Understanding Your Donors: Wealth Screening for Nonprofits

The Keela Team • Dec 08, 2020

Introducing Keela’s Capacity to Give Insights

Donors in North America gave an unprecedented amount in 2019, over $450 billion with individual, corporate, and foundation giving all having risen from the previous year.

Yet one thing that isn’t increasing as fast as generosity, is our fundamental understanding of who our donors are, how likely they are to give, and how much they’re likely to give. That trifecta is the key not only to a healthy, sustainable fundraising strategy but to creating long-lasting donor relationships that will ensure your organization thrives well into the future.

So how, as a fundraiser, do you begin to answer these questions?

Cue the launch of Keela’s Capacity to Give Insights!

We’re excited to announce that you can now do prospect research from within Keela using philanthropic data readily available at your fingertips. This suite of insights includes Keela’s new DonorSearch Integration and a Demographics tool!

Demographics is free for all Keela users and includes wealth markers such as median household income, median age, education levels, employment rate, and percent owners vs renters for nearly every postal code in Canada, Australia, and the US.

Our integration with DonorSearch is an additional upgrade for users on Keela USA that helps identify your best prospective donors, major gift donors, annual fund donors, and planned gift donors based on DonorSearch’s extensive philanthropy and wealth analytics.

Depending on your donor’s history, you may find your contact’s dashboard filled with:

Wealth Assessments
Real Estate Value
SEC Stock Holdings
Business Revenue
Nonprofit Board Seatings
Philanthropic Giving History and Transactions
Largest Gift Found

These insights allow users to learn things about their donors that they might not have thought would be useful before, and show them the true depth of how powerful data can be! And it works through a process called wealth screening.

What is Wealth Screening?

Wealth Screening is a powerful prospect research tool that nonprofits can deploy to help determine a donor’s capacity to give. It helps to unveil how much wealth a potential donor has by compiling public data like real estate ownership, stock holdings, and any business or political affiliations, as well as any past information, like previous giving history.

This information helps your organization focus on specific groups of donors rather than spending time cultivating every donor in your database. It allows you to be more targeted based on your specific fundraising expectations and set realistic goals for your nonprofit.

How to Boost Your Fundraising With Wealth Screening

Rather than create new engagement or donor acquisition strategies, you can use Keela’s Capacity to Give Tool to gain a comprehensive understanding of who your donors are. The information gleaned from Demographics and DonorSearch will then shape future stewardship strategies, making it easy to segment, create targeted communications, and provide a solicitation framework to approach your donors based on their estimated generosity.

See How Nonprofits Use Keela to Raise 4x More!

Get a glimpse of how Keela’s donor management system can help you develop better relationships, retain donors and raise more for your cause.

Learn More

Find Major Donors

Did you know that 88% of donation dollars raised come from just 12% of donors? In fact, broken down even further, 76% of gifts are from a mere 3% of donors. Even with the rise of online donations and the associated rise of micro philanthropy, the sector still heavily relies on finding, stewarding, and retaining major donors.

And while a major gift will look different to each organization – some consider $100,000 a major gift whereas others consider $2,000 – it’s essential your organization has a major gifts program in place.

To increase your revenue from significant gifts, first, you need to identify who possible candidates could be. Keela uses a fundraising tool called Smart Ask to automatically provide a recommended donation amount based on previous giving history, but what if there is no donation history available? You could be losing out because you’re under-asking.

While there’s no way to be absolutely certain who a major donor is – and whether they’re willing to give – by using the Capacity to Give Tools, you’ll be able to identify who among your donor pool’s high-net-worth individuals has the potential to be a major donor, so you can plan your outreach accordingly. Read more about how DonorSearch pinpoints major donors.

Learn How Keela’s DonorSearch Integration Helps Nonprofits Find More Major Donors

Upgrade Donations

The basic component of wealth screening is helping you understand how much each donor can realistically afford to give. If you have a healthy monthly giving program, that’s great. You’ve already unlocked one of the puzzle pieces to an effective long-term strategy.

But how do you know whether your recurring donors have more capacity to give? When checking in on the health of your recurring donation program, use Keela’s Capacity to Give Insights to determine which wealth bracket each of your recurring donors is coming from. You may find, statistically, some are giving as expected, but in some areas, there’s room to nurture those donors and increase their monthly gift.

Plan Solicitations

The more information you have about your supporters, the easier your job will be in cultivating effectively. If you personalize their communications based on their specific wants and needs, then they’re more likely to donate. For this, you can segment donors based on their audience profiles.

Building profiles will be all the easier using wealth indicators such as home values, estimated income, donation history, and other insights found in our Capacity to Give.

Wealth Insights Best Practices

Whether you’re using Keela’s wealth screening tools or not, there are three components that will make your prospect research successful.

Maintaining a clean donor database – In a previous blog, we referred to clean data as a high protein, low sugar diet for your CRM, and this analogy extends to any fundraising tools you employ as well. The better your data, the better your results. End of story.

Tips to keep your database well-fed:

Create a strict process for data entry – and stick to it!
Ensure you have a complete and correct address for your donors – this is vital for generating our Capacity to Give insights!
Get rid of duplicate information (Don’t worry, Keela does this for you)

Use segments – At Keela, we love segments and all of their fundraising superpowers. It’s essentially a way to be more focused, more targeted, and achieve better results by sending the right information to the right audience.

Prioritize your outreach plans – While you want to build relationships with all your supporters, to be most effective, create a tiered solicitation strategy that targets those most receptive to giving or donors most likely to affect your current fundraising strategy. Stewardship is a long game, and it’s important not to nurture each donor the same. Everyone will have different paths, needs, and gift sizes, so instead of treating it as a one-size-fits-all, you can use wealth screening tools to meet donors where they are.

Understanding who your donors are, what they’re able to give, and when they’re receptive to giving is a fundamental part of growing your nonprofit. Using Keela’s Capacity to Give insights will enable you to create realistic fundraising goals while spending less time developing general cultivation strategies.

If you’re looking to unlock the power of wealth screening, book a demo today.