This month, Hilarie Ashton, Senior Institutional Research Analyst at New York University, offers up a review of Major Donors: Finding Big Gifts in Your Database and Online, published in 2006. Thanks to Hilarie for taking the time to review this resource for all of us!

REVIEW:

Any collection of essays has a tricky task at hand when its goal is to tackle a gargantuan topic through the lenses and expertise of several different authors, and Hart et al's Major Donors: Finding Big Gifts in Your Database and Online (Wiley, 2006) has its proverbial work cut out for it. General readers (of the discerning variety) are primed to try to see how the essays fit together while keeping individual ideas fresh and unrepeated, and whether each essay takes on a different facet of the question at hand. An audience of prospect researchers would be, it seems to me, a more exacting and even more discerning group than the general public. We are, after all, architects of narrative in addition to seekers of new information, so we suss out structure and meaning just as we look for new data points and skills to add to our respective arsenals. Even novice researchers, the intended audience for this book, tend to have a strong inclination to sort and learn and organize - these skills are part of what will end up making them effective at their jobs.

Overall, Major Donors succeeds more on the new information front than on the essay/structure front. While the editors included a variety of experts from different disciplines, there seems to be a rather confusing dearth of representation from amongst the higher education and hospital fields within the pool of contributors. Each author, often collaborating with others within a single given essay, offers several useful nuggets of information to share with a beginning researcher. However, the book falls short on reader expectations – it seems to attempt to satisfy said expectations, but doesn’t meet them cleanly, and the global, unifying perspective of a book editor is hardly evident. The book's introduction touts itself as "the first truly global compilation of e-research techniques" (xxi, from Foreword), but such a distinction could only be true when limited to books about prospect research (even in 2006). Furthermore, its claim to "the barely tapped resources of e-research" (ibid.) is awkward at best, and false at worst. Statistics are seen to be repeated more than once across essays, while some of the graphics were badly typeset. In addition, this book neither seems able to decide if it wants to be an outline or a collection of essays, nor whether it wants to be descriptive or prescriptive. The balance that it tries to strike is at times awkward - with some of the essays, the information most useful to the beginning researcher or fundraiser is readily available and comprises the bulk of the piece, yet with others, the reader has to wade through a lot of filler to get to actionable data.

This is not, however, to say that the book doesn't contain valuable information. Several essays have a real-world example as a focal point: Both Wylie and Lawson's and Powell's examples are particularly helpful, and Carnie and Boodleman Tenney's great essay on international research has several. This technique helps to ground an essay's disparate recommendations into one tangible example, guaranteeing that the casual reader will come away with something, while also leaving a trail of small and useful statistics and tips through which the closer reader can dig. The editors would have done well to encourage all of their authors to adopt this technique. Several essays carefully outline their arguments, giving the beginning researcher or fundraiser actionable steps to try out the suggested tactics within their own organizations.

It's also interesting and a little awkward to read this book in the technological climate in which we find ourselves at this time, six years after the book's publication. Much of its advice is incredibly outdated: we all know what blogs are now, and many of us, especially in the research community, depend on an RSS feed as part of our daily operations. Given the ephemeral nature of the book's basic subject (online information sources), I would also think that the authors/editors would have added a disclaimer about website addresses changing, companies folding, et cetera. (There are even a few inaccuracies, most notably in the identification of the now-defunct social networking site Friendster as an online dating site.) The gradual obsolescence of certain pieces of information is not, of course, the fault of Major Donors' authors or editors, but it decreases much of the book's current usefulness. This is particularly true since so much of the most useful information on research techniques today is being delivered directly through RSS feeds and Twitter accounts, rather than appearing in book form. Major Donors was written for its very particular moment, which would present less of a problem if its characterization of said moment had been more diligently drawn.

Ultimately, Major Donors would be most useful to a new researcher as part of an arsenal of several books. While it isn't strong enough to stand on its own, its appendices are stellar, and its information, dated as it may be, will certainly help to strengthen the skills of a new researcher.

 SOURCE REVIEWED: Hart, Ted, James M. Greenfield, Pamela M. Gignac, Christopher Carnie. Major Donors: Finding Big Gifts in Your Database and Online. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006.