TLDR
Prospect research is the process of identifying donors who have the financial capacity, the interest in your mission, and a connection to your organization that makes them realistic candidates for major gifts. This guide walks through the full process, from defining what you're looking for to building the profile and entering a prospect into cultivation.
Prospect research is one of the most misunderstood activities in nonprofit fundraising. Many organizations treat it as a one-time screening exercise—upload your database, get back a list of wealthy people, start calling. That approach consistently underperforms.
Effective prospect research is an ongoing process that identifies individuals who have three things: the financial capacity to make a major gift, genuine affinity for your mission, and a connection to your organization or someone in your network who can facilitate an introduction. Capacity without affinity leads to cold solicitations. Affinity without capacity leads to deep relationships with donors who can’t give at the level your organization needs. Both are wasted effort.
This is a nine-step process that produces genuine major gift prospects—not just names on a list.
Step 1: Define What You’re Looking For
Before you run a single search, define your criteria. What counts as a major gift prospect for your organization?
Start with a capacity threshold: the minimum gift size that would justify the time investment of a major gift cultivation strategy. For most organizations in the $500K–$10M range, that threshold is somewhere between $5,000 and $25,000. Set a number and stick to it—otherwise “prospect research” becomes a general database cleanup project with no clear output.
Beyond capacity, define your affinity indicators. What evidence suggests someone cares about your cause?
- Past giving to your organization (or to similar organizations in your sector)
- Volunteer history with your organization
- Program beneficiary or family member of beneficiary
- Board service at related organizations
- Professional work in your sector (a pediatrician on your child wellness nonprofit’s list; a housing developer on your affordable housing list)
- Geographic connection to the community you serve
Finally, define your connection threshold. Cold solicitations rarely work at major gift levels. What counts as a sufficient connection? Board member relationship? Staff relationship? Mutual organizational board service?
Writing these criteria down before you start ensures that your research output is useful, not just voluminous.
Step 2: Start with Internal Data
The highest-value prospect research source you have is your existing donor database. Every prospect research process should start here before any external tool is used.
Pull and review:
- Lapsed donors who gave $500+: donors who gave at significant levels and then stopped giving are often warmer prospects than new names
- Sustained mid-level donors ($250–$2,500/year for several consecutive years): consistent giving at this level often indicates capacity and affinity that hasn’t been fully developed
- Volunteers with significant tenure: people who give time are telling you something about their values
- Event attendees who aren’t donors: they came to your gala, they’ve seen your work, they haven’t been asked
- Board members’ family and friends networks: documented in relationship notes if your system tracks it
Internal data is more reliable than external data because you have direct evidence of interest and relationship. A donor who has given three times is a prospect; a wealthy person found in a database screening who has never heard of you is a name.
Step 3: Screen Your Existing Database
Once you’ve identified your internal prospect pool, a wealth screening of that pool helps you prioritize cultivation resources. Wealth screening matches your donor records against public data sources to estimate financial capacity.
Major providers include iWave, DonorSearch, WealthEngine, and Target Analytics (a Blackbaud product). Each uses a different combination of data sources and scoring methodologies. All of them produce estimates, not facts.
For a database of 1,000 to 10,000 records, a batch screening typically costs a few hundred to a few thousand dollars depending on the provider and the data package you select. The output is a spreadsheet or database export with capacity ratings and underlying data for each record.
Use the results to segment your internal pool: high capacity and high affinity, high capacity and unknown affinity, mid-capacity and high affinity. Those segments determine your research priority.
Step 4: Identify Wealth Indicators
For your highest-priority prospects, deeper individual research beyond the wealth screening output is appropriate. Public records provide the most reliable wealth indicators.
Real estate holdings: county property records are public in most U.S. states and searchable online. A person who owns a primary residence worth $1.2M and a vacation property worth $800K has a meaningful asset base.
Business ownership: public business registration records, LinkedIn, and company websites can confirm business ownership. Private company owners with significant businesses often have substantial net worth not visible in other records.
SEC filings: executives at publicly traded companies are required to file Form 4 (insider transactions) and proxies that disclose stock ownership and compensation. SEC EDGAR is publicly searchable. An executive with 200,000 shares of a company trading at $40/share has $8M in that position alone—visible in public filings.
Foundation trusteeships: if a prospect is a trustee of a private family foundation, that foundation’s Form 990-PF is public and shows the foundation’s total assets, annual giving, and grant recipients. This is direct evidence of philanthropic behavior.
