Corporations were matched by name and address with business directory phone disks and identified by Standard Industrial Classification codes, which the government uses to keep track of business growth. Individuals were coded based on their employers. Names and addresses were further matched against Federal Election Commission donor lists. A key goal was to find the names of all corporate officers and directors for companies we were particularly interested in. With such names in hand, we could search our database to see if they made contributions.
Some companies have web sites that list their officers.
And sometimes we found news articles that listed many officers from one firm. We managed to identify 78 percent of the major donors to the 1998 governor's race. That left a substantial number undone, but it was far and away the biggest such effort ever undertaken in Maryland. The results allowed us to write authoritatively about special-interest giving in what was Maryland's most expensive general election in history. Of course, the data only provided a road map, one that no Maryland media outlet had seen before.