Nonprofits

ClientEarth is a global charity which litigates against organisations doing harm to the environment. The philanthropy team had received approval to launch a new corporate fundraising strategy. However, partnering with the wrong corporation is ClientEarth’s most significant reputational risk, so they needed to conduct stringent due diligence.

ClientEarth didn’t have a single dedicated prospect researcher in the team whose job it was to conduct this due diligence and provide reports to fundraisers. They needed a tool that could be put straight into the hands of fundraisers. This tool needed to conduct in-depth research, particularly around a corporation’s links to environmental concerns, whether directly or indirectly through third parties such as the company owners and directors, as well as their supply chain. If done manually, this would have taken hours for each due diligence report, significantly slowing down the fundraising process.

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The development team’s due diligence process involved a template with specific information requirements. Each team member would manually search for this information online, which meant carefully researching and reviewing news articles, Wikipedia, and company websites one by one, before analysing and summarising the findings.  

This was time-consuming, taking half or day—or sometimes an entire day—to compile a report to the expected standard. There was also the risk of human error. Individuals might overlook critical details, leading to variations in quality depending on who was doing the research. This lack of uniformity made sharing the information with senior leadership a challenging task. 

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The Royal National Lifeboat Institution conducts background research on all corporate partners, trusts and major suppliers to protect the organisation from risks. Conducting manual research using search engines and databases can lead to bias in the results due to a user’s preferences and past searches. By using Xapien to conduct background research, the RNLI obtain unbiased results and uncover all the reputational risks, not just the first few pages of a search engine.

For example, the RNLI was looking to partner with an extreme sports safety equipment company. Manual searches didn’t find anything of concern. But then a Xapien search revealed several class action lawsuits in USA and Canada relating to faulty equipment. The RNLI didn’t want to partner with any company that didn’t uphold the highest standards of user safety.

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The Museum of London has a small team of three who manage the entire advancement practice and only one person who is responsible for their entire research function. The Museum does not have a large existing pool of donors that they can leverage. They needed to scale the fundraising efforts rapidly, with limited resources.

Ciara FitzGerald-Graham, the Museum's Fundraising Intelligence Manager, adopted Xapien for her research and due diligence. With Xapien's AI-generated reports, she gets comprehensive due diligence results in minutes, not days. This saves her time and lets her focus on prospecting and scaling their fundraising efforts.

Bonus: Running a Xapien report provides the team with an extra layer of security that all risks have been checked, protecting the organisation from reputational risk.

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The Prospect Research Manager, being the sole researcher at Sightsavers, is responsible for all research and due diligence checks. This research, whether it’s a quick review or in-depth investigation, would often take a couple of hours to an entire day or even longer. In turn this this would cause delays to fundraisers being able to commence stewardship and delays in the delivery of bespoke research projects. 

Integrating Xapien into the workflow has proven to be a game changer for the Prospect Research Manager, enabling them to handle multiple research and due diligence requests with remarkable efficiency and speed.

Xapien has become an indispensable research tool eliminating the need to dedicate entire days to due diligence research. This has resulted in quicker approval and grant processes and fostered better relationships with potential donors.

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