The Forgotten Foundations of Fundraising

Chapter 7Assessing the Donor Party—and, Foundations Are People, Too!

“Donor research” is a hot niche business these days, rather as cupcake boutiques were yesterday, mac‐and‐cheese eateries are today, and—what?—steamed broccoli bars or donkey‐cheese shoppes will be tomorrow.

How do you identify promising donors?

In general, our least favorite means is to pay a vendor a huge fee—there's always a huge fee—to examine your entire donor base and disgorge reams of data about the net worth, “giving capacity,” and “propensity to give,” among a thousand other measures, of the persons therein. These services will tell you who's a millionaire, who's a billionaire, who's a pauper, and who's a prince. Their computers comb through such public records as SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) transactions and cough up the names of the wealthiest people on your list. They can more or less point you to the high‐net‐worth people, correlate giving capacity with age, and direct you to the best planned‐giving prospects.

It sounds, in the parlance of the huckster, like a no‐brainer. If you know who's got the money, this whole fundraising thing gets a lot easier, no?

Well, yes and no; if you have a donor base of perhaps 12,000 names, you'll be spending at least $3,000 on this search—not chickenfeed. Yes, you will have a universe of intelligence. But so what? You need actionable intelligence. A person's net worth ultimately has surprisingly little bearing on how much money he or she will give your ...