As the Apra community gears up for Prospect Development 2024 (PD 2024) — Apra’s premier annual conference — in August, get to know Stephen Deutsch, PhD, ahead of his upcoming presentation “Prospect Management as the Keystone for Radical Change in Portfolio Management and Fundraiser Performance Management.” Deutsch shares his career journey, perspectives on prospect development’s unique role in fundraising and more in this introductory preview.

How did you begin your career in prospect development?

I entered the field in 2018, so I have six years of experience in prospect research and prospect management. I worked for Seton Hall University for 17 years and held two positions prior to this role. I worked for six years as a quantitative analysis assistant in the Office of Institutional Research and five years as the director of reporting and analytics for university advancement.

I have only held one position in prospect management: my current role as senior director of research and data analytics. In 2017, the president of our university hired a fundraising consulting firm to assess our advancement division. At that time, our division had 70 employees, and I was responsible for reporting and analytics for the entire division, which included public relations and marketing, alumni relations, advancement services and development. One of the firm’s recommendations was to merge my position (reporting and analytics) with the prospect research and prospect management team. The prospect research and management team had three employees and operated in a silo because they only worked for development. The idea was to merge my position into this team to infuse my strengths in quantitative analysis. Although it took a few years, the result was a high-performing, dynamic team with great rapport throughout the division.

What have you enjoyed the most about what you do?

There are two aspects of this role I love. The first is the topic for my forthcoming presentation at PD 2024 in Seattle. A member of our leadership team came to me explaining a perceived problem: stagnant portfolios. I produced a cogent analysis with visualizations in Microsoft Power BI so our leadership team could understand this problem. I was given a brief overview of the changes they wanted, and it was up to me to fill in the details. We made major changes in our prospect management practices as a result of that initial analysis, and the changes we implemented led to great improvements in donor qualification and performance. Unfortunately, it would take me a few pages to explain everything, which is why it is a full session at PD 2024 in August.

The other aspect I enjoy is reviewing gift reports. It is so exciting to see a major gift hit the report from a prospect that I identified for a fundraiser several months or years ago.

What changes have you seen in the field of prospect development over the course of your career?

We have strong reliance on likelihood modeling, and I developed two machine learning models that assign annual giving and major giving likelihood scores to all prospects in our database. They have become so important that our fundraisers use often reference them. I may present this at a future Apra Prospect Development conference.

Are there any changes you feel have solidified the importance of our work?

I feel that leadership is always turning to us. They want us to provide analytics and reports for their interactions with the president and our governing board. They call on us to identify the best prospects in the database. Data science is a nascent field, and it is booming in all industries of the economy. We have always been in this space, even before the terms “big data” and “data analytics” entered our lexicon. All leaders know their decisions must be based on data, which makes our roles more crucial to the missions of our organizations.

What do you feel is most important — the research of prospects or the management of prospects?

I feel management is more important. I consider research as the identification stage, essentially the first step where we identify target prospects. But management is the phase where we form strategic action plans and set up the donor for a major or principal gift ask. Without the management part, we essentially have information; prospect management is the stage where action occurs.

What are things you feel prospect development can do for donor engagement efforts?

One of our primary functions is to provide information to engagement teams. We provide wealth and likelihood data, so they know where to focus. Alumni engagement teams often have databases in the tens of thousands and sometimes over 100,000 constituents — making it difficult to know where to begin. Prospect development teams can provide engagement scores, major giving capacities and likelihood scores to allow engagement teams to easily select their target groups.

What do you feel is prospect development’s role in navigating inclusive philanthropy?

The term “back-office” can be considered disparaging in the sense that back-office workers are not the primary force in philanthropy. I often state to my colleagues that we are indeed back-office because we are not front-line fundraisers. However, we are the key support for an entire division of employees. Our front line is the identification of new prospective donors. As such, it is our responsibility to think outside the box to find prospects that do not fit the traditional parameters.

A few months ago, we were presented with a unique funding initiative. We had a federal grant that expired, which had supported a very successful program for first-generation students, most of whom were from underrepresented minorities. It was up to my team to identify prospects who would be interested in funding the continuation of this first-generation program. This program was very different from other scholarships, which are typically endowed and named after the donor. Rather, we were seeking numerous major gifts to fund this program, and it turned out that recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM) scores did not yield the best prospects. Instead, the best prospects were donors from many years ago, sometimes donors who had not given for over 10 years. These donors were not interested in our recent fundraising priorities but instead gave to very specific priorities in the distant past. This is a great example of how we in prospect management and research can think outside the box when identifying donors; in this case, the standard criteria did not yield the best prospects for the initiative.

Stephen Deutsch, PhD, will be presenting “Prospect Management as the Keystone for Radical Change in Portfolio Management and Fundraiser Performance Management” Thursday, August 22, at PD 2024 in Seattle. Learn more about his upcoming session and view the full PD 2024 program on the Apra website.