How to Get Started With Prospect Research: 5 Steps
- Nonprofit Learning Lab
- 6 minutes ago
- 5 min read
This is a guest blog.
Picture this: you're looking through a database of thousands of constituents, and your organization needs a list of major gift prospects by the end of the week. Without a clear process, you may overlook strong candidates hiding in plain sight.
To find your most promising giving prospects, you’ll need to go beyond basic wealth screening and start qualifying major gift candidates by combining wealth data, philanthropic history, and affinity signals.
To accomplish this in-depth research process at scale, your organization needs a systematic approach to prospect research that provides your team with a repeatable framework and a shared language for evaluating donors. In this guide, we’ll share tips for how to get started with prospect research, train your fundraising team, and build a reliable major gift pipeline.
1. Audit your existing donor data.
The most promising major donor prospects are often already in your database. Wealth screening and prospect research tools leverage your current data to uncover insights into your donors and identify those with the potential to make major gifts. However, for these tools to provide an accurate analysis of your donors, they need accurate data.
Get your database ready by prioritizing the following practices:
Standardize formatting protocols. Ensure all names, addresses, and contact details follow a consistent format to prevent errors when conducting wealth screenings.
Merge duplicate records. Identify and consolidate duplicate profiles so your team always works from a single source of truth when analyzing each prospect's engagement history.
Flag upgrade candidates. Look for consistent mid-level donors whose giving history and ongoing engagement suggest they may be ready for a deeper, more personal relationship with your organization. EverTrue recommends reviewing your donor segmentation strategy to help you identify where these candidates currently sit in your pipeline and how to prioritize them.
Your database is only as powerful as the data inside it. Taking the time to clean and standardize your records upfront helps you identify more prospects, feel confident you have accurate information, and build standardized processes for assessing major giving candidates.
2. Define what a major gift looks like for your organization.
Major gift thresholds vary widely from one organization to the next, and what counts as a transformational gift at your nonprofit might be a mid-level donation for another organization. Define your own baseline to keep your team focused on the right prospects and set ambitious but realistic major giving goals.
Start by reviewing your median major gift size over the past three to five years, removing any one-time outliers, such as large bequests, that might skew your baseline. It also helps to look at where natural clusters exist in your giving data. If a significant portion of your major donors are consistently giving at a similar level, that pattern can inform where you set your threshold.
From there, build out a tiered structure that creates a clear path for moving donors through the pipeline. This helps you allocate gift officer time more strategically, reserving your most experienced staff for the highest-potential candidates, while other members of your development team continue to cultivate mid-level prospects.
3. Build complete prospect profiles.
Identifying a major giving candidate’s net worth is only one component of prospect research. A useful donor profile should include not just how much a prospect is capable of giving, but whether they have the affinity to give as well. Wealth alone does not guarantee a donation, and building a complete picture of each prospect before reaching out is one of the best ways to focus your team's time and keep productivity high.
Assess prospects from all angles by evaluating the following factors:
Giving capacity. Review tangible wealth markers to determine a prospect's financial ability to give. These include real estate holdings, job title, and stock holdings. Look beyond salary estimates and instead get deeper insights by examining federal filings for stock transactions or county tax assessments for secondary properties.
Philanthropic markers. Look at a prospect's past giving history, both within and outside your organization, including the frequency of their contributions and any involvement with family foundations or grantmaking organizations. Publicly available tax filings from other nonprofits can reveal whether a prospect serves on a peer organization's board or makes recurring major gifts elsewhere.
Giving affinity. Make a distinction between general charitable interest and a specific connection to your mission by tracking behavioral signals like social media engagement, event attendance, and email interaction. A prospect with moderate wealth who consistently volunteers with your organization is likely more promising than a millionaire who doesn’t engage.
Taking the time to build complete prospect profiles upfront helps your team spend less time guessing which major giving candidates are worth pursuing and more time building relationships that lead to lasting donor commitments.
4. Use a designated prospect research software system.
Manually tracking wealth markers and charitable interests across hundreds of constituents via spreadsheets is unsustainable and prone to human error. Dedicated prospect research software increases what your team can accomplish by automatically surfacing opportunities that manual research misses.
Scale your fundraising efforts with prospect research software, thanks to these benefits:
Access to comprehensive gift records. Wealth screening software can connect your organization to expansive databases of philanthropic records that would be impossible for your team to compile manually, giving you a fuller picture of each prospect's giving behavior across organizations. This broader view allows your team to determine if a prospect's giving history aligns closely with your mission.
Automated wealth screenings: Instantly update capacity ratings using up-to-date financial data, eliminating the need for tedious manual data entry. You can even configure these tools to alert the appropriate major gift officer when one of their prospects experiences a major financial event, such as a company acquisition.
Predictive modeling: Apply AI-powered algorithms to uncover hidden prospects whose behavior is similar to that of your existing major donors. These AI fundraising tools help you determine which prospects to focus on by assigning candidates scores based on their giving recency, frequency, and monetary value.
The right software can free your team from tedious administrative work and help you conduct more comprehensive prospect research than manual tracking can accommodate.
5. Build your prospect portfolio.
Gathering data is only useful if your team has a clear strategy for acting on it. To win major donors, you need focused, manageable prospect portfolios that set up your gift officers for success. Once you establish a clear framework, train your team on how to use it so your gift officers can pursue major giving prospects with confidence.
Structure your team's outreach and cultivation efforts by:
Personalizing your outreach: Empower your gift officers to build relationships through structured, multi-channel outreach that keeps donors engaged. Establish a clear communication routine that creates connections through personalized prospect emails, phone calls, one-on-one meetings, and impact reports.
Automating ongoing prospect discovery: Monitor fresh wealth indicators and engagement metrics to accurately group prospects by their giving readiness. Continuous monitoring provides your major gift officers with updates about high-potential candidates to add to the major giving pipeline.
Maintaining portfolio oversight: Give your advancement leaders real-time visibility into portfolio health and daily activities so they can track gift officers’ progress, provide coaching, and keep your team accountable without waiting for scheduled review sessions.
Your gift officers will do their best work with a focused, updated prospect list. Give them the bandwidth to build the right relationships, and the results will follow.
A systematic approach to prospect research takes the guesswork out of fundraising, helping your team focus its energy where it matters most. The more consistently you revisit and refine your prospect research process, the stronger your major gifts program will become over time.
