Free preview: Donor and Prospect Research

The exam does not test whether you can raise money. You had to demonstrate that in writing to be allowed to sit it. What it tests is whether you describe the work the way the profession's body of knowledge describes it, and those definitions are narrower and more particular than the ones most organizations use day to day. That gap is where experienced candidates lose points they did not expect to lose.

Start with the definition itself. Fundraising is the work of connecting people who care about a problem with an organization that is credibly solving it. The money is the result and the relationship is the work. That ordering is not a slogan for the purposes of this exam. It is the assumption behind a large share of the answer keys, and where two options are both defensible in practice, the one treating the gift rather than the relationship as the objective is reliably the wrong one.

The three questions

Every serious fundraising decision (who to call, how much to ask for, what to send, when to follow up) comes back to three questions about a person. The profession has used these three for decades, usually under the shorthand linkage, ability, and interest.

Linkage: Is there a connection between this person and us? A former client, a board member's colleague, a neighbor of the building, an alum, someone who has volunteered. Linkage is the bridge that lets a request feel like a conversation instead of a cold call.
Ability: Could this person make a gift of the size we have in mind, if they wanted to? Ability is about capacity and liquidity (what someone could give from assets and income), not about what their job title suggests they earn.
Interest: Do they care about this problem? Interest shows up as attention, questions, attendance, volunteering, and giving to organizations like yours. It is the hardest of the three to fake and the most predictive of the three.

What the money actually looks like

Where the money comes from is worth being precise about, because the intuitive answer and the tested answer diverge. Foundations and corporations feel like the major sources, since they are the ones with application forms, deadlines, and a named officer to call. In every country with reliable giving data the picture is the other way round: the large majority of private giving comes from individuals, living donors and bequests together, while foundations and corporations make up a much smaller share between them.

That matters for how the exam expects effort to be allocated. Given a scenario with constrained staff time and a choice between chasing another grant deadline and building individual relationships, the individual work is almost always the keyed answer. Individuals are slower to start and far more durable once started, and the exam consistently rewards the durable option.

What this course covers

The six modules that follow are the six domains, taken in the order the work tends to happen rather than the order the blueprint numbers them.

1Who gives and why: finding, researching, and ranking prospects (this module).
2Securing the gift: building a case for support and actually making the ask.
3Relationship building: thanking, reporting, and turning first gifts into second gifts.
4Volunteers and boards: getting other people to help you raise money.
5Running the shop: plans, budgets, metrics, and what to report upward.
6Ethics and accountability: donor intent, gift acceptance, privacy, and public trust.

Read in that order the through line is hard to miss. Everything before the ask is about earning the right to make it, and everything after it is about earning the right to make the next one.

A prospect is not a name. A prospect is a name that has survived a test. Until someone has been checked against linkage, ability, and interest, they are a suspect, a possibility. Turning possibilities into prospects is called qualifying, and it is what this lesson is about.

Where names come from

Names come from further inside the organization than most people expect. The sources below are ordered roughly by how well they tend to perform, and the strongest of them are already in your building.

Your own database: past donors, lapsed donors, event attendees, petition signers, newsletter subscribers.
People served by your programs, and their families, where it is appropriate and legal to approach them.
Board members, staff, and volunteers, and the people they know well enough to open a door.
Public filings from grantmaking foundations, which disclose what they funded and at what level.
Corporations with a stated giving program, a local footprint, or a business reason to care about your issue.
Community knowledge: who chairs what, who just sold a business, who shows up in the arts program listings.

Qualifying: turning names into prospects

Qualifying is a fast pass over a large list to decide who deserves a slow pass. For each name you are answering: is there a real connection, is there plausible capacity for the level of gift I have in mind, and is there evidence they care about this kind of work? You are not trying to be precise. You are trying to sort.

Signal	What it tells you	Where to find it
Repeat giving to you	Interest, and a floor on ability	Your own donor database
Giving to peer organizations	Interest in the issue, and a gift-size range	Published donor lists, annual reports, event programs
Volunteer hours	Interest and linkage, often ahead of money	Program and volunteer records
Business ownership or a liquidity event	Ability	Local business press, public filings
Property and known assets	Ability	Public property records, screening vendors
Board or committee service elsewhere	Both linkage and a willingness to be asked	Other organizations' published board lists

Rating: putting a number on it

Rating is the process of assigning each qualified prospect a realistic gift range. The important discipline is that rating asks what a person could give, not what you hope they will give or what you need them to give. Confusing those three is how organizations end up asking a $2,500 donor for $50,000 and never hearing from them again.

Ratings are more accurate when two groups do them separately: staff, who know the giving history, and volunteers or board members, who know the people. Where the two disagree, that gap is usually information worth chasing.

Before a name goes on your active prospect list

✓Contact information has been verified in the last twelve months.
✓You can name the specific linkage: the person or experience that connects them to you.
✓You have a gift range, not a single number, and you can say where it came from.
✓You know what part of the mission they are most likely to care about.
✓You have identified who should make the approach.
✓Nothing in the record suggests they have asked not to be contacted.

A list that clears all six is shorter than the one you started with, and that is the point. A hundred names you can speak about specifically will out-raise a thousand you cannot.

