Photo: Information Booth, by Heath Brandon.
Researching prospects who live in the United States (and to some extent, in Canada and the UK) is a very different activity from researching prospects in other parts of the world. While researchers may look for the same kinds of information about wealth and philanthropic activity, the strategies and techniques for finding these details can be quite different.
Why? There are five main reasons. I will introduce each of them, starting with today’s post.
Finding data at the source
The first main difference involves the sources used for international research. The large databases that we often use for US-based research, which allow quick and convenient searches for real estate holdings, board memberships, and corporate ownership information in one place, generally — with a few exceptions — do not exist outside of the US. The lack of such resources often gives the false impression that information is not available.
The trick to finding such details is to go to the original source. I start by asking questions: Who collects the data I need? National government? City government? Private research organization? Do they share the data online?
The answers to these questions will be different from prospect to prospect and country to country. Some types of information, such as real estate transaction data, may be available at the state or provincial level in some places and at the municipal level in others. That data sometimes may be available with the names of owners, and sometimes owners will not be disclosed, due to local privacy laws, which can vary from city to city. (It’s important to know where to look for back-up information to fill in any gaps.) On top of these differences, the rules that govern data availability, and the technologies that enable the sharing of such data, change all the time.
Knowing where to look takes experience, study of the country where a prospect lives, and a commitment to ongoing professional development. For these reasons, I spend a lot of time doing background reading and research to build my knowledge base. Those exercises pay off when I am working on client projects.
Finding the appropriate data usually involves searching in a prospect’s local language — a process that involves special techniques and tools. I’ll discuss language and international prospect research in my next post.
