Fundraisers should use every advantage possible to maximize donations to their organization.

Budgets are tight, and time is limited. Every fundraising choice has to be made with careful attention to its benefit to your nonprofit.

Prospect research is worth the investment. It takes your list of donors and investigates them, educating your organization about any relevant donor information such as past giving and business affiliations. Those pieces of data can greatly improve your organization’s ability to cultivate and solicit gifts from your prospects.

Here are three reasons why you should start prospect screening your donor pool.

Any kind of fundraising practice serves to benefit. Whether you have a grateful patient program at your hospital or an alumni giving initiative at your private school, there’s a way to leverage prospect research.

1. Determining Donors’ Preferred Communication Channels

Donors respond better when they are contacted through their communication channel of choice.

How do you determine what that channel is?

Use prospect research. But really, in this instance, it’ll be donor research.

Dig into your donor database and investigate what types of communications your donors historically responded to best. There’s a good chance that most will have been driven by email. Internet communications are, after all, the steadily growing correspondence of choice in most industries, the nonprofit sector included.

With that being said, think strategically about how you can maximize the ways in which you solicit donations from your supporters who prefer web communications.

Have you thought about SMS marketing?

Smartphones have reached a point of such sophistication that browsing the web, checking email through an app, or even making an online donation is often easier than booting up your laptop.

In fact, 80% of internet users said they used their smartphones to search the web. As a culture, we love the internet (duh!), and we expect to be able to access it from the collective palms of our hands.

If you’re going to be making a major online communications push, you need to have a web presence that is optimized for mobile users.  

2. Finessing How You Build Relationships with Prospects

When you perform a prospect screening, it is imperative that you take full advantage of the data it affords you. Use what you know to tweak how you build relationships with your prospects.

For instance, consider learning the professions of your donors. If one of your supporters is a comedian, you would be remiss if you forgot to invite him or her to a comedy night fundraiser.

Of course, the scenarios do not have to be as niche as that example. Finessing how you develop relationships could be as straightforward as learning that a high-quality prospect is a business associate of one of your board members. You could then ask the board member to step in and provide a welcome introduction.

Be creative with how you utilize the data, and you’ll be very pleased with the fundraising results.

3. Locating Qualified Leads for Major Giving

Qualified leads for major giving have both the capacity and willingness to give a large contribution to your organization.

Prospect research will reveal a bevy of characteristics about your prospects that make them more or less likely to donate a major gift. Major donors typically:

• Possess traditional wealth markers like high-value, appreciated assets.
  
  
• Have strong philanthropic connections like a nonprofit board membership and/or a history of giving.
  
  

To uncover those kinds of details, screen your prospect pool. Once you know who is a potential major donor, your major gifts officer (or the equivalent at your organization) should begin the cultivation process.

Remember, donor acquisition isn’t a process that should be rushed. It should be even more extensive when a major gift is on the table.

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Nonprofits are always going to need to raise money. That is as true as the sky is blue. However, donors are not always going to require the same cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship strategies.

After implementing prospect research into your fundraising process, you’ll never want to return to your old ways. In this case, it turns out the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. And you have the key to the gate.  

Guest Author: SARAH TEDESCO

Sarah Tedesco is the Executive Vice President of DonorSearch, a prospect research and wealth screening company that focuses on proven philanthropy. Sarah is responsible for managing the production and customer support department concerning client contract fulfillment, increasing retention rate and customer satisfaction. She collaborates with other team members on a variety of issues including sales, marketing and product development ideas.

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