Feature Article: NEDRA News, Spring 2004

Prospect Research: Past, Present, and Future
BY SUSAN CRONIN RUDERMAN, Ed.M., VICE PRESIDENT, VERITAS INFORMATION SERVICES

It’s official—time really is speeding up. The National Institute of Standards & Technology, which uses atomic clocks to keep Earth time in sync, recently announced that the rate of Earth’s rotation has sped up ever so slightly since 1999. The reasons for the relative increase in Earth’s spin speed during the past five years remain unclear, but some scientists believe that subtle changes in Earth’s shape may be at work.

The news that the pace of time is accelerating will not surprise most prospect researchers. We know that the amount of information—and the time spent corralling it—has increased dramatically in the past five years alone. And when we compare the state of the art to NEDRA’s beginnings in 1987, we could almost be talking about two different professions.

How Did We Get Here?
For those of you new to prospect research, here is a brief history of the establishment of NEDRA. During the early 1980s, the field of development as a whole became more competitive and more professional due to economic and societal factors. As development efforts expanded, it became clear that institutions that “did their homework” by conducting some level of prospect research generally fared better than those that lacked this capability.

Elementary-level prospect research was often conducted by clerical staff or administrative secretaries, who had an eye for details and some degree of curiosity. But prospect research sometimes occupied a shadowy existence, where the research function was considered a necessary, but potentially embarrassing, task that was best not discussed in public. Managers of development were concerned that if trustees or volunteers learned that the development office was conducting research, they might feel uncomfortable and wonder what information staff might have compiled on them. So in the 1980s and into the 1990s, few development offices highlighted the existence of the prospect research function to outsiders.

The first publication to examine prospect research in some detail was CASE’s Prospect Research: A How-to Guide, edited by Bobbie Strand and published in 1986. But organized training opportunities for this evolving job were still nonexistent. Instead, knowledge was generally passed down to new researchers by those who had been personally trained by some of the pioneers. When these trained individuals would move on to other institutions, they disseminated the knowledge to more organizations, and broadened awareness that prospect research was a valuable function. Larger institutions, primarily colleges and universities, were even able to build staffs of multiple “research analysts,” as they were generally called. Healthcare organizations also were among the first nonprofits to grow a prospect research function.

By the second-half of the 1980s, when the largest campaign goals were in the range of $400 million to $500 million, individuals working in the field felt two strong needs: to increase their knowledge of techniques and resources, and to establish more credibility and status within the development office. A core group of six or seven people began meeting at a restaurant in Cambridge to structure the group. While several members had worked in libraries, a background in library science was not at all universal. Perhaps the only universal was a desire for knowledge and excellence. Also from the beginning, ethics in prospect research was always an uppermost concern, and an area for education and discussion.

In 1987, the New England Development Research Association was incorporated. The annual conference and this very newsletter were quickly established as NEDRA’s two primary outreach tools. A membership directory soon joined the arsenal as a way to help members connect and network. Today, NEDRA boasts more than 300 members representing fundraising professionals throughout the United States and Canada, drawn from higher education, private secondary and elementary schools, hospitals, health, religious and social services organizations, arts and cultural institutions, and regional offices of national not-for-profits.

For those who are puzzled about the relationship between NEDRA and the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA), perhaps a brief explanation will fill in some of the gaps. APRA, known as the American Prospect Research Association until 1996, grew out of the Minnesota Prospect Research Association in 1987, the same year NEDRA was established. The two organizations followed parallel development, with APRA choosing to become a national chapter-based organization, and NEDRA preferring to maintain a strong regional presence.

Although it seems relatively inconsequential now, a major difference between APRA and NEDRA in the early days was the leadership of the organizations: APRA elected a consultant as president, while NEDRA—as well as at least one APRA board member who resigned in protest—felt that the top position should be held only by someone working full-time in a nonprofit organization. This requirement is no longer in plance and by 1994, the relationship between APRA and NEDRA had become cordial enough so that the two organizations could serve as co-hosts of APRA’s annual conference held in Cambridge, MA. NEDRA and APRA continue to operate as independent organizations, with moderate overlap in members between the two groups.

The More Things Change…
If you ask most veteran prospect researchers what they would view as the single most important transformation in prospect research since 1987, you will get near-unanimous agreement: technology in general, and the Internet in particular. Of course, technology has been a part of prospect research from the beginning. In 1987, researchers like myself wrote out reports in longhand and passed them off to a word processor—back then a person, not a thing—who entered the text into a Wang terminal. When searching Nexis, we used a cute red terminal called the UBIQ, with miniature keys. Dialog was still owned by the defense contactor Lockheed and a modem transmitting at 300 baud seemed like a reasonably fast rate. But the bulk of prospect research was conducted using reference books, magazines, and newspapers, whether in-house or at an off-site library.

