a slow day today.

The website o' the week this week is Phil Bradley's website. 

Making search easier for everyone runs the tagline and I would have to agree. Phil's site is a smorgasbord of information on search engines, searching the internet and keeping up to date on internet events, with numerous free articles on internet searching and a regularly updated weblog.

Articles of particular interest to prospect researchers include Which search engine for which query? and a comparsion of UK based search engines.

Remember, there's more to life than Google!

OK, this has nothing to do with prospect research, but then it is Friday.

For those of you who enjoyed my recent presentation on the Monkeysphere, and in particular all the lovely pictures of chimps, gorillas and orangs, I urge you to go to this site - Manifesto for Apes - and sign their manifesto to try to help safeguard the future of these wonderful animals in their natural environment.

I've signed it, as you will see if you check out the signatories. I am signatory 4030. Cool.

This weeks TOTW is to read the Data Protection Act.

I know what you're thinking, this is a pretty obvious tip, right?

Well, maybe, and yet I get the feeling that there are a fair number of fundraisers and researchers out there who have not read the act. But to be perfectly frank, because I'm tired of being Mathew, you must read it. There are no excuses not to.

Well, there is one, I guess, which is that the act is very, very boring to read. But that's not really much of an excuse, is it? The act is not very long, not very difficult to read or understand, and, for the most part, not very difficult to interpret.

I say 'for the most part' as there are sections of it that are a little ambigious when applied to prospect research. Hah, to say the least.

But you can help your interpretation of it by checking out Adrian Beney's site, and also by reading the Researchers in Fundraising Guidelines on interpreting the Data Protection Act.

The Institute of Fundraising has also produced a Code of Fundraising Practise concerning Data Protection which "aims to draw attention to those areas of the act that apply to fundraising activities" and which is worth reading.

So, all in all, exciting stuff, expecially for a Friday afternoon!

Ciao.

This week's WOTW is the news & current affairs site Newsbiscuit.

Divided into various categories, including Arts/Entertainment, Business & Celebrity, as well as UK News and World News, it contains many articles of interest to prospect researchers.

You can also get articles sent direct to your inbox. Cool.

From the ARNOVA-L discussion list I learn that Google has launched a new resource, Google for non-profits.

The site features tutorials and examples of how non-profits use Google tools to operate more effectively.

TechSoup provides a range of technology services for nonprofits, including news and articles, discussion forums, and discounted and donated technology products.

They have, for example, a comprehensive list of articles about using the internet going back some 8 years.

This week's TOTW is courtesy of my old mucker, Finbar Cullen, who describes on his blog how you can access and search previous Sunday Times Rich Lists from 2002 to 2007.

Even more useful than a mask in a fart factory.

I've finally finished the notes to the presentation I recently gave to the Trusts and Statutory SIG earlier this month.

Entitled 'Inside the Monkeysphere!' it considers how prospect research can help you in your trust fundraising.

There are two versions, a monkey version and a non-monkey version.

The choice is yours!

EDIT - the first presentation was waaaay too large, so I've put up a smaller one. JPEG monkeys rather than bitmap monkeys. Makes all the difference.

This week's WOTW is Karen Blakeman's Tales from the Terminal Room (tfttr).

tfttr is "a free newsletter for anyone who uses electronic media, and particularly the Internet, for locating information."

The newsletter appears roughly every two months and discusses a variety of search tools, information resources and other items of interest to researchers.  

Karen also has a blog, which is well worth reading.

I wonder, is it very childish of me that I find it rather amusing that the wonderfully named Debra Allcock Tyler, Chief Executive of the Directory of Social Change, has written a book called The Pleasure and the Pain?

Ooh, matron!

From time to time in your researching adventures, you may come across a website intended for Johnny Foreigner. (You know, funny words, some of them written with strange symbols that bear little relation to what you or I would recognise as letters,*  that sort of thing).

This is especially likely to be the case if you are carrying out research into wealthy non-doms or foreign prospects. 

And unless you are a cunning linguist (he he - oh grow up) you are going to be stumped and not know whether you have stumbled upon a goldmine of information concerning your prospect or just another nugget of fools gold.

But help is at hand!

In the first instance you can use Babel Fish, which very kindly translates websites from foreign to English.

Or, if you prefer, you can use the translating abilities of Google. 

Or, better still, use both. Why? Because they can give markedly different translations of the same body of text.

For example, if you translate the following website www.bonsoirclara.be (a Belgian restaurant where I shall be eating in a few weeks - snail ravioli is one of their specialities!) you get the following results (the first translation comes from Babel Fish, the second from Google):

The framework is irresistibly tempting and the fauna of the beginnings gradually made place with more marked customers in her choices and tastes culinary. In other words, one can be a restaurant "tendency" and nevertheless to propose a kitchen of quality. The chart of the wines is of an eclecticism particularly shining.

Interesting, eh? And not a little confusing.

How about if you are one of those lucky people who can understand, or partially understand, another language, but who gets stuck with the odd word or phrase? 

In this case, you need lingro.

Lingro provides a translation for any of the words you don't know, just by clicking on them.

Amazing!

Unless they don't have a translation for the word you pick, then it's just frustrating, but this sort of thing should become more rare, as the site is developed.

* Unless you are foreign, of course, in which case they look just right! But we think they look funny. So there.

Why oh why oh why do certain fucktards insist on calling Bob Geldof, Sir Bob Geldof?

Being Irish and not British (or from the Commonwealth), he was awarded an honorary knighthood and so is not eligible to use the term Sir. 

Do you ever hear people talking about Sir Bill Clinton, Sir Rudy Giuliani or Sir Bill Gates? No. But they too all have an honorary knighthood. So why call Geldof Sir Bob?!

It really gets on my tits that so many people who should know better, can get it so wrong. Especially when we, as researchers, have to be so careful to get our prospects' titles right. But perhaps they do know better, and are just being sycophantic, which is even worse, the fawning twats.

Still, I suppose I should be grateful he hasn't been awarded an honorary peerage, thus prompting fuckwits around the country to call him Lord Bob and, no doubt, style his wit-retardant daughters The Hon Trixie FagAsh, The Hon Lulu Monkeyspank and The Hon Slagwit Drunkentart, or whatever the fuck their real names are.

Oh, just checked Wikipedia, those are their real names. Hmm, lucky guess there.

My website of the week this week is Richard McEachin's Confidential Resource.

His blog offers "valuable information about sources, methods and resources for professional and amateur Investigators and Researchers."