Prospect research

Identifying prospective donors is necessary to securing donations from trusts and major gifts (currently defined as gifts of £500 or more) from individuals, so that we can grow our income and meet Haven House’s charitable objectives.

Prospect research helps us to

• identify if a potential donor may have the capacity and propensity to give major gifts to Haven House; and
• identify how best to approach them.

Prospect research includes manually gathering public and freely given information from the Internet, from Haven House contacts and from Haven House’s own donor records, and creating profiles to help us identify individuals, trusts, foundations and corporations able to give at this level.  This means that we:

• Create short profiles of potential donors, using public and freely given sources of data to identify people who may be able and predisposed to give major gifts. These data sources may include:
  • Charity Commission data (which identifies trustees of grant-giving trusts, and charitable aims)
  • Other sources of information about charitable trusts’ giving, for example trustfunding.org.uk, trust websites, charity trade press
  • Companies House data (which identifies company directors)
  • Company and charity websites which profile, for example owners, senior partners, or Trustees
  • News articles about business, financial or philanthropic decisions
  • Public media where individuals have volunteered information about their interest or experience for example media interviews where individuals have spoken publicly
  • Public social media accounts, e.g. a company’s Facebook or LinkedIn page, or an individual’s Twitter account which has a primarily professional function.
• Create queries on our database to identify past donors who may have given at major-gift level in the past, and therefore could do so again
• Review lists of individuals signing up to Haven House’s fundraising events (and have opted in to communications) to look at the reasons that people give, their job titles, their family name (if they are well-known/in the public eye) and postcodes. We use this information to target personalised invitations to engage further with Haven House at those who are most likely to be interested.
• Identify where our Trustees, Committees, Patrons, Ambassadors or staff may be able to help with an introduction, for example because they move in the same professional social circles as a potential donor.

We do not seek consent to our prospect-research activities as defined above, because we believe we have legitimate interest which is not over-ridden by the individual’s fundamental rights. However, we will conduct a balancing exercise and review the potential processing to ensure that our use of legitimate interest is fair and lawful. If you would prefer us to not process your data for prospect research purposes, please let us know by emailing our Supporter Care team or by calling 020 8506 3634 (Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm).

For prospect-research purposes we gather sensitive data only in the form of information about experience connected to the work of our hospice which the subject has willingly put in the public domain, or shared with Haven House. We do not:

• Gather data from personal sources such as personal Facebook and Twitter accounts
• Conduct automated wealth-screening using external agencies.

We want all individuals who come into contact with Haven House to have a positive experience, whether or not they are donors.  We believe that the way we carry out prospect research will help us to identify potential donors efficiently, and to avoid making inappropriate or excessive approaches.