A Traveller’s Blog  

Times Newspapers says this is the

“Definitive guide to the richest 1,000 in Britain and Ireland”

Except that it isn’t!!  It ought to be called “The definitive guide to the richest 1,000 people in Britain and Ireland which Philip Beresford and his colleagues  can find and prove that they are that rich without getting sued”

That’s no criticism of Philip Beresford since much of the information one would need to prove people are wealthy is not in the public domain.  The head of one of the world’s leading private banks told me three years ago that he thought the STRL underestimated the amount of wealth in London by a factor of about 7.  He reckoned there were 5,000 people in London worth £50m or more. At that time you had to have £30m to get into the STRL.

The serious point here for fundraisers is we risk becoming too reliant on STRL rather than private prospect research with volunteers leading us to other wealthy people.  So what would you do instead to find wealthy people?

• See who’s giving you big gifts already
• Ask your most generous donors to introduce you to others they know
• Look for wealth in your database: people who do the kinds of job likely to result in significant wealth creation
• Read the newspapers, especially the FT and similar - look who is selling companies, who leads those companies making significant wealth - yes these have been hedge funds and private equity. Don’t be depressed by the current market turmoil - remember hedge funds started as a way of making money when times were bad.
• Don’t be blinded by people earning £250,000 a year - very exciting but big big gifts need significant genuinely disposable income, or better, disposable capital.

More ideas welcome - do post them in the comments….

As Christmas becomes more and more pervasive, it was an extraordinary privilege to be involved in the Advent Procession with Carols in Durham Cathedral this weekend, reminding Christians that as well as the baby we are also dealing with the creator and judge of all.  As a lay member of the Chapter I was able to be in the procession behind Miles who was singing. He’s an old hand at this and his Dad is just learning.

Here’s a photo of the Cathedral towering above the River Wear just a few hours before the service.

There are more pictures at http://www.beney.org.uk/pix/advent07

Miles and I went flying today since he had not been in the Cardinal before, but the weather was very hazy, with BKN at 1,000′, just a barely transparent layer. Of more concern was the 3,000m visibility, which meant IFR departure and arrival. See our track below. But we had a nice loop over Durham and we got to see the Cathedral, our house, and the appalling building site next to us!

We returned with vectors to the ILS, and the runway lights at 600′
Here’s a nice view of our spiral over Durham

And finally, how wiggly was my ILS? Not the best ever…

By comparison, here’s the one from Newcastle the other day…

There appears to be a huge promotion going on at the moment of so-called “Address Cleaning” products. A number of clients of ours at Iain More Associates have been persuaded to use these services, and some of the communication about what these services actually do has, it seems to me, been somewhat opaque.

Agencies promise not only to tell you where your lost alumni or supporters are, they also say that they can tell you who has moved, and even who has goneaway from an address, the implication being that it’s not worth mailing the old addresses. Indeed when you ask one of the firms for a quote, they will even tell you how much postage they think you will save by not mailing all those dud addresses.

I find there are a number of significant problems with this approach. The best way of keeping a database “clean” is not to send it to agencies, but to use it continually, providing update forms each time you mail, plus specific questionnaires from time to time.

The other problem is that most universities and similar organisations have a fairly finite pool of supporters, so that simply marking someone as “goneaway” is not good enough. Indeed it’s scary just to do that without takiing any further action if a piece of mail is returned. It’s much scarier if the indication has come from a third party database.

So here’s my take on this:

In respect of people whose mailings have already been returned marked Goneaway, these services can be excellent for finding these people, especially if they have recently moved.

But in respect of people on a database which has been reasonably well used and from whom there has been no return directly to the organisation saying they have Goneaway, the best these services can do is indicate which records may be suspect.

Here are some examples of where these services, if not used wisely, can be unhelpful:

1. If someone moves out of the parental home, and changes the address for their bank and their credit card statements, then they will look like they have moved. If an “address cleaning” operation is then undertaken, the client will be told that the person has moved. But the address from which they have moved is likely to be a long term, reliable, parental address, whereas the one to which they have gone may well be transient. If they move again soon afterwards the chain lengthens and the likelihood increases again that the alum will be lost.

2. If the same person changes bank they will disappear from that address, and the chain is broken. Similarly if the parent (or for that matter the individual) gets fed up forwarding junk mail, they may start throwing it back in the post marked “Goneaway” or “Not Known.” Some of this will end up on the GAS database, and once enough scores have been made on the GAS database, the person will register as a Goneaway. Despite the fact that they are still known to the occupier, and possibly even still there.

3. If someone has temporarily moved overseas for work, but is intending moving back home, they may well place a forwarding order on their mail, sending it to their temporary rented accommodation in New York. It would be wholly inaccurate to say that they have moved, yet if the New York address is adopted it will soon fail, and contact with the constituent could be lost. Yet they will appear on NCOA.

4. If a constituent whose father has the same initial and surname, in a case where the father has died, but the son still lives at the same address, a Mortascreen match on initial and surname would be generated.

As with all things, it pays to understand the service one is buying.

Here’s what I suggest to my clients: DO everything you can to keep your own address clean. If you use these services then use them intelligently, and if they tell you that someone whose address you thought was OK has changed, then check it, by email, by mobile phone or by mail. Do not assume that the database results are right. One client of mine found that 29% of the people claimed by the database company to be Goneaway were in fact still there. If you get a 5% match on your database, and 30% of that is wrong, then the average University will be throwing away around 725 good addresses. Would you do that voluntarily?

I am absolutely not suggesting you should not use these services; what I am suggesting is that where you have a good address, buying the database service is only half the job (and cost) - the other half is rigorously checking the data that has been returned to you.

Have fun!

was not good.  Tea was too strong, there was no muesli, the pastries were like cardboard and the fruit looked nice but tasted of nothing.