Surfacing Future Wealth Events like Stock Vesting Dates into Actionable Intelligence

In fundraising . . . timing is everything. Timing the “ask”. Confident the “ask” is the right size — not too big and not too small. None of us can predict life events, but a few gift opportunities are hiding in plain sight. As most of you know, scouring SEC filings can be a tortuous, time-consuming process, especially on “free” sites. Hello! Your time is not free!

As prospect researchers, time is precious. We have too much on our plate to really do a deep dive into every prospect for clues to future wealth events. Potential gift opportunities can be missed if there’s not a visual clue, or an alert, or some way to “calendar” a future event.

That kind of functionality gives your frontline gift officer the advantage . . . time enough to plant the seeds and cultivate the idea of an alternative gift with prospects.

Imagine small teams or solo prospect researchers trying to juggle “event-driven” research with “pro-active” discovery. Most of the time they decide the ROI to dig for hidden clues is not worth the effort.

Large or small, there’s a great need for time-saving solutions to identify more opportunities within our current donor list and prospects. And those opportunities are not always immediately obvious.

Gifts of Cash or Stock?

Other than accumulated “liquid” wealth from past stock sales and cash compensation, most corporate insiders have stock awards just waiting to be exercised. These restricted shares are either time-based, performance based, milestone based, or some combination of criteria, and make up a part of their overall deferred compensation package.

Insider Forms 3, 4, and 5 tell the story of the trail of awards and wealth events. However, the key to understanding what is being disclosed (a sale, exercise of an option, or vesting of an award) is found in the section at the bottom — Explanation of Responses. Each of the (#) correlates to the (1) footnotes indicated in Tables I and Table II. An excerpt from a Form 4 showing the complexity that is typically disclosed is shown in the example below.

Making “heads or tails” out of the convoluted “legalese” in Form 4 footnotes can take hours! Especially if the insider has lots of Restricted Stock Units (RSUs) that typically vest over 3-5 years. I don’t know about you but, figuring this out hurts my brain. I’m not a left-brain math person, and it would take too much time to figure out language filled with percentages and elusive timelines!

To eliminate this painful process, KALEIDOSCOPE’s INSIDER FOCUS research tool has tagged all the Insiders who have stock awards, translated the vesting cycle into a calendar for easy workflow collaboration between prospect research and management teams.

For researchers, there’s an instant filter to surface vesting events. Armed with this pre-event knowledge, development officers have time to plant the seeds and cultivate prospects or known donors.

In the search column of INSIDER FOCUS, you can simply check a box to instantly create a list of Insiders with shares that are vesting in the near and long term! This is a huge time saver.

On the Search Results, you will see a calendar icon under the Insider’s name. A Visual Flag — Click the Calendar Icon to view the vesting events. This is a game changer for translation of the footnotes to plain English.

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