Prospect Research Is a Love Language

Maya sat in her car outside the coffee shop for a full minute before she went in, feeling vaguely like a stalker.

She knew, from twenty minutes the night before, that the man she was about to meet had sold a logistics company in 2019, that he gave quietly to two hospitals and a scholarship fund in his hometown, that he'd lost his wife the previous spring, and that the scholarship was in her name. None of it was secret. All of it was a Google search and a public 990 away. And still Maya felt it — that small, modern guilt, the sense that she'd peeked at something she wasn't supposed to see, that walking in knowing was somehow cheating.

So she did what a lot of good, decent fundraisers do. She left most of it in the car. She walked in, shook his hand, and asked him to tell her a little about himself — as if she didn't already know the shape of his whole life.

We've been thinking about that minute in the car a lot lately. Because Maya had it exactly backwards, and almost everyone does.

The guilt nobody questions

There's a quiet anxiety running underneath this whole profession, and it almost never gets said out loud.

It goes: Isn't it a little creepy to look people up? You pull a donor's giving history, their business, their board seats, the size of their last gift to the org down the street, and somewhere in the back of your mind a small voice says you've crossed a line. So you soft-pedal it. You arrive at the meeting playing dumb. You ask the donor to walk you through things you already know, because pretending you don't feels more polite than admitting you did your homework.

It feels respectful. It is the opposite of respectful.

Research isn't surveillance. It's preparation.

Here's the thing nobody tells you. The donor is not unnerved that you looked them up. The donor is unnerved when you didn't.

Think about every other relationship in your life where someone showed up prepared. The doctor who'd actually read your chart before walking in. The friend who remembered, a year later, the name of the surgery and asked how it went. The person on a first date who'd clearly thought about you beforehand instead of treating you like the next name on a list. None of that felt invasive. It felt like being taken seriously.

Doing your homework isn't spying on someone. It's the work you do so the time you spend together can be about them instead of about catching you up.

Why it feels weird (and why it isn't your fault)

Nobody taught us the difference between knowing about someone and intruding on them, so we lumped them together and got scared of both.

It doesn't help that the tools made it feel transactional. For years "prospect research" meant a wealth screen spitting out a capacity score and a real-estate estimate — a number that told you how much to ask for and nothing about who you were asking. That is the part that feels gross, and rightly so. Reducing a grieving widower to a giving tier is not research; it's appraisal. The guilt Maya felt in the car wasn't guilt about knowing him. It was the residue of a whole industry that taught her to value people by the size of the check.

But the homework she actually did the night before wasn't appraisal. She'd learned that he funds scholarships in his late wife's name. That's not a capacity score. That's the most important sentence anyone could possibly know before sitting down across from him — and the cruelest thing she could do was make him say it out loud to a stranger who'd "rather hear it from you."

The opposite of research isn't privacy. The opposite of research is making someone explain their own life to you, again, for your convenience.

What we want from a tool

Rōmy doesn't have the coffee. A person does that — has to. The understanding that a scholarship is grief turned into something durable, the instinct to let a quiet man talk about his wife at his own pace, the decision to not ask for a dime that morning — none of that lives in software, and it never should.

What a tool can do is make sure you walk in already knowing the things it would be unkind to ask. Point Rōmy at a name and you get back the picture Maya assembled by hand at midnight — the business he sold, the causes he's funded, the gifts he's made to organizations like yours, every claim hyperlinked to the public record it came from — in two minutes instead of two hours, for everyone on your list and not just the few you had time for. Not a score. A briefing. The kind a thoughtful person would have done themselves if they'd had the night free.

So that you arrive the way you'd want a friend to arrive for you: prepared, attentive, and already a little bit on your side.

The boring revolution, again

We keep landing in the same unglamorous place. The future of fundraising isn't an AI that writes the warm note or makes the call or feels the thing across the table. It's a development officer who shows up to every meeting having done the reading — who never again has to choose between being prepared for a handful of donors and being honest with all of them.

Knowing someone's story before you meet them isn't an intrusion you have to apologize for. It's the homework love does without being asked.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before your next donor meeting — any donor, any size — give yourself twenty honest minutes with the public record. Their giving, their work, the causes that already have their heart. Not to price them. To meet them properly.

Then walk in and don't perform ignorance. You don't have to recite what you found. Just let it change the questions you ask — softer, more specific, more clearly meant for them and no one else.

Watch what happens to the room when a person realizes you bothered. That flicker of oh — you actually looked. That's not the feeling of being surveilled.

That's the feeling of being worth the trouble. Go make somebody feel it.