Every organization that raises money keeps records about the people who give. That system (whether it is a purpose-built database or a spreadsheet you inherited) is the memory of the program. When it is good, a fundraiser inheriting the portfolio is productive in a week. When it is bad, ten years of relationships walk out the door with whoever leaves.

What a donor record should hold

What belongs in a record is less obvious than it sounds, and most systems end up holding whatever the last person to touch them happened to care about. A record that survives a staff change covers six things.

Verified contact details, and the person's stated preferences for how and how often to be contacted.
Complete giving history: every gift, its date, amount, designation, and the appeal that produced it.
Solicitation history: every request made, including the ones that did not work.
Relationships: spouse or partner, employer, matching gift eligibility, who on your side knows them.
Interests and motivations, in their own words where you have them.
Notes from visits and calls, written as if the donor might one day read them.

Segmentation

Segmentation is grouping donors into like categories so you can treat different groups differently. It is the practical payoff of good records. A first-time $25 online donor and a fifteen-year $5,000 donor should not receive the same letter, and segmentation is what lets you send them different ones without writing two hundred individual notes.

Segment by	Example groups	Why it changes what you send
Giving level	Under $100, $100–$999, $1,000+	Determines whether an appeal or a visit is the right channel
Recency	Gave this year, lapsed one year, lapsed two or more	Lapsed donors need a re-engagement message, not a renewal message
Frequency	One-time, occasional, sustaining monthly	Monthly donors should almost never get a standard renewal appeal
Program interest	Scholarships, food access, capital project	People give again to the thing they gave to the first time
Channel preference	Mail, email, text, in person	Sending mail to someone who asked for email costs money and goodwill

The numbers that come out of good records

Good records pay for themselves in the form of numbers you can act on. Four of them carry most of the diagnostic weight, and each answers a different question about the health of the program.

Renewal rate: The percentage of last period's donors who gave again this period. Also discussed in reverse as attrition. It is the clearest single measure of whether your thanking and reporting are working.
Average gift: Total raised in a segment divided by the number of gifts. Useful for setting ask amounts and for spotting when a single large gift is hiding a weak year.
Lifetime value: What a donor has actually given you to date, and (projected forward) roughly how long they are likely to keep giving multiplied by how much and how often. It is the argument for spending real money on retention.
Response rate: The share of people who received an appeal and gave to it. Low response rates usually indicate a list problem or a message problem, and it is worth knowing which before you reprint.

Privacy is a fundraising issue

The information you hold about donors was given to you in confidence, often incidentally, in the course of someone doing something generous. Treating it carelessly is both an ethical failure and a practical one, because donors who feel surveilled or exposed stop giving.

Baseline data practices

✓Access to donor records is limited to staff whose job requires it.
✓The organization can say, in plain language, what it collects and why.
✓Any sharing, renting, or exchanging of donor information is disclosed before it happens.
✓Donors can ask what you hold about them, and can ask you to stop contacting them.
✓Anonymity requests are recorded in the system, not just remembered by one person.
✓Records are backed up, and someone other than one employee can restore them.

Prospect research has a bad reputation among people who have never done it, and sometimes deserves one. Done well, it means arriving at a meeting knowing enough not to waste the donor's time. Done badly, it means compiling a dossier on a private citizen who never asked for the attention.

Two kinds of research

Research divides into two activities that get conflated because they use the same tools. They answer different questions, run on different timelines, and are budgeted differently.

Proactive research: Looking across your whole file to find people you should be paying attention to. Includes screening your database against public asset records, comparing donors to regional and demographic models, and asking volunteers to rate people they know.
Reactive research: Investigating one specific person because a meeting is coming up or a name surfaced. Narrower, deeper, and driven by an immediate decision you have to make.

Common techniques

The techniques below span both kinds. Which combination you use matters less than being able to say, for any number in a profile, where it came from.

Asset screening: comparing your list against publicly reported holdings such as property records, company ownership, and disclosed stock.
Geodemographic segmentation: using neighborhood-level data as a rough proxy for likely capacity and interests.
Peer screening: sitting board members or campaign volunteers down with a list of names they know and asking them to rate capacity and likelihood.
Public digital sources: professional profiles, published board listings, news coverage, and other organizations' donor rolls.
Financial rating: the organization's own estimate of a probable gift size, combining everything above.

The line

A workable test: would you be comfortable if this person read the file you have built on them? Public, verifiable, relevant information passes. Speculation, information obtained from someone who was not free to share it, and details with no bearing on the relationship do not.

Research exists so that you can have a better conversation, not so that you can avoid having one.

Writing a donor profile

The output of research is a short, useful document, usually a page. A profile that runs to eight pages will not be read before the meeting, which makes it worthless regardless of how good the research was.

A one-page donor profile

✓Verified name, preferred name, contact details, and household.
✓The linkage: how they came to us, and who on our side knows them.
✓Giving history with us: first gift, largest gift, most recent gift, total.
✓Evidence of interest: what they have funded elsewhere, what they volunteer for, what they have said.
✓A capacity range with a one-line note on where the estimate came from.
✓Recommended next step, the person who should take it, and by when.

Everything on that page exists to serve the next conversation. If an item would not change what you ask or what you say, it is research done for its own sake, and it belongs in the file rather than the profile.