“What we can do in four or five days might take someone who doesn’t have our resources weeks – or even months.”

In this imagined Q&A with fictional fundraiser Steph, we explain how Prospecting for Gold can help small charities with their major gift fundraising – from prospect research to getting in front of potential donors.

Hello, I’m Steph. I’m the sole fundraiser for a small perinatal mental health charity working with families in Dorset. We need to significantly boost our income if we’re going to keep our services running. We hope to do that by finding some major donors. My background is in community fundraising, so I’m not really sure where to start with all this. Can you help me?

We certainly can. First, we’ll help you identify good prospects – local people who have an affinity with your cause for whatever reason, and who have the capacity to donate. Once we’ve identified these people, we can help you engage with them.

Great. So where do we start?

Firstly, if you’ve got a database of current supporters, we can do a wealth screening. This will identify any wealthy people among your existing supporters.

I don’t really get what a ‘wealth screening’ is. Can you break it down a bit? 

Of course. It’s pretty simple really. At Prospecting for Gold, we have a database of over 270,000 wealthy individuals. All the information we hold on there is publicly accessible. We screen your database against ours – which means we look to see if any of the people on your database are also on our database. Then we let you know if we’ve got any matches. 

Our database isn’t huge…we only have around 2000 supporters on there right now. 

Well, based on our research, that could still throw up around 60 wealth matches as well as some additional million-pound property matches, so it’s still worth doing the screening.

What if we want to look beyond our database and make new contacts locally?

We can help with that too. Through our Millionaire Next Door research, we can identify wealthy people in your area who you don’t yet know. We’ll find a group of between 40 and 100 wealthy individuals in Dorset that you can try and make a connection with.

Additionally, if you’ve already got one or two key supporters, we can use network mapping to give you an idea of wealthy people they might know locally. So, let’s say you’ve got a major donor called Sam. Using network mapping, we find out about wealthy people in Dorset that Sam might know. You can then go to Sam with a list of names and say, ‘Can you introduce me to any of these people please?’

I wish we had a Sam! Are there any other ways you can help me find major donors?

Have you thought about corporates? We can help you find key people in local profitable businesses, or national businesses that have headquarters in Dorset. They may have giving programmes that you can apply to. We can also tell you about any local grant making trusts and foundations.

What about wealthy people who might have an interest in perinatal mental health – could you help me find them?

Absolutely. We call this ‘affinity research’. Through our New Names service, we’d look for wealthy individuals in Dorset with a particular interest in mental health and wellbeing. In this case, a really good prospect might be someone who has children or grandchildren of their own and has previously supported other mental health charities.  

Once I’ve got a list of potential major donors, how do I establish a relationship with them? As I said, I’m pretty new to major donor fundraising…

Right, let’s say we’ve done the ‘identify’ work – we’ve done our prospect research and we’ve given you a list of names. Now it’s time for the ‘engage’ work.

We have a small charity package that could be right for you. We’ll hold you by the hand, guiding you through how to set up the basic functions of a major donor programme. The package includes helping you write your first case of support and developing individual development plans for the key donors we’ve found through the identification process.   We can also talk you through how to make sure your major gift fundraising meets all the data protection regulations.

In essence, we can help you get in front of the prospects on your list so that you can start to build rapport with them and inspire them with your services and impact.

I’m in! Now I just need to convince my CEO to find budget for this…

It’s good to talk about all this in terms of time and efficiency. What we can do in four or five days might take someone who doesn’t have our resources weeks – or even months. With our Wealth Database and a team of expert researchers, we can delve straight in – and very quickly and efficiently we can give you a list of at least 50 good prospects. If that doesn’t convince your CEO, we’re happy to have an informal call with them – no strings attached!