The User’s Guide: Architect Finder
Another AIA tool to make the phone ring

by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: The AIA’s Architect Finder is an online resource that collects architecture firm profiles and makes them available to potential clients and the general public to search though. It is automatically drawn from AIA membership data, but firms need to contact Architect Finder to add more information to the tool in order to make a more useable profile.

How do you ... use an online searchable database to bring your firm more business?

In economically uncertain times such as these, it’s always good to have an extra client or two waiting in the wings. And the AIA’s Architect Finder can connect you to them.

Architect Finder is a Web-based directory available to the general public composed of approximately 15,000 architecture firms searchable by location, building type, and service type. Firm information can be submitted by all licensed architects who are AIA members in good standing. Participants don’t have to be firm founders or principals, nor does the firm have to focus exclusively on architecture.

Potential clients who call the AIA are directed to Architect Finder by the AIA’s Information Central staff. In its current incarnation, the service launched in November of 2007. The firm profiles in Architect Finder are automatically drawn from the AIA’s membership database and updated every day. But the database doesn’t contain all the relevant information to make each firm’s Architect Finder profile successful. Because it’s for the public and potential clients, each profile needs to be as clear and detailed as possible, says Carl Sandstrom, the AIA’s director of business systems. At the very least, to be a useable profile that can bring more work to your practice, each entry should contain basic contact information and details on the building and service types your firm handles. To go further, contact Architect Finder about adding Web site links, a firm logo, and project portfolios with project images and descriptions. Once requests for changes have been made, AIA staff members update Architect Finder approximately every 48 hours.

Kaye Orr, AIA, a sole practitioner in Alexandria, Va., was contacted by four potential clients who had heard of her on Architect Finder, and one of them ended up hiring her for a residential bathroom remodeling project. Orr, who specializes in residential additions, has only been on Architect Finder for a few months. “The fact that I had already gotten that many calls in that short amount of time was impressive,” she says. “It’s been very helpful.”