Within a year, several aspects of prospect research already had begun to change. Lockheed sold Dialog to Knight-Ridder in 1988. Dialog would change hands twice more, in 1997 and in 2000. Desktop computers multiplied in every office. As more prospect researchers had the opportunity to talk to each other, sharing of “tricks of the trade” became standard. Clearly prospect research was on the move.

One way to examine change in a profession is to analyze what topics the professional literature has been covering. I did this recently, looking at back issues of NEDRA News from calendar year 1987 to 2003. I subjectively assigned one subject header to each article in each issue, which numbered generally four issues per year. Many articles, of course, could fit under more than one topic, but I chose the topic that seemed most relevant to the article. (And since I was editor of NEDRA News for some of this time, I have a reasonably good idea about the theme of many of the articles!) [See the chart below.]

Subjects of Articles in NEDRA News, 1988-2003

[chart available with full reprint]

Some patterns emerge. Career management, for instance, was a topic of great interest in the first half of NEDRA’s existence, but has waned somewhat in the past seven years. Interest in techniques, however, has remained steady and high over almost all the years. Beginning in 1997, not a year has passed without at least three, and sometimes as many as seven, articles about electronic resources. Both international research and special constituencies appear to be “fads” that receive heavy coverage in some years, and then recede from interest. There has been a decrease in the number of articles that explore the broader context of philanthropy, and relatively light coverage of ethics.

Now it would be wrong to draw too many conclusions from the limited data above. For one thing, the newsletter alone is just one vehicle, and a comprehensive analysis would include a tally of conference and roundtable topics as well. But despite the inherent limitations, the quick analysis of the literature seems to support my own thesis that technology, rather than discussion about ethics or career status, has dominated the second half of NEDRA’s life.

My Cloudy Crystal Ball
It’s hardly a eureka moment to realize that technology has changed prospect research. But has the change been for the better? Not completely.

On the plus side, the availability of the Internet means that information once accessible only with considerable effort, such as leaving the office and going to the Registry of Deeds to view a mortgage, is now often available at your desktop. In theory, this change alone should make prospect research faster. In practice, researchers may actually be spending more time, in absolute terms, because of the need to sift through inaccurate, duplicative or irrelevant information.

The plethora of information available on the Internet has caused us to think information is cheap. We sometimes fail to distinguish between the value of verified, authoritative information, and random mentions. We also can be prone to pay more attention to the prospects on whom information (of whatever quality) can be found readily on the Internet, and ignore those prospects who require other research tools. Over time, this may result in overlooking significant development opportunities.

I believe that the Internet has widened the prospect research divide in many ways, while closing it in others. By prospect research divide, I mean the difference in the quality of research between those organizations with large staffs and a healthy budget, and those organizations where a single researcher is responsible for prospect research and frequently lacks the tools to conduct it well. The low-cost availability of the Internet means that even small organizations can partake of some of the information once the realm of only those organizations with large budgets. In some cases, this access helps level the playing field. But in others, I suspect that some novice researchers are being unleashed without sufficient initial training and without ongoing support and professional development. The assumption is that “anyone” can use Google and compile valid information quickly when in fact it takes some time, skill, and careful checking. Or that “anyone” can find answers to questions in the virtual community of PRSPCT-L when in fact a new researcher may be better served either by hiring a consultant for a few days of training, attending a workshop or conference, or getting a mentor through NEDRA.

And we ARE a generous bunch—the same impulse to share that led to the formation of NEDRA continues at the virtual level. But we do ourselves and our community a disservice if we ignore the need for adequate training and the necessity for internal discussion of ethical and privacy concerns. Such issues affect the entire development operation, not just prospect research, and top management must continue to budget and plan for a researcher’s professional growth.

What will prospect research look like in the next 10 years or so? If we as a profession are not vigilant, I fear we will move away from involvement in prospect management and closer to some sort of “Search Technician” role in which the retrieval of information becomes disconnected from the context of fundraising. We cannot afford to lose the “prospect” in “prospect research,” since fundraising demands a high degree of respect and ethical consideration of our donors in addition to technical skill. We worked too hard to become an integral part of the fundraising team to cede this role, so make sure that your computer cables don’t become chains. ®