Political giving: the Federal Election Commission (FEC) database is publicly searchable by name and employer and shows federal campaign contributions. This is not a capacity indicator per se, but political giving to candidates in the $1,000–$10,000 range suggests philanthropic capacity.
Combine these sources to build a picture of capacity. No single data point is definitive—multiple converging indicators are more reliable than any one source.
Step 5: Assess Affinity
Capacity data tells you what someone could give. Affinity evidence tells you whether they might.
Affinity assessment draws on:
- Your internal records: giving history, event attendance, volunteer hours, board service
- Relationship proximity: who on your board, staff, or donor roster knows this person and how well?
- Professional and personal background: does their career, educational background, or life experience connect to your mission?
- Other philanthropic activity: what other organizations do they give to publicly? (Foundations and university alumni databases sometimes make this visible)
- Social media presence: what causes do they publicly support? (Handle this with discretion—research is not surveillance)
An affinity score is less quantifiable than a capacity estimate, but it’s at least as important to the final qualification judgment. A prospect with very high capacity and low affinity requires significant cultivation investment before a solicitation is warranted—if it’s warranted at all.
Step 6: Qualify Through Conversation
This step is where most research processes break down. Organizations treat wealth screening output as a solicitation list. It isn’t.
Qualification is the process of confirming through actual conversation—often an initial cultivation meeting—that a prospect’s capacity and affinity are real, that their relationship with your organization is positive, and that there’s a basis for a major gift conversation.
A cultivation visit is not a solicitation. It’s a listening meeting: what do they know about your organization? What aspects of your work interest them most? What philanthropic priorities do they have right now?
The qualification meeting answers: is this person actually a prospect for a major gift, at what level, and on what timeline? You cannot reliably answer those questions from database research alone.
Step 7: Build the Prospect Profile
For each qualified prospect, create a prospect profile in your donor management system. A complete profile includes:
- Biographical information: age, family situation, employer, career history
- Capacity estimate: your best estimate of their giving capacity, with the evidence it’s based on
- Affinity summary: what connects them to your mission, based on your research and any conversations
- Relationship map: who at your organization knows this person and at what level of relationship
- Giving history: everything in your database, plus any publicly available giving information
- Recent touchpoints: notes from every cultivation meeting, event attendance, email, and call
- Proposed ask: your current thinking on the size and timing of the eventual solicitation
The profile is a living document, updated after every contact.
Step 8: Assign to a Relationship Manager
Every qualified prospect should have one assigned relationship manager—the person responsible for the cultivation strategy and, eventually, the ask. Without assignment, prospects fall through.
At smaller organizations, the development director or ED manages all major gift relationships. At larger organizations, portfolios are distributed among gift officers, each typically managing 100–150 active prospects.
The assignment decision should consider:
- Existing relationships (assign to the person who already has a connection)
- Geographic proximity
- Mission affinity alignment (a gift officer who worked in education may be better positioned with a prospect interested in your education programs)
Step 9: Enter into Moves Management
Moves management is the structured cultivation process that moves a prospect from identification through qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship. Each “move” is a planned contact designed to deepen the relationship and advance the prospect toward readiness for an ask.
A typical cultivation sequence might look like:
- Introduction meeting (get acquainted, listen)
- Program tour or event invitation
- Personal update letter with impact story
- Targeted follow-up conversation about specific program they expressed interest in
- Introduce to board member with relevant connection
- Solicitation meeting
- Post-gift stewardship (site visit, personal thank-you from leadership, recognition)
Document every move in your donor management system. The relationship history is what makes it possible for someone else to pick up cultivation if the relationship manager changes.
Privacy and Ethics Throughout
Prospect research uses publicly available data—not information obtained through deception, not data shared in confidence, and not surveillance of personal behavior.
The Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) and the Association of Professional Researchers for Advancement (APRA) both publish ethics guidelines for prospect research. The core principles:
- Use only publicly available or voluntarily shared information
- Store research responsibly—prospect profiles contain sensitive personal and financial information
- Do not share research findings outside the development team and board leadership
- Respect donor privacy preferences
- Do not research someone’s personal life beyond what’s relevant to philanthropic capacity and affinity
Research that makes a prospect feel surveilled damages the relationship before cultivation begins.
For organizations managing significant donor portfolios, having a CRM that maintains complete relationship histories and links to donor retention reporting helps ensure prospect research investments translate into long-term donor relationships rather than one-time solicitations.
Related resources:
- Donor Retention Strategies
- Donor Wealth Screening Guide
- Donor Retention Reporting
- Free Major Donor Cultivation Playbook
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