How Prospect Research Can Boost Major-Donor Acquisition

There are numerous ways for your nonprofit to find new supporters for its mission, from planning engaging community fundraisers to creating an informative, user-friendly website to increasing your social media presence. While these strategies can attract many donors to your organization, most of them will likely only give small to mid-sized gifts.

Major-donor acquisition is a different ballgame, involving very focused efforts to identify and reach out to potential donors individually. The foundation of these activities is prospect research, a process in which nonprofit fundraisers gather and analyze data to identify individuals with a strong likelihood of making significant contributions.

In this guide, we’ll discuss three ways prospect research can improve your nonprofit’s major-donor acquisition efforts. Whether you’re just getting started with prospect research or you’ve gone through the process before and want to improve your strategy, keep these factors in mind to help you secure high-impact gifts efficiently and effectively.

Identifying Giving Capacity and Affinity

Prospect research is sometimes confused with wealth screening, which involves analyzing potential donors’ financial information to determine their giving capacity. However, just because someone could make a significant gift to your organization doesn’t necessarily mean they’d be willing to do so.

Holistic prospect research goes beyond traditional wealth screening by diving into each potential donor’s philanthropic tendencies and affinity for your nonprofit’s mission. Here are some examples of the different types of data you might find on each prospect, which are typically called indicators or markers:

• capacity indicators: real estate ownership, stock holdings, business affiliations, political giving history;
• philanthropic indicators: previous donations to your nonprofit or other similar organizations; and,
• affinity indicators: connections to your mission, interests, values, nonprofit engagement history (volunteer hours, event attendance, board service, etc.).

When you find a prospect who exhibits all three types of indicators, they’re a good candidate to reach out to and start cultivating a relationship with to prepare for major-gift solicitation down the line.

Finding Major Donors Within Your Existing Supporter Base

According to DonorSearch's prospect research guide, “One of the most common misconceptions around prospect research is that nonprofits use it [only] to identify new donors.” While reaching outside your organization is one way to find major donors, you might also have strong prospects within your existing supporter base that you can identify via prospecting.

To find these prospects, you should do the following:

1. Ensure your nonprofit's database is up to date and free of duplicate or inaccurate entries.
2. Use your prospect research tools to screen your database.
3. Look for the same capacity, philanthropic, and affinity indicators in your existing donors as you would for brand-new prospects.

If prospects already have a connection to your organization, major-donor cultivation will likely take less time and effort, so it’s worth looking in your database to see if any of your supporters may be able and willing to upgrade their contributions.

Guiding Your Relationship-Building Efforts

As NXUnite's donor relations guide explains, prospect research lays the foundation for the tailored cultivation processes you’ll create for each potential major donor. Relationship building is critical since most donors are only willing to make significant contributions to organizations they feel connected to and that value them as a critical part of furthering their missions.

After conducting an initial round of research, meet one-on-one with each prospect to introduce them to your nonprofit and get to know them through casual conversations. Then, use the data you’ve collected and the information they shared to establish a personalized follow-up cadence. This will help keep your organization top of mind, provide them with relevant resources, and invite them to participate in activities like events or volunteering to get more involved with your mission.

While cultivating these relationships, continue leveraging your prospect research tools to ensure your wealth and philanthropic data on each individual is always up to date and complete. That way, you can more effectively determine the right time and method for soliciting a major gift from each prospect.

Prospect research is integral to your nonprofit’s major-donor acquisition efforts since it provides a complete picture of both new and existing supporters’ giving potential. Then, you can develop tailored relationship-building strategies to help them convert from unengaged prospects into loyal major donors to your mission.