The Kalamazoo Community Foundation KCF) continues its track record of innovation in the adoption of an advanced system for prospect research.  As a part of this initiative, it  implemented the Kintera P!N wealth appending system. One hurdle to implementation was a lack of in-house expertise in accessing the FIMS fund accounting system and managing the mapping and conversion of this data to the new system.

In 2006, KCF asked Yeager and Associates to provide technical services in assisting them in implementing Kintera P!N.

More than Prospect Research

What is special about the Kalamazoo prospect research project is that KCF did not define prospect research in terms of a "system".  KCF did NOT confuse the implemtation of a wealth appending solution with their own business needs.

The business objective of prospect research is to expand the horizon of individuals with whom the foundation was interacting.  Since simply finding out the wealth profile of the existing donor base would not achieve this end, KCF began the process by engaging the services of third party list providers, searching for people of means in their community.

Many Hurdles, But Success

Many organizations would have blanched at the task ahead, for due to systems limitations in the FIMS fund accouting system, there was no easy way to import contacts.  The decision was made to manually key the data into FIMS.  While this may seem a bit ugly, it got the job done.

The decision about which prospect research tool to use was in practice relatively easy for KCF.  Their participation in several aspects of the national Technology Steering Committee had exposed them to the vendor environment and to individuals who knew the marketplace.  The Kintera P!N system was selected.

But the next hurdle was daunting for the organization: how to extract the data from FIMS, de-dupe it, map it to P!N's format? How to query the FIMS system to generate the kind of profile P!N needed to judge relative levels of engagement of contacts with the KCF community?

Yeager and Associates was able to provide technical services to KCF as described in the circular:  Technical Services: Making it Happen.  The project was delivered on time and within budget. 

One of the salient aspects of this case was how little work KCF had to do in order to achieve the implementation: that is, Yeager and Associates was able to insulate KCF from the technical detail and complexity of the project.  The key to this success was that KCF entered the project with a clear concept of what deliverable was needed, and able to know when the soup was "done" at project conclusion.