About

Overview

These prospect research field notes are an independently maintained repository of fundraising industry analysis, software information, and research methodology. This also functions as a hobby coding and research project.

There are plenty of excellent paid resources already available: Apra, private consultant firms, subscription tools, books…but not everyone has the budget to access them. This toolkit was created to bridge that gap, or supplement what’s already out there, and create original content that is interactive. The goal is to keep it simple, fun, open-source, community-driven, regularly updated, and always free.

Short-term Goals

  • Create software/tool comparison dashboard and tool reviews
  • Keep building prospect dev jobs dataset and create data visualizations highlighting salary trends

Long-term Goals

  • Create AI Prompt library and use-cases, as well as “helper files” for creating stronger research posture without having to initialize an entire agent
  • Extensions or add-ins, or community plugins (potentially starting with Obsidian or Excel)
  • Collaboration with other Apra chapters and Apra International
  • Refine a synthetic donor dataset for training, examples, and presentations

FAQ

Who is this for?

Prospect research analysts, prospect dev folk at large, maybe a few managers. This is an independent source of information from an industry insider, so I hope to speak frankly about things like fundraising software, methodology, and research obstacles, similar to the conversations on PRSPCT-L.

The rest of this website is primarily to corral my tendency to fall down rabbit holes, and try to actually learn some new things.

What’s the catch?

I am not an expert (yet), and none of these posts reflect the opinions of my employers, so take everything here with a hearty grain of salt - and some forgiveness in your heart for website bugs I haven’t learned how to fix.

This blog will remain free, though I may develop some datasets or software that will fall within the “pay-what-you-want” model.

How accurate is this website?

There will be an entire write-up explaining how I source pricing information, but generally speaking, the prices on this website will be prone to errors and should be understood as estimates. The incidents, however, given their public nature, are a more reliable metric to contribute to the overall rating scheme of the software tools.

In order of most to least accuracy (probably):

  1. General tool, feature, or company information
  2. Tutorials
  3. Pricing information

Who is this guy anyway?

I come from a psychology background and am largely self-taught in data analytics, information science, data science, etc. This website is guaranteed to have some bugs, or occasionally be broken.

How often is the website updated?

In small ways, frequently! You can read the latest release notes for some of the technical details.

Contributors

This blog was launched by Greg Brooks as part of an education initiative while he served on the board of Apra Utah.

Other contributors include: Kensuke Uma.

If you’d like to collaborate on this project, please connect with Greg on LinkedIn!. It would be really fun to work with fellow coding and analytics nerds in the prospect research niche!

Latest website version: The latest release is 0.1.2-alpha

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