Data Mining for Donors: Museums Do It Too

Yesterday’s NY Times article, N.Y.U. Mines Personal Data to Gain Edge in Money Race (different title online), makes it sound as if New York University, by sifting through personal financial information on online databases (to identify potential big-money donors), is doing something that other charities aren’t.
Far from it.
Ten years ago, when I was writing my “Visual Reality” column for Artnet‘s nascent online magazine, I published an item on Donor Dossiers:
Terri Constant, the Met[ropolitan Museum]’s head of “prospect research,” [said that] about 10 percent of the museum’s 100,000 members are checked through services like Nexis and Investnet for details about business dealings and insider stockholdings. The purpose: to identify big-bucks donation prospects.

Times reporter Jonathan Glater yesterday revealed this about N.Y.U., as if it were something shockingly novel:
Each day, Lekha Menon, the director of prospect management and research at N.Y.U., and four staff members pore over more than a dozen newspapers and electronic news and data sources, looking for names of alumni, parents of alumni or parents of students. They also look for notable donations to other causes, promotions, appointments to corporate boards and records of securities transactions.
Nowhere does Glater state that this is common practice among many charities. But chances are that if the Met was already doing this 10 years ago, almost everyone’s doing it now. Then as now, I wondered whether people who forge connections with nonprofits realize they are potentially subjecting themselves to intrusive scrutiny of their net worth by those very organizations.
The only difference is that now, unlike then, we all know that there’s no such thing as personal privacy: Our worth, net and otherwise, can always be assessed online.