If you work in fundraising here in the United States, it’s likely that you have some experience with automated prospect screening services. These services help you identify new prospects, prioritize existing prospects, and give you an indication where further research is needed.
Many organizations — including independent schools, colleges and universities, and hospitals — have large numbers of constituents living outside of the United States. Given the distances between the places where you work and they live, you probably don’t know your international constituents as well as you would like. That situation makes international prospect screening a much-sought-after service.
Here’s the problem.
Most screening vendors focus on the United States. There are a few services that cover constituents in Canada and the UK. Some vendors provide limited global data through a few sources like Who’s Who, or they focus exclusively on UHNWIs. If you want to screen all of your constituents (including those who fall below the UHNWI level) in places like Singapore, Brazil, or South Korea, you’re out of luck with an automated screening service.
Why?
The reasons have to do with the data and language issues I talked about last month in my series of posts, “How is International Prospect Research Unique?”
Here’s the brief recap: Data collection, storage, and sharing standards vary widely from country to country — and sometimes even from city to city. On top of that, the languages in which these records are collected are numerous. Creating an automated screening service that covers multiple countries given these variables is a huge challenge. The major players currently offering US-focused automated screening services are certainly interested in expanding their geographic scope. For the time being, however, automated screenings for most countries and wealth levels are not a practical reality.
Just because such automated global screenings aren’t available doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to undertake an international screening project, however. I do international screening projects regularly for IFI’s clients. In an upcoming post, I will talk about what is possible and the screening work done here at IFI.
