Wealth screening

Wealth screening is the practice of using public records and third-party data — real estate holdings, political donation history, business affiliations, stock holdings, and other philanthropic gifts — to estimate an individual's capacity to make a major gift and their likely affinity for a given cause. Nonprofits run existing donors and prospect lists through a screening service to produce a capacity rating and an affinity or propensity score for each person.

This is the nonprofit analogue of lead scoring in sales, prioritizing who a limited major-gifts team should spend time cultivating rather than treating every donor equally. It differs from behavioral segmentation methods like RFM analysis, which infer likelihood to give from an organization's own giving history alone; wealth screening brings in external data the organization does not already hold, which is useful for prospects with no giving history yet.

Development teams use wealth screening results to prioritize outreach and set gift-ask amounts, feeding into donor lifetime value and Fundraising ROI models for major-gift programs specifically. The main pitfalls are treating a capacity score as a certainty rather than an estimate built from imperfect and sometimes stale public data, and using capacity alone without affinity: a wealthy individual with no connection to the cause is a poor prospect regardless of what a predictive analytics capacity model reports.