3 Ways To Use Prospect Research In Major Gift Fundraising

Every fundraising campaign needs a reliable structure to support the cultivation of major gift donors. Prospect research provides the foundation for any fundraising efforts that seek to identify and engage new or existing major gift donors.

Prospect research can help your fundraising team unearth a wealth of information about prospective donors such as previous charitable donations, involvement in nonprofit foundations, and donations to political campaigns. Knowing how to leverage this information can drastically improve your major gift fundraising.

1. Identify Major Gift Prospects

Major gift prospects tend to be donors who give $5,000+ to your nonprofit (although that minimum number can vary by organization). The top giving indicators include a combination of both philanthropic and wealth markers:

• Charitable giving to your nonprofit


• Charitable giving to other nonprofits


• Involvement as a volunteer or board member of a nonprofit or foundation


• Political giving


• Real estate ownership

It’s important to research both the philanthropic histories and the wealth capacities of donors.

• According to our research, donors who gave $5k-$10k were about 5 times more likely to donate to another nonprofit, while donors who gave $100k+ were over 32 times more likely to donate elsewhere.


• This positive correlation is also seen in wealth markers, such as real estate. Donors with the highest valued real estate, valued at $2 million or more, were over 17 times more likely to give to another nonprofit.

Knowing the predictors to look for is the first step, but digging into that information and what it means reveals that, once you understand who your major gift donors are, you can further segment them into groups, such as your highest quality major gift prospects.

Both philanthropic and wealth indicators can be powerful predictors on their own, but when the two come together you can discover not just willing donors and not just wealthy donors, but willing donors who can give significant gifts.

Potential major gift donors could be:

• Loyal donors who give smaller gifts to your nonprofit but larger gifts to other organizations.


• People who have never given to you but donate to similar causes.


• Relations of other donors, whether major givers or not, who, with the aid of prospect research, you identify as having the capacity to give generously to your nonprofit.

If you know what to look for, prospect research can make a major gift prospect stand out like a dependable brick house among a neighborhood of log cabins.

2. Update Biographical Information

Dialing wrong numbers, calling someone ‘Mrs.’ instead of “Ms.’, and talking to a Patriots fan about how great the Jets are can waste valuable time and money. It’s important to stay updated on basic prospect information, such as:

• Contact Information – Name, address, phone number, email, employment status, etc. can all change with the natural passage of time. Knowing who to call, where to call them, what to call them, and other basic information goes a long way towards both building trust and establishing a relationship in the first place.


• Marital Status – Is a donor single? Married? Knowing this information is important because spouses may have the potential to become major gift prospects too.


• Hobbies & Interests – Interests can reveal the causes prospects care about, how they think, and discussion topics both to humanize conversations and to help you to relate better to what they invest themselves in.

This information both makes it easier to contact donors and allows you to tailor pitches to the individual prospect. For example, Jim might be a former football player while Sandra spearheads a book club. If you can relate your nonprofit to football for Jim and reading for Sandra then you take the step from being just another nonprofit seeking money to a nonprofit who gets it and cares that each and every donor is giving to a cause that truly matters to him or her.

3. Find New Prospects

Finding new donors is all about connections to your existing donors as well as discovering the donors of similar nonprofits. Connections that indicate potential prospects include:

• Board members of nonprofits and foundations


• Business, personal, and family relations to existing donors


• Donors to similar nonprofits

Prospect research allows you to obtain new names and then discover if those prospects are good fits for your nonprofit. Step one is gaining more names, and step two is narrowing that list down to legitimate prospects.

Next: Create A Solicitation Plan

You’ve got all this new data and lists of potential prospects. How do you manage it all? Planning, of course, which entails answering a few necessary questions:

• How many major gift prospects would you like to add to your portfolio?


• How many prospects do you realistically have the time and resources to obtain?


• What specific increase in money are you looking for?


• Are you willing to travel to speak with donors?


• Will you host events to entice prospects?

The data prospect research returns can feel overwhelming, but it’s better to know your prospects through-and-through than to go in blind. Developing a plan of attack forces you to organize your data such that it’s easily accessible, understandable, and available to all relevant staff. Additionally, when your staff has a plan to follow, they’ll be both more efficient with their efforts and better focused on the right prospects and how to speak to each one according to their individual profiles.

There are many ways to increase major gifts, such as through stewardship, but prospect research stands as a superior strategy that can support any and all other discovery methods.

In order to last, a house must be built from durable materials. Fundraising is not a temporary fix, but an ongoing effort that endures seasons of change. Prospect research can unearth the major gift prospects who will transform your fundraising efforts into a more formidable nonprofit structure.

3 Ways To Use Prospect Research In Major Gift Fundraising