3 Media Web client Helen Brown Group is a team of prospect research consultants. They came to us for a side project to create a database of donor-advised funds for the Helen Brown Group (HBG) team to search when creating profiles for clients. The new DAFinitive site was designed to help the team move up in organic search results for donor-advised funds once the team started marketing the new initiative.
The Challenge
The client wanted a searchable database of donor-advised funds that they could use to help their clients. This concept grew to allow the database to be available to other prospect researchers to subscribe to and use.
“About a year ago it dawned on me that this would be helpful to researchers everywhere,” said Helen Brown Group. “Not just us at HBG, but a research resource created by prospect researchers for prospect researchers. Or for anybody, really, who is interested in DAFs and their donors.”
“Is every DAF in DAFinitive™? Absolutely not, but we do have about 5% of the roughly one million DAFs estimated to be in existence, and we’re adding at least 1,000 funds every week.”
The Solution
The client came to us with the idea of this searchable database. They knew exactly what they wanted; they just needed help designing and building it. That’s where 3 Media Web came in to help.
We designed the site to reflect the HBG brand and look similar to the business site, but different enough so people would be able to recognize that it was a separate entity. We built the site in WordPress and used a membership plugin to manage the levels of subscription to access the database.
The database is set up in a way that the client can easily import and export 1000s of records at a time. The search function works on many different fields so users can drill down on the type of funds they are interested in.
The client approached us in August with the idea for the site. In January the HBG team tested it out and in February, the client had a group of beta testers try the site out. It was launched to the public in early March.
The Results
Her team members are able to use the database to easily find funds to help their clients. Shortly after we launched it to the public, the client’s site started getting subscription signups.
The client will continue to add to the database over time––it already has more than 45k funds listed.
“We’re happily crowdsourcing from everyone in the research community (hint hint!) who sends us a fund name and a URL to confirm it so if you want to see a fund in DAFinitive™, send it along!” said Helen Brown Group.
For more information about DAFinitive, or the background of Helen Brown Group’s decision to create this site, read the full article from Helen Brown Group here.