How Important are Information Vendors

One of the most frequently asked questions within prospect development is what vendor should our shop buy? It’s a seemingly important question given the nature of development information analysis being woefully under-resourced. However, generally speaking development shops would be better served spending those thousands of vendor dollars on their own researchers, creating well rounded in-house knowledge experts who have incentive to stay at an employer investing in their professional development.

And researchers themselves would benefit from stopping their over reliance on information vendors and getting back to the manual hunt of raw information.

Yes there are complications that arise from this, mainly around efficiency, however the average amount of information a researcher gathers on a single prospect is well beyond a simple standard of; does this prospect have the capacity, inclination, and/or affinity to give a major gift? Any additional information beyond that point is excessive. And once that threshold is met, the responsibility then moves to the fundraiser to make the outreach and find out more. After all, what is the best way to find more information on a prospect? A face to face visit.

So next time the contracts are up, consider ditching the vendors and instead invest in resources that care more about your organization than any fancy vendor ever will.