Donor Prospect Research

How to Find Donor Prospects

If you work at a nonprofit, you have asked yourself, “How can I get new donors?”. Finding the best donor prospects is one of the essential aspects of building a donor base and growing your portfolio. In the donor lifecycle, getting new donors starts with donor prospect research.

How to Research Donor Prospects

To acquire new individual donors, you must start with donor prospect research. New donors can be found through donor prospect research tools. Products like donor prospect search engines like Wealth Engine allow for donor wealth screening. Usually, nonprofits use these tools to find prospects of wealth to be classified as major donor prospects. Ask yourself-- what qualities are you looking for beyond the net worth of the ideal potential donor? One way to streamline your research is to create a prospect research discovery form, where you can look for key information, like interests, in every donor you research.

Retaining New Donors

Once you have the information on potential donors, what should you do with that knowledge? First, you could store the information in a nonprofit database. Add potential new donors to your database. You may find through using donor prospect research tools that you have major donor prospects hidden in your database. After doing donor prospecting, the next phase of new donor acquisition is to cultivate. Start with effective donor marketing, like a new donor welcome letter for lower dollar donors or a cultivation phone call for potential major donors.

Julep, a CRM for Nonprofits

Julep is a new fundraising platform that streamlines nonprofit management while helping you focus on what’s important — building and cultivating donor relationships. Julep’s Moves Management module makes major donor portfolio management from prospecting to stewardship easy. Schedule a demo today!