Expand Your Donor Base: Last Chance for NOZA Promotional Offer!

This week through TechSoup Limited, we've been running a special discount on NOZA, a database of philanthropy data. This database has more than 43,000,000 (million) donation records in it — where you can search for individuals, corporations, and foundation donation records to see who they've supported in the past, how much they've given, and look for those donors who may be likely to also support your cause. The special discount ends today at 5 p.m. Pacific time, so place your request now.

The promotional offer is for a 30-day subscription that gives you unlimited access to the database and all those donor records for the grand total of $99. The subscription starts when you activate your account (between now and December 31, 2009) and gives you unfettered access for the next 30 days, so you can research for the best donor prospects to grow your organization's support. It's available to 501(c)(3) nonprofits and public libraries. Also, libraries and nonprofits can make their subscription available to individual community members and patrons to help them research potential donors for community, school, and local programs.

In preparation for this promotional offer, we sat down to interview Craig Harris, the CEO and founder of NOZA, about his fundraising background and how NOZA can be put to use by nonprofits and libraries. He also guest blogged earlier this week about developing a major gift fundraising program.

When asked about his background, Harris wasn't shy about what's helped him learn the ropes of fundraising for nonprofits. "I don't consider myself an expert," Harris claimed. "I've failed at a lot of my fundraising endeavors. I come from the school of trial and error… mostly error. In the evolution of my fundraising career, I've gleaned some of those best practices that are relevant to nonprofits. My fundraising came by accident."

That trial and error came from first being in the Peace Corps in Paraguay where he later started a nonprofit to support sustainable forestry. It's in that capacity that he learned his first real lesson in fundraising (one that, I'd bet most nonprofit executives experience at some point). "I thought that it'd be easy to raise the money. I realized that even though all my passions lie in the programs, I ended up having to shift my focus to 90% fundraising and 10% programs. I thought the easiest way to raise money was to write a lot of grant proposals. I was wrong," said Harris.

After that first experience running an organization in Paraguay, he came back to the United States and took a job as the development director at a social services organization in Santa Barbara, California. "That's really where I learned the ropes," laughed Harris. "If you really want to have long-term sustainability, funding really is all about people — not foundations. It's all about getting that first-time donor to give a $25 check and then engaging them deeper and having them become a major stakeholder over time. The only way you get someone to give you a 7-figure gift is by cultivating them from when they started as a $25 donor."

And that's the basic premise of NOZA's philanthropy database. Harris later opened a fundraising consulting company to help more social benefit organizations reach their fundraising goals and he saw a gap in the system. "Traditional prospecting methods are extremely ineffective or expensive." Rather than expecting nonprofits to spend all day on Google searching for who donates to what causes, Harris saw the gap and decided to create NOZA (which is named for his twin sons, Noah and Zachary).

He looked at the models created by Guidestar and Foundation Center, which help fill the research niche for information about foundation support for causes. But he realized there was no database of individual giving that a nonprofit could look to in order to focus on the donor prospects that would be likely engaged in their cause. "We just created a tool to compile it all and save nonprofits time. I like to call it a 'magic database' that can help nonpfoits save time so they can spend it on doing more important work."

With more than 43 million donation records, grant records, and 990s (and a half million more being added each month), and plans to launch a database that will help nonprofits prospect for potential board members in 2010, NOZA is rapidly becoming the "world's archive of philanthropy data."

Check it out and get the special offer before it magically disappears later this afternoon!

Photo of Craig Harris from NOZA