Work Smarter: Getting The Most From Your Donor Wealth Screening

As a consulting associate for the Heller Fundraising Group, Kaylana Sareen supports both our clients and senior consultants with prospect research and data management. She knows her way around Donor Search (and what wealth screening tools can’t tell you) and how to tell if your organization’s data management system could use a little sprucing up.

But she’s also seen how too much information can lead to analysis paralysis, leaving some fundraisers unable to take the next step with a donor.

Here, she answers a few questions about how to make the most of your wealth screening—and what some of those wealth indicators don’t tell you.

When you’re working with a client on their wealth screening, where do you often begin?

For feasibility studies, which help us determine the scale and scope of a campaign for our clients, we usually start with the overarching view of a donor database. We identify those with strong indicators of wealth (capacity), who have given to other organizations (propensity), who have connections to your organization or industry (affinity). We also look at the recency of their gifts, a factor that’s often overlooked. If they haven’t engaged with your organization in several years, you need to consider the time it will take to re-engage with them.

With all of this information, we can start to quantify how many prospects are being under-solicited—and how much money you’re leaving on the table.

That’s a lot of information to take in! How do you know where to focus?

Yes, but once we do that big picture analysis, we can start to identify your top prospects and what we know about them. This is where we start that deeper dive into individual donors—and where having a consultant can really help you make sense of that data.

The most important information in your wealth screening data is previous, verifiable, large gifts. From there, we want to look at other wealth indicators. We look at things like their real estate values and stock holdings, but also, where do they live? Where did they go to school? What is their career and how long have they been with a company?

Is there anything the wealth screening can’t tell you?

Your wealth screening is just one of many tools you can use. There’s a lot of public information out there, and Google can tell you so much about a person.

For instance, real estate can tell you that someone has an expensive home, but when did they buy it? Is it in an affluent area? Do they also own a vacation home, and where? On the flip side, their real estate might not indicate that they can give a lot of money, but if you see on their record that they’ve made significant gifts to another organization, that tells you what you really need to know.

You can also find out if they’re on the board of any organizations, or if they participate in exclusive clubs and events. With more of that information, you can start to intuit things about an individual. Your wealth screening tool isn’t going to show you all of that, but if you go online and you’re a little curious, you can take that data to another level.

That sounds like a lot of personal information. Are there concerns about privacy? 

The wealth screening tools we use take publicly available information that anyone can access and analyze it to help us draw conclusions. The same goes for Internet searches. We’re just looking for what’s already out there and using that to guide what we know—or don't know—about a donor.

That said, we always recommend our clients have strong confidentiality practices and systems in place to make sure they’re protecting that information.

How do these reports help you when approaching a donor?

Even though I’m a data nerd, I would still say your personal relationship carries more weight. The data gives you a starting point, but perhaps more importantly, a sense of what you still need to learn. It prompts you to consider what questions to ask that you can’t get from your research.

The data can possibly tell you how much they can give, but that doesn’t mean they will. Cultivation conversations where you remain curious and open-minded are where you’re going to learn the most about your donors and what motivates them. You have to be ready to ask thought-provoking questions.

[Get our 12 questions for better donor conversations]

With all of this information out there, how do you avoid that analysis paralysis?

An obvious sign to me that you’re getting bogged down in the data is when you’re continually doing research without securing meetings with a donor. Throughout a donor’s lifecycle, you’ll regularly come back to your research. But if that research isn’t in conjunction with growing the relationship, then it’s not in service of the work.

If you feel like you can’t because you don’t know enough about them, I would argue that you can just go have a conversation and let the research give you something to talk about.

Overwhelmed by your data?

If your data could be working harder for you, Kaylana—and the rest of the Heller Group team—is here to help you make sense of it. Set up a free strategy session and show us what you’ve got.