Prospect Research (Finding A Potential Investor)
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Infoseek
This, or any other similar search engine, can be a good place to start.
Now, if your prospect's name is John Smith, don't bother with the search engines. A common name is obviously going to return thousands of sites that are impractical to explore--without some other key words (e.g. "John Smith" +Megacorp) if you also know that he is the CEO of Megacorp. But a Xavier Thistlehammerstein is probably ok to try, even without knowing any other information.
General search engines will tend to find many common news sites, corporate websites, personal homepages, etc.
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Hoovers
This site is a great place to go for information on Corporations or to find if
an individual is an officer of a corporation. A paying subscriber can get fully
detailed profiles on each company, but even for free there is significant
information.
If the individual you are researching is in another profession, you can track down some details at professional sites. For example, almost every lawyer can be found in Westlaw's directory or at Martindale Hubbel's site.
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Forbes
Toolbox
This is most useful if you just want to focus on finding some of the richest
individuals and companies.
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Yahoo Newspapers
If you or your prospect lives somewhere that has a newspaper with an
online edition--it may be possible to do a check in the local papers. The
Chicago Tribune, for example, allows one to search the last several years for
any name. It then gives a small sample of what each story is about and allows
you to purchase the full article by credit card for less than $2. Its
inexpensive and immediate. I hope more of the newspapers in the country provide
such a flexible resource.
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For more on prospect research, try contacting The
Association of Prospect Researchers for Advancement. |
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For those inclined to pay for their prospect research sites, there are also powerful research benefits of Handsnet.org, Lexis/Nexis and there are a number of services now which use web-based interfaces to access their traditional prospect research databases. |
This site was created by Rachel A. Broom, a student at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She is currently working towards her masters in public administration. This page was last updated December 3, 2000 and is copyrighted.