Charities are feeling the pressure to expand their donor pools and double down on major gift fundraising. With the rising number of organisations applying for grants and community programmes stretched thin, it’s a viable solution for sustainable fundraising.
What’s often left out of the conversation when we talk about major gifts is the existing supporters in your database with major gift potential. Prospecting for new donors is exciting, and we’re big proponents of prospect research. However, prospect research to identify totally new donors requires planning. Instead of rushing into prospect research, we recommend you spend Q1 working with your existing supporters to nurture those relationships.
If you’re not sure which supporters in your database have major gift potential, wealth screening can help uncover them. Put simply, wealth screening involves comparing the information on your supporter database with our Wealth Intelligence Database to identify matches. A supporter who appears in both databases is likely to be a good candidate to make a major gift.
We’ve spent the last 27 years building our Wealth Intelligence Database, which holds information on about 270,000 high-net-worth and well-connected individuals and is updated daily. We can assure you that it’s perfectly lawful. Our database contains publicly accessible data from major industry directories, online sources, newspapers and journals.
Despite being the subject of much misinformation, wealth screening, carried out in accordance with GDPR requirements, is perfectly lawful. Before wealth screening, you must make sure your privacy notice clearly states your intentions and, if you need to update it, let your supporters know about the update, giving them ample time to opt out of data processing. In the seven years since GDPR came into effect, we’ve never known a high-level supporter to be surprised by this kind of research.
The biggest mistake we see charities make is thinking that wealth screening replaces relationships. Wealth screening is a tool to develop your major gift pipeline by identifying people you can build long-term, sustainable relationships with. It can help you identify who has potential, but you still need to build the relationship and, of course, make an ask!
The most successful charities are those that use wealth screening as part of their fundraising toolkit, by planning how they’ll use their data to build relationships and support corporate, regional and legacy teams as well as major gifts.
Ready to find the best prospects for your major gift fundraising programme?
Join our free webinar on Thursday 30 April, Getting the most out of wealth screening. As well as sharing the nuts and bolts of data protection, planning, doing and using the results for major gift fundraising, our CEO Kerry Rock will explore:
- What you need to know about wealth screening and data protection.
- Planning your wealth screening to be GDPR compliant.
- The steps for undertaking a screening.
- The results – what you get from a screening.
- How to make the most of your screening results.
- How to convince colleagues that screening is right for your organisation.