Reputations take centuries to build, but just one headline to destroy. How are you protecting yours?
Now, more than ever, nonprofits need to know who they're accepting donations from.
Under the gaze of the media and activist shareholders, knowing donors from the start is vital. But to really know a donor means to know their associations, interests, and reputation. Screening data alone can’t provide this insight.
Insights come from deep research, not surface-level searches
Knowing a donor is more than just their sanctions exposure. You need to know if they have ties to industries and associates that don’t align with your and your stakeholder’s values and ESG priorities. But that means filtering through thousands of search engine results. And with fundraising goals to meet, time is a luxury neither you nor your fundraisers can afford
Protect your reputation with Xapien
“Xapien helped identify a potential future risk and saved a great deal of potential reputational fall out.”
Joe Forrest, Partnerships Researcher, Royal National Lifeboat Institution
Xapien doesn't stop at databases. It combs the entire indexed internet to deliver concise reports on individuals or companies worldwide. It casts a wide lens on potential donors – sorting their comprehensive risks from sanctions to allegations, corporate structures to key associates, and their wider online reputation. Its succinct reporting untangles the web of information, revealing deep insights instead of surface-level responses.
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.
Customer stories
ClientEarth
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.
Customer stories
Royal Air Force Museum
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.
Customer Stories
Royal National Lifeboat Institution
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.
Customer stories
Museum of London
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.
Customer stories
Sightsavers
Our guide to protecting your reputation
Fundraisers are under unprecedented pressure to reach targets. At the same time, universities need to think responsibly about who they accept money from. Not all forms of reputational risk are predictable and preventable. But some are.
In this guide, we share due diligence best practices and how AI can enable universities to meet big fundraising targets without leaving themselves at risk of ending up on the front pages of the newspapers - for the wrong reasons.
Xapien streamlines due diligence
Xapien's AI-powered research and due diligence tool goes faster than manual research and beyond traditional database checks. Fill in the form to the right to book in a 30 minute live demonstration.