The Internet is replete with sites for researching corporations. And its no wonder considering the Godzilla economy, the dotcom phenomenon, the advent of the day trader and individual investors calling their own shots. And that’s just for public companies. In prospect research it has always been difficult to find information on private companies, but now with the Web much more information on these companies is readily available. What’s more, it will only continue to increase.

From readymade corporate profiles, to stock quotes: historical and current, press releases, bios on board members and officers, analysis, and media coverage, the Internet provides a mind-boggling amount of information that just a couple of years ago was certainly not as plentiful as compared to today.

SEC
The Securities and Exchange Commission's Web site, contains their EDGAR database of documents that are filed by public companies. These can be searched by the name of the corporation. The SEC document that be the most helpful is probably the proxy statement or DEF14a. This document contains brief bios of board members, current stock holdings of officers and board members, insider stock holdings, details of stock options and key bits of information that do not appear in the annual report. The best way to searchy proxy statement is by using the "find" function in your browser. This can be activated by hitting the "control" (Ctrl) key and the letter "F" at the same time. Find what you want, highlight it, copy it to your clipboard and paste into your document.

BigCharts.com
Supplies historical stock information. Even if you don't know the symbol you can type the name of a company and it will give you a list of matches to choose from.

Hoovers.com
Hoovers is one company that supplies information on quite a few public and private companies on their Web site. They provide address, phone number, ready-made profiles, the lastest sales/revenue figures, number of employees, key officers, board members, press releases, stock quotes, charts, etc. Plus, they link to other relevant sites. It is a good place to start.

Bizjournals.com
Is a site that connects business journals from 41 cities across the United States. American City Business Journals, the owner of the journals, runs the site. They've recently updated the site where the user can search one journal or all of them. You can also search the last 30 days or as far back as their archives go. If the company you are researching has had any activity at all in their community they will more than likely show up in one of these publications.

CorporateInformation.com
This site is a business information search engine. Use to search for over 350,000 public and private corporate profiles from other sites.

Message Boards
On some business sites, such as the Motley Fool site (www.fool.com), contain "message boards" where individuals discuss the companies activities. Scanning the ongoing discussions can be very educational, but watch out for the wild commentaries. Other sites have the "message board" feature, such as Yahoo.

Public and University Libraries
Libraries have whole sections devoted to just business research. While the Web is excellent for researching a business one can still find all sorts of good current and historical information in reference books. Ever heard of the Directory of Obsolete Securities? This book gives the details of what happens to a stock when two companies merge. Also helpful is the Directory of Corporate Affiliations, Wards Business Directory, Dun & Bradstreet and Standard & Poors corporate directories.

Libraries are also good because they have larger budgets than the average individual which allows them to subscribe to large online databases that are free to the user. You can even access them from your home PC if you have a library card that provides a user id and password.

If your library has the Lexis/Nexis database then count yourself lucky. This company could be considered the leader when it comes to online information. Their databases contain media information, public record information and much more.

Secretary of State’s Office
One can usually find the Secretary of State's Web site, if indeed it exists, by going to any search engine and typing in the name of the state and "secretary of state". Some Secretary of State's web sites have wonderful search capabilities that allow you to either search on name of corporation or the name of the officer, registered agent or director. The information is not extensive, but can provide you a starting point, especially when you are coming up with diddly using other sources.

Corporate Giving Programs
Sometimes you can find information about Corporate Giving programs on the corporation’s Web page or tucked in a press release, or newspaper article. But the best source at this time are the Corporate Giving books down at the local library. Taft Corporate Giving Directory is the one of the best for this type of information, but be aware once the information is published it is already a year old.