Big Fish Donors (Part II)
This is a follow up to a previous post asking what cause based orgs were doing to pursue HNW individuals and their bags of tax deductible money.
At DreamForce a few weeks ago, I saw the demos for a few vendors who offer very comprehensive data of the social and professional relationships of a significant chunk of the professional populace. They seem to have accurately populated about a quarter of my social graph, which is impressive if sourced from public data. Their tools were able to point out various paths and strengths of paths I could take to reach, and establish or strengthen a relationship with, certain Big Fish. Just like LinkedIn’s recomendation feature, but more powerful. Are these tools being used with your CRM to figure out better ways to approach and snare big fish? How? Why not?
It seems like the first thing to do would be to run a list of potential or previous big fish against a list of your employees, volunteers, other donors, and contacts. Maybe your email campaign intern’s family vacations with Mr. and Mrs. Deep Pockets. Maybe one of your volunteers used to sit on the board of a company that could sponsor your events. If you don’t use your database to find out, you are limited to what your decision makers know personally.
The big fish are not probably not likely to show up in your data dragnets. They are older, more private, and can pay people to save them the hassle of having an online, searchable footprint. It seems worthwhile to combine the semi-known, offline network surrounding these individuals with the info you can get out of CRM products.
My main point, I suppose, is that the current effort and future strategy of the nonprofit technology community should be better aligned with where the money is. It seems like right now we’re working as if the smaller online donations are 50% of the pie instead of 5%.
