The Benefits of Using a Wealth Screening Tool for Your Nonprofit’s Fundraising Efforts
This article was originally posted on NonProfit PRO’s blog.
Wealth screening can be an incredibly effective way to improve your nonprofit’s fundraising initiatives. Whether your nonprofit is large or small, it can help you identify which donors are most likely to give, and how much they might give, based on their wealth and giving history.
Of course, your nonprofit likely has too much donor data to manually sort through to uncover data insights. And even if you could sort through it manually, you probably don’t have extensive data about donor (and potential donor) assets. That’s where wealth screening tools come in.
What are wealth screening tools?
Wealth screening software helps you accomplish wealth screening efficiently by providing detailed donor prospect research and screening tools that let you dive into your donor list, identify potential donors, and target them with fundraising asks that are most likely to appeal to them.
How can wealth screening tools help your nonprofit?
Using a wealth screening tool is often associated with major gift fundraising. And it can certainly help you to identify who could potentially become a major donor for your organization.
But it can help in many other ways as well.
That’s because it allows you to you focus your development efforts on specific groups of donors for specific types of asks rather than spending time and energy on donors that are unlikely to give. It also helps you develop realistic donation goals and plan your direct asks when creating everything from capital campaigns and annual fund contributions to fundraising events.
Here are some specific examples of what wealth screening can help you do:
- Confirm your assumptions about donors and potential donors.
For example, confirm that the donors at the top of your “major gifts” target list truly have the capacity and likelihood to give. - Become hyper-targeted with your fundraising asks.
Segmenting fundraising campaigns and communications based on wealth screening data allows you to tailor your asks to the ideal gift amount and for the ideal initiative. For example, you could search for people who have given to some type of gardening or botanical organization in the past and ask them to give to an initiative to build a visitor’s garden for your organization’s new facility. - Upgrade donors to new giving levels.
For example, identify donors who have given several small donations in the past so that you can cultivate them as a mid-level donor.
As you develop your nonprofit’s technology plan, consider adding a wealth screening tool to the mix. There are almost limitless ways you can use it to help accomplish your nonprofit’s development goals.
Learn more about wealth screening
You can learn more about wealth screening in episode 62 of The Nonprofit Voice podcast from NonProfit PRO. In this podcast, I sat down with two industry experts – Shana Bradley from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts development team and Ryan Woroniecki, an advisor in the fundraising industry – to talk about ideas, tips, and real-world examples about wealth screening tools and techniques.
