Growing up watching the TV show “MythBusters” has had a lifelong influence on me, including my work as a prospect researcher. Learning to incorporate co-host Adam Savage’s organizational philosophy of first-order retrievability (FOR) into my workflow has empowered me to work more efficiently and better organize my findings for presentation and utilization by my fundraising team. 

Although prospect researchers rarely have their work exploded in front of high-speed cameras like Savage did, the “MythBusters” context is a helpful analog for our field. Savage’s FOR philosophy targets challenges that are shared by many prospect researchers, like working with speed and agility within tight constraints. Where he designed and built a myriad of machines for ever-evolving myths within the constraints of co-host Jamie Hyneman’s workshop “M5” and TV production budgets and timelines, prospect researchers must often provide an array of research products to meet a wide variety of requests on tight deadlines with limited resources. 

What is First-Order Retrievability (FOR)?

The objective of FOR is to organize your tools in intuitive and accessible locations to reduce potential barriers to achieving your ideal workflow state. The “first-order” includes the tools that are your “must-haves” to do your work, whose absence from your fingertips would interfere with your ability to complete your work. The “second order” are the “nice-to-haves” that you use less often but still require quickly when the need arises. Subsequent orders include tools that have more niche use cases, and you can afford to spend the time to seek them out when needed. 

FOR operates on the premise that when it’s time to work, you want to be working, not running around trying to find your needed tools before you can begin. Working on “MythBusters” physically exhausted Savage as he walked miles daily around M5 to find and then return the tools he needed, losing crucial work time each day. This was because M5 was designed according to Hyneman’s organizational philosophy to have one copy of each tool grouped by type in their own dedicated place. This made for efficient storage, but Adam wanted to use the tools, not store them. When Savage was in a rush and couldn’t embark on a hike to find the proper tool, he says that “every tool in my immediate vicinity became a hammer,” and smashed on ahead with whichever tools he had on hand to complete his goal within the time he had. Savage wasn’t being lazy or disrespectful of Hyneman’s system, rather he was prioritizing productivity and seeking efficiencies to achieve his desired working pace. 

Many prospect research workflows and databases are set up like Hyneman’s shop, with the tools and data neatly compartmentalized, but are also required to serve the needs of the people using it. In our case, prospect research is a key “tool” that fundraisers require first-order access to. While researchers enjoy seeking out information about prospects, a fundraiser’s objective is to leverage that information. Ensuring that our research is readily accessible and digestible is a crucial step in helping fundraisers maintain their productivity and achieve success. When fundraisers ask you to “just tell me what I need to know,” what they’re seeking is first-order access to key information about a prospect. For example, if they want to know a prospect’s capacity, their goal is to learn the figure so they can use it to inform a decision — and the quicker they can find it, the quicker they can act on it. 

Exploring FOR in Prospect Research

Savage applied FOR on “MythBusters” to create working conditions better suited to his needs by constructing mobile toolboxes to carry personal copies of the tools that were the most conspicuous in their regular absence from his working location. The first-order tools were at the top of the toolbox, the second order on the next layer, and so on. This investment immediately increased his workplace efficiency by ensuring his key tools were always accessible when needed. For prospect researchers, we can apply this to organizing our “toolboxes” — our customer relationship management platforms (CRMs) and prospect profiles — so that our key research findings are readily accessible to the fundraisers who need that information, with supporting information available deeper down as needed. 

Implementing FOR begins with eliciting feedback from your key stakeholders to identify which tools they rely on having first order access to. These stakeholders obviously include your fundraisers, but you may find that other users also engage with your research or have interest in potential infrastructure changes. To accommodate these various stakeholder needs, Savage recommends having each stakeholder list their top five needs in order of priority and searching for overlap. The needs with the most overlap are your primary targets for FOR, as ensuring their accessibility is vital for maintaining your organization's workflow across multiple teams. This will also demonstrate which elements of prospect research your stakeholders find most crucial to their decision making and require frequently, and help you prioritize and organize your research accordingly. 

The next step is figuring out how to make your prospect research FOR to meet those needs within your functional capabilities. This includes evaluating which opportunities are available for updating the existing infrastructure, where your tools will be located within it, how they will be populated and maintained, and so on. If your fundraisers all want capacity information, but only need to have the rating itself as FOR, you can prioritize finding a means to isolate, highlight and update that number, while keeping additional wealth indicators separately. This means that you can continue recording your complete research into your CRM for fundraisers to navigate deeper if they want to, but don't expect them to. Remember, the more obtuse the retrievability of a tool becomes for someone, the more likely they are to resort to improvising, and we don’t want fundraisers smashing around the database — or turning to ChatGPT in desperation if they can’t find your research! 

FOR also empowers collaboration by making it easier for our users to engage with the system in an organized fashion. We have found that implementing FOR has helped fundraisers more actively contribute their first-hand information to the database by clearly defining what tools they are meant to use, where to find them and why they are helpful. An intuitive system is an inviting system, and this approach has helped our less tech-inclined fundraisers feel more comfortable working in the digital world.  

Applying FOR Sustainably

An important consideration about FOR is that in making a tool more retrievable, we must also maintain its functionality. If not, it is at risk of becoming more difficult to retrieve or even disused if users cannot sustain the utility. For example, we previously used our CRM’s summary note to prominently display high-level information about a prospect on their record. This was ostensibly FOR, as it put key information in a highly accessible place, but the functionality was not sustainable. The note was not able to be located by our CRM's query feature and notes to creep and diverge in form as each user updated them differently, making them difficult to utilize as users had to manually investigate each note to find what they wanted. We decided to delegate the information contained in the summary note to other dedicated sections in the profile. This decision reduced the immediate FOR in terms of locating and viewing the information all in one place, but greatly elevated the functional FOR in terms of knowing where to find information, how to update it and how to access it across all records by all users. 

Finally, Savage advises that applying FOR is not a single task to be completed, but an iterative process that keeps your tools best organized for you and your stakeholders’ current needs. What works well now may evolve with employee turnover, adoption of new tools, data updates and so on, all of which could change the workflow needs of your team and require a refreshed FOR. 

If you want to bust concerns that your prospect research isn’t being used to its full potential and confirm that it’s serving your fundraisers’ needs, try experimenting with how incorporating FOR into your workflows can elevate the way your work is accessed and utilized by fundraisers.

Michael Hess
Prospect Management Coordinator, Mount Royal University