Dearly Beloved,

I grew up in the death business — flowers, funerals and the high cost of dying — and I’m sure glad those high-priced days are long gone.

Today there are many options. Cremation. Low cost, bio-degradable ‘green’ caskets. Consumer funeral societies. All aimed at bringing reality and reasonable costs to the post-death process.

Reforms in this area came about as part of the consumer revolution of the ‘60s and ‘70s and some terrific muckraking journalism, like Jessica Mitford’s classic book The American Way of Death that exposed the excesses and rip-offs of the funeral industry.

Seems to me it’s about time to do the same when it comes to fundamental data that’s of daily use to fundraisers, but may right now be priced far too high.

Stuff like wealth screening, merge-purge, predictive modeling and scoring. Or even simpler stuff that ought to be free — like the ability to check on the validity of an address, look at the giving demographics for a particular community, quickly identify Democratic or Republican donors who also own a yacht.

While the Sacred Order of The Data Vendors scramble to prepare their response, let me explain why I think the time for change in the data business has come.

It’s simply inexcusable that our trade doesn’t demand more of those who process, store and manipulate our data. And it’s more than inexcusable that in this age of cheap, cheap and easily usable technology we settle for the sometimes inept, often slow, and generally expensive ways of the fundraising data market.

So, what about the elephant and embalming?

At various points in the debate over the high cost of dying, the self-righteous committees of Congress, as is their want, held self-righteous hearings demanding change.

My favorite colloquy from one of those hearings occurred when a House Committee witness, a prominent Washington, D.C. funeral director by the name of W.W. Chambers, testified that the business of funerals was “a highly specialized racket” and “that the cost of embalming an elephant would be $1.50”.

Here at The Agitator we get lots of complaints about the quality and cost of the various data vendors and processors. We don’t do much with them believing most readers don’t care, don’t understand or aren’t remotely interested in all this … whether they’re getting ripped off or not.

Nonetheless these complaints kept gnawing at my brain and led me to draw the analogy between elephant embalming and data. The fact is that with today’s high-speed, high-capacity computing and easy access to a wide range of data, fundraisers should be able to get lots of data free and a lot of quality data analysis, screening and modeling at a damn-near-free price.

So rather than shove this to the back burner of our mental stove, dismissing it as just part of what we’ve labeled ‘The Dismal Data Dump’ here at The Agitator, Tom and I’ve decided to take whatever steps we can to remedy the situation.

Here are the first steps in our Agitator Data Liberation Crusade …

1) Ask Agitator readers what types of data — excluding free prospecting lists — they’d like access to on a free or at least a low-cost basis.

2) Then begin by gathering as much valuable but free stuff as possible, and put it in one online place for easy use.

Here are some of the items from my ‘wish list’. I hope you will add (or subtract) items that would be of use to you or folks in your shop.

• Name and address verification. Quick look-up to verify if a person you’re interested in actually lives at an address. Not just DPV or NCOA, but actual verification.

• Organization Snapshot. Quick overview of your organization’s market, including competitors, market size, and share of wallet estimate.

• Donor Dossier. Quick overview of a donor or prospective donor — net worth, home equity, political giving (or yacht ownership), board memberships, etc. Enough to let you know whether further research is warranted.

• Geographic Reporting. A map-driven report that allows you to select on key demographics and giving, with the ability to drill down from national to zip radius-level giving.

• Giving Capacity Calculator. A quick way to calculate the giving capacity and also the likelihood that a prospective or current donor will make a gift of X size in the next 6 months.

Some of these data sets already exist in various of The Agitator’s sister companies and we suspect we can talk them into putting high quality, free data in one place and making it easily accessible to everyone.

But, I’d also like to hear from you about your ‘wish list’. Just let your imagination run wild and we’ll get this project underway.

Roger

P.S. If you’d rather not share your Data Dreams publicly in The Agitator’s Comments section send ‘em along to me as a private email to Roger@theagitator.net.