Currently, the most recognized strategy for prospect identification is to find out how much money your prospect has by using wealth screening. But when you focus solely on your prospect’s ability to give you can miss the mark and limit your chances of success.
Screening is a prospect identification process used to prioritize individuals in a donor database and uncover those with high potential as prospective donors. Generally, there are two approaches to screening. Currently, the most well recognized strategy is a wealth screen.
Wealth screening, while often recommended as the first step in prospect identification, is often expensive, time consuming, and unreliable without further research and verification. Above all, it does not provide enough insight to cover all aspects of an ideal donor profile.
Why? Primarily, wealth screening focuses on wealth. Essentially, screening involves matching individuals across different types of external information or databases to determine their capacity to give to a nonprofit organization. Example: By providing a name, city, and state of a potential donor, a screening tool will match this individual to real estate records, securities holdings, biographical information, and other types of data.
However, the results are not always reliable for fundraising teams to make the right “ask”. The screen could be missing valuable records, include false positives, and ignore other important factors that make up an ideal donor. Wealth screening is popular among those who believe cash is king. It doesn’t matter if a donor has strong linkage to a cause if she doesn’t have the capacity to award major gifts, right? This is true, but it leaves many unanswered questions. Wealth alone is not enough to find the right major gift donor.
Prospect screening is an alternative solution to wealth screening that involves much more comprehensive results and processes.
Prospect screening solutions provide a more complete picture of an individual because the results include ratings about their:
This strategy provides insight into not just one, but all three key factors that make a great donor. No donor profile is complete without understanding the full picture, and these prospect scores help fundraising teams determine which prospects to focus on first.
Since each nonprofit is different, it’s also important to have the ability to customize a prospect screen to suit unique goals and fundraising strategies. Ideal customization features might include adjusting the weighting of prospect score components, inputting custom capacity ranges, selecting the matching algorithm’s restrictiveness, and choosing from a variety of affinity categories. Transparency is also critical. Can results be trusted when it’s unclear where they even came from? A tool that clearly demonstrates how its screening process works gives more power to the user to better understand prospects and further customize the tool’s settings.
Screening is just the first step in the prospect development pipeline. Therefore, a prospect screen needs to be comprehensive and detailed enough to matter, yet simple and straightforward so that fundraising teams can spend more time on their most important objectives: verifying, refining, researching, and spending time with the right prospects.
By: Ryan McCarvill, iWave Information Systems
About iWave: For 25 years, iWave Information Systems has been delivering software solutions that empower education, healthcare, and nonprofit organizations to raise more major gifts, faster. iWave has assisted over 6000 organizations in the United States, Canada, and overseas, making these tools a proven asset for fundraising departments of any size.
