[hullsa]

Andrea, I agree with Matthew and Peter - this is really a must for your. BUT, since you asked for a researcher's opinion - (and maybe to help make a case for the cost). I love the Prospect Tab. It helps with both prospect research and management. We've been using it for about 7 years, and here's what I think about it's 7 (really 6) core parts:

1 - General: includes p mgmt functions for classifying prospects and where they stand in the solicitation cycle (but not with dates). Also good for research and listing funding interests and limitations. No place for types of support tracking so we use Attributes. Great for Corps & Fdns research! You can list all the interests (children services, community development, etc) for your org prospects, and then run searches for grant prospects from within your own database. At this point, we can supplement (often completely) searches from other sources ( i.e. Foundation Center Directory, Guidestar or MetaSoft etc) with our own tracked data. It Rocks!

2 - Gifts to Other Orgs - kind of lame. We use mostly for individual major gift prospects to record & highlight their large gifts. For long grant lists for Corp & Fdn profiles we use the Notes Tab. Also, doesn't print so well on the Profile Reports. I'd like to see a better use of this space - maybe for tracking types of support, a checklist for research sources used, a research request log (I could go on). But anyway...

3 - Financial Data - good to have. Useful for monitoring such info. We track the usual: real estate values, stock, salary, and other hard assets and indications of wealth. The aggravating thing is the calculator only goes to $9,999,999,999. So you can't enter, for example, the sales figure for a $10 billion dollar company. This is particularly sucky because it is the FINANCIAL DATA portion of the Tab.

4. Financial Graph - You can run graphs and charts based on the financials, but we never used them (the pie charts) for any serious purpose.

5. Proposals - this is the bridge from Actions to Gifts. As was mentioned, you can track much more than the typical grant. Replicates Action Tab and links to specific gifts. Has it's own Attributes, Media, and Notes. Lot's of bells and whistles - too bad canned reporting and exporting is so bad for this feature.

6. Ratings - also a good feature. You can track any type of rating and it comes (or used to) with an assortment of vendor names, which wasn't very helpful to me, but....This feature is important to any good prosp res & mgmt program, but you can recreate it elsewhere. Also, the Rating Notes don't print on the Profiles. Many screening vendors publicize how easy it is to import all their results into RE; they mostly mean the ratings. Word of caution - mess around with how you'll pull and sort on the rating fields before deciding where to put everything ( i.e. capability, inclination, affinity, and their respective codes and tables). I know that's a given, but I'm only mentioning it because many orgs track similar to this: A1 = High Inclination and High Capability; E5 = low. Do you pull these separately, as just a list of As or just 1s, or always together? Also, will you distinguish between the ratings that you as a researcher calculate and those you've gained from a screening service or will they all be "capability" etc?

7. Chronology - nice chrono summary combining Actions, Gifts, Proposals, Events and Appeals.

All in all, I think that with all the hats you wear, you would find this module worth the cost.

Sorry for the book,
S.