copperbadge:

A few weeks ago, two people gave us a nice donation in memory of someone who didn’t share their surname; not that unusual even for family members, since people get married and remarried and such. They’d given to us before and seemed to have some wealth, but I had other priorities at the time and didn’t dig too deeply. 

One of my fundraisers ended up asking for more information, and I thought it was pretty hopeless; they had very common names, as did the deceased, who passed long enough ago that his obit might not even be online.

But I figured I might as well see about their giving history, and so I looked them up and found they’d given $25K to a high school. Generally people don’t give $25K to a high school and if they do it’s because their kid is attending. So I searched their surname and the name of the high school and turned up a varsity sports stats page about a kid with their surname as his surname…and the deceased’s surname as his given name. 

And the kid, since he’s twenty years old, has a Facebook, which is friends with his parents’ Facebooks, which his father used apparently purely to document his career, which was nice of him. The kid’s Facebook also friended a guy with the name of the deceased, who hadn’t posted since about the time the deceased passed. Searching his very common name plus the tiny midwestern town in which he lived (according to Facebook) turned up his obituary, which confirmed one of the original donors was his daughter. 

So from one single donation they made I was able to find their kid, the donor’s career history, the deceased’s obituary, and an entire family tree. Feeling very accomplished about that and also a little bit creepy!

Whenever I pull something like this, especially making such full use of Facebook, I think about that episode of Person Of Interest where Finch explains that he invented social media because “The Machine needed more information. People’s social graph, their associations. The government had been trying to figure it out for years. Turns out most people were happy to volunteer it.”

This is basically what I do, but to figure out if someone has stopped their regular donation to us because they died – since continuing to send post addressed to them usually upsets their families and uh… that’s not good for encouraging the family to think well of us and give us money.

I think it’s a bit frowned upon in the fundraising regulations here to do it to live people.