After sharing the components of a prospect profile last week, I thought I’d provide you with a list of some great resources, tools and tricks of the trade.
For wealth screening and confirming screening results: DonorSearch, iWave, WealthEngine, Blackbaud Target Analytics/ResearchPoint, and LexisNexis for Development Professionals, to name a few (caveat: these are not free but are worth the investment!).
For foundation research: Guidestar and Foundation Director Online (now together as Candid), FoundationSearch, GrantStation.
Tools for building a profile:
- FEC.gov – look up political contributions from individuals.
- Forbes – can be used for articles or company and billionaire profiles for professional and personal biographical information.
- Google – search for the name + director, trustee, etc. to see where the individual may serve on a board. Or name + obituary to look at a family tree and information about family members.
- NozaSearch – search foundation, individual and corporate donations.
- Pulawski Tax Assessor Database – great for confirming real estate tax and ownership information.
- Salary.com – for investigating estimated salaries.
- Social Media – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and any other platform a prospect uses. These provide great insight into what an individual publishes themselves: photo, name/nickname, family, education, career experience, certifications, etc.
- Yahoo Finance – for insider information/salaries, forms and news about publicly-traded companies.
- Zillow – for checking our real estate value, taxes, estimates, when a property was last sold.
- Zoominfo – great for finding business information and even personal business contact details such as phone number and email address.
Hopefully, these will be helpful for your next research project. There are tons of other excellent sites to use. What are your favorites?
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