Prospect Research: What Is It and What Can It Look Like For Your Nonprofit?

Prospect research can be one of those “best practices” that feels intimidating, especially if your nonprofit has a development team of one. It can be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, which makes it daunting enough to take a backseat in many small nonprofits’ strategies, in addition to the myriad other fundraising projects development staff are already working on.

We want to help clarify what the actual process of prospect research looks like. And, if you are a small organization, how can you scale your prospect research efforts in ways that feel implementable as part of your workflow?

So, what is prospect research, really?

Prospect research is typically a proactive three-step research process in which nonprofits identify potential supporters and how to contact them. These potential supporters can include individuals, corporations, or foundations. Depending on the scope of the research you need to be doing at this time, you:

1. Set the major donor traits that you want to look for when identifying prospects.
2. Conduct an additional screening to help you learn more about them and prioritize who you want to contact.
3. Decide how you can best reach out to them and who in your organization should make that first point of contact.

Getting Started

Before diving into your research, we recommend knowing exactly what you’ll do with this information. What are the fundraising goals you want to achieve? Are you raising funds for a specific campaign? Are you shifting existing donors to higher levels of giving? Are you trying to get small-dollar donors, recurring donors, major donors, or planned gifts?

Your goals will be key in helping you build a donor profile and find shared characteristics you want to identify in your new prospects. We also recommend, at this stage, using your goals to refine the scope of your research. Instead of trying to prospect every type of supporter, choose just 1-3 types of support you want to focus on and set a clear number of prospects to aim for.

Similarly, when considering the qualities you want to look for in each prospect, choose just 3-5 to focus on that you think will best determine their fit for your goals. There are three types of traits you may consider when creating a donor profile:

• Their ability or capacity to support your organization
• Their interest in the work that you do
• Any existing connections they may have to your organization

Researching some of these traits can look like: investigating how your prospects have previously given to your nonprofit and/or to other causes, gleaning insights from their social media, etc. How much and how frequently did they donate? What are the causes they care about? What do they do for a living and where do they live? What are their hobbies and are there any indicators that they care about your mission? What potential relationships might they have with your existing stakeholders?

Choosing the Right Tools

This is where it’s critical for your organization to weigh the time and budget you have to spend on prospect research. Gathering big picture data on your prospects takes time. Wealth screening tools exist to help take some of that legwork off your plate, but they can also be expensive and inaccessible to nonprofits with smaller budgets.

We recommend investing in a subscription only when prospect research is part of a larger strategic direction for your organization and you have the staff capacity to get the most out of it. For instance, if your goal is to get more new donors over the next fiscal year and your team has budgeted the time to do prospect research, contact identified prospects, and continue cultivating those relationships, then investing in a wealth screening tool could be effective for your organization.

Alternatively, there are other ways to gather some of the information you may be looking for in a prospect. SEC.gov is a platform you can use to investigate any prior political giving, while Guidestar and Candid are useful for researching foundation giving. Your local business journals are good places to look for corporations, as well as high-net worth individuals. Some of these resources are also available through library or university subscriptions, depending on where you’re located.

In addition, get creative about what you can search for on the Internet. You can look into real estate listings to get a sense of home and property values, find connections through LinkedIn, create a Google Alert for when an individual or company is mentioned in the news, as well as explore professional associations in your area and their networks. Don’t forget that research can also be done in person! Know the qualities you’re looking for so that when you’re networking and attending events, you can identify these qualities in the people you’re meeting and use the chance to gauge their interest in your work.

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