I was speaking to a customer last week about the best way to find addresses for new prospects found on NOZA. Oftentimes I recommend people to pipl.com and Google Directory, but I hadn’t put a lot of thought into finding corporate contacts for the millions of corporate giving records that NOZA provides. That’s when the customer alerted me to Jigsaw. Jigsaw is a FREE online business directory- and had a unique business model.

Fortunately for our NOZA Blog readers, Jim Fowler, the CEO of Jigsaw, agreed to do an interview with us and give overview of how Jigsaw works, highlight the benefits Jigsaw can offer nonprofits and even offer a promotion for our blog readers. So, read on… at the end, you might find an Easter egg.

Brief Overview of Jigsaw:

Jigsaw provides an online business directory of company information and more than 9 million business contacts. If your success depends on reaching out to others, Jigsaw is essential. And that's why over 500 corporations and more than 450,000 members turn to Jigsaw.

Every contact in Jigsaw is complete with full name, title, postal address, hard-to-find email address and telephone number.

Interview with Jim Fowler, CEO and Founder of www.jigsaw.com:

NOZA: I did research on Jigsaw and was really floored. The way you created your database as a points-based system is extremely intuitive. In reading your mission & history, I see that you harnessed concepts from Wikipedia and eBay to create Jigsaw. Can you give our blog readers some detail as to how the point-system on Jigsaw works, and how these two highly successful web-based companies influenced you?

FOWLER: The Jigsaw database is a directory of company and contact data and the point system helps our members create and maintain our database. You don’t need to have points to get the company data- just the contacts. It’s very much like open-source software. Our contacts are the data that everyone wants and needs and you get them by using points. You earn points by adding records, updating records or by buying them.

Every record in "costs" 5 points, and you earn 5 points for adding or updating a record. But if another member comes in within 30 days and finds that the data is bad, the person who added that data gets deducted 10 points. We needed an incentive to get people to put good data in and we needed a disincentive for people to not put in bad data. We use a lot of elements of the eBay feedback system.

The whole database is really a wiki. Many people brining data to the puzzle is much more effective than one company maintaining the data. We have almost 600,000 registered members. And these registered members have added almost 10 million contacts and almost 1.5 million company records.

The concept is the same concept that open-source software has to closed and proprietary software. Encyclopedia Britannica is basically dead- Wikipedia is bigger and badder.

NOZA: What are some anecdotal frustrations that occurred while trying to find quality leads, and ultimately led you to start this database?

FOWLER: It was born out of a point of pain. I was director of sales and I was frustrated at how much time my sales team would spend just trying to find the right people to contact. Sales people spend a minimum of 33 percent of their time just trying to find the right people to sell to.

The data companies that existed did a decent job at company data, but their contact data was sub-par. I thought, "people are way more dynamic than companies and there is no way a closed and proprietary system could maintain business contacts."

What sales people really need is direct contact information. We knew that data companies are controversial out of the gate--so we decided we weren’t going to touch consumer information. We decided we would keep it to information that could be found on business card, minus the mobile number. Nothing you would consider non-business would be found on Jigsaw- not even personal emails.

It really kind of happened all at once. Data is a tough product to work with because it’s so dynamic- and the reason it’s tough is because one company working alone can’t get all this quality information. I thought, how would you do it in a scalable way? You would need to use the wisdom of crowds. So, I was whiteboarding in my office and the whole concept just kind of hit me. I thought you’ve gotta have a carrot and a stick. So basically Jigsaw rewards you when your good and spanks you when your bad.

NOZA: I see that you focus your message to the for-profit sector; did you ever imagine that nonprofits would be using this database to find prospects?

FOWLER: We really did. We knew there were many situations in which people would need business contact data- even in many places that we didn’t yet expect. For example, it’s used by a lot of job seekers. They use Jigsaw to find the hiring manager. We also see people using it for customer support issues- one guy lost his bags on British Airways, got on Jigsaw, found the CEO and got his bags back.

We always knew that nonprofits would use Jigsaw for fundraising. If you do B2B (business to business outreach) you don’t do business with companies you do business with people- and Jigsaw allows you to connect with those people.

NOZA: What do you think that you can offer to the nonprofit community that your competitors can’t?

FOWLER: First and foremost, Jigsaw is free. So, it’s a great concept for them because it’s free, especially if they are willing to share their data. It fits perfectly for nonprofits.

Number two is our Open Data Initiative–a feature unique to Jigsaw that allows anyone to search, build and download a list of complete company records for FREE.

And lastly, our data is just better. At the end of the day, they have to find donors. It is getting much more difficult to communicate with people at home (due to ‘do not call’ lists, etc). Even people who are trying to sell to individuals are communicating at work rather than at home- the same goes for nonprofits.


To find out more information on how Jigsaw can help your nonprofit organization, you can participate in a Jigsaw Webinar. Go to the Webinars page on Jigsaw to learn more.

Also, Jigsaw recently added a company wiki to it's services and features. Similar to Wikipedia, Jigsaw's Company Wiki is a vibrant hub of user-generated content.