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Hi Sam,I have a question about your job. I just got my MLS, and while I was in library school I did a 4 month internship at a non-profit as a prospect researcher. My boss recently contacted me about a new ft prospect research job opening up there. While I was an intern all I did was the basic research every day (she would give me a list of names), and it was kind of tedious. I think as an employee I would have more to do, so I'm wondering if you can tell me about the variety of tasks you do.

Congrats on your MLS! Happy graduation :)

We actually have at least one person, possibly two (I’d have to check) who have library science degrees working at our office! I think it’s a pretty great career.

And yes, your internship experience sounds like it’s about in line with the student workers we make use of :D Lots of data entry.

I want to preface this by saying that I work in a large and active shop, more so than many. We’re drastic, we’re well-funded, and we’re very forward-looking. Like, I don’t want to brag, none of that is my doing, but the fact of the matter is my experience as a researcher is not necessarily the normal research experience, so take what I say with a grain of salt rather than as gospel.

So here’s how my days generally go as a researcher.

One of the services we offer our frontline fundraising staff is a sort of news clipping service. Every morning when we arrive we each have between one and three sources we check for news about our top donors (and prospective donors), the industries in which our donors work, philanthropy in general, and international news of note. So from the time I arrive until about 9-ish, I’m reading news sources and clipping anything that looks relevant to our interests. I enter articles into our database as necessary, then send copies to my boss and the lead analyst, who compile them into a newsletter.

Once I’ve submitted my news items, the rest of the day is generally, basically, unstructured. I receive assignments throughout the week and usually I prioritize by deadline, swapping between a couple of assignments through the course of the day to keep myself engaged. Assignments may include anything from half-page blurbs to multipage biographies about donors that our fundraisers are going to meet; financial overviews or in-depth financial reporting on donors in order to determine what amount to ask for as a donation; “pulling” lists from our database of donors with specific criteria our fundraisers ask for; and special projects where we all pull together to process a lot of data on a lot of prospects at once. I have two ongoing projects with revolving deadlines, but most of the rest of my work is assigned as a one-off.

So most of what I do throughout the day is online research. I study peoples’ biographies, their financial information, their real estate information, sometimes their social media if it’s publicly available, and I write it up in a neutral report. I use a number of both free and subscription databases (I’m more intimate than I really would care to be with the SEC’s horrible website, and I spend a LOT of time on LinkedIn) as well as our existing database of information. So it’s a lot of learning how to search, learning how to analyze basic financial information, and learning how to judge the accuracy of any given info and confirm it via other sources. It sounds pretty boring on the page but I actually find it really fascinating, because I’m always looking up something different and learning about new peoples’ lives.

I may have meetings:

check-ins with my boss, where I can bring up issues I’m having and we can discuss my ongoing performance

staff meetings where we discuss any issues affecting us as staff and make announcements

One-off meetings to discuss new thoughts on my ongoing, long-term “special project” assignments

Professional development/cross-training meetings where we learn what other departments are doing

Et cetera. Usually in any given week I’ll have 2-5 meetings. I’m still a newbie so I don’t have meetings with fundraisers yet, but eventually I’ll be assigned a group of fundraisers and meet with them semi-regularly about their needs.

We do a lot of proactive work that I, being a newb, am also not a part of – researching various industries for white papers and presentations, formulating new methods of “prospecting” (searching for new prospective donors), that kind of thing. I’m trying to dive in but it’s going sort of slowly for me.

In some places, your duties may include things that we, as a larger org, assign out to other departments. This may include things like helping fundraisers manage their “portfolio” (helping them decide who to ask for money, and who they shouldn’t solicit from), analyzing data and making models for future solicitation from it, and entering data about gifts, address changes, and other basic stuff we hear about our donors (our Record Services team handles the vast majority of this, though we still update addresses and jobs data and such when we come across it).

I think it’s a really engaging job, with a lot of variety that’s sort of couched within a more routine structure. There are eight or ten standard things that you do a lot of, but they’re always different internally. There is still a significant amount of data entry, but it’s the back end of the job rather than the bulk of it. And if you’re in a smaller shop, you’ll get even more variety since you’ll be wearing a few more hats.

I’d go for it – if you don’t like the job you can always quit, but even if you don’t, you’ll have developed skills in database maintenance, business writing, and financial analysis that will be great bonuses on your resume.

Plus, researchers are generally huge nerds who are fun to hang out with. :D

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