Internet Prospector History

In 2008, after14 years of production, Internet Prospector ended its tenure as the newsletter for fundraising researchers mining the Internet. Many things about the Internet changed in more than a decade. Search engines improved and news about great sites reaches researchers quicker than a monthly newsletter can. Internet Prospector is now an archive of those many years of newsletters reviewing Web sites for prospect researchers.

The Internet Prospector (IP) is an example of how a small network of volunteers from across the country used the Internet to create a monthly electronic newsletter and Web site that has become widely-recognized in the non-profit sector as a reliable tool for uncovering Internet resources. All of this, without the volunteers ever having met face-to-face.

The IP was born in 1994. Over the summer, at a conference of the Association for Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA), there had been a focus group discussing "the hottest topic in the information field today" -- the Internet. Many prospect researchers there felt that guidebooks to the Net were too general, and that a more specific guide was needed.

Randy Bunney of the University of Wyoming moderated the session. As a follow-up, he sent an email to prspct-l, the listserv for prospect researchers, asking: "Would any of you folks on this list be interested in contributing towards a guide for prospecting the Internet?" He had a lot of questions: "Is the Net changing so fast that anything we produced would be outdated? How should we organize ourselves? How would we produce the guide?"

Others responded. It was suggested that we produce a monthly newsletter instead of a book that would become obsolete the day it was published. Charles Lowe, from the University of California, Irvine, jumped in with an offer to coordinate the project.

About 15 of us hopped on for the ride and we divided into topics. Pam Smith, then at Creighton University, took on the International beat. Bev Goodwin, at the University of Arizona, went for Corporations and Ethics. Martha Murphy, then at Butler University, volunteered for Software. Pam Patton, then at Washington & Lee, took on Individuals. Over the years we have added and lost individual volunteers but -- and this seems incredible -- we have published the Internet Prospector almost monthly since November 1994, despite what seems to be a long-running battle with the IP gremlin who tortured us with server crashes and other miscellaneous disasters each month. The newsletter was posted around the first of every month and emailed to a list of about 500 subscribers.

In January of 1996, we launched our own Web site, an online reference desk of resources and how-to's that has become a widely-used, up-to-date resource for prospect researchers. The site features specials not found in the newsletter. Randy Bunney created the site and it was maintained until its retirement by Sheila Faris-Penn.