July 31, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Boston
Wealth-screening services take a charity’s donors and check them against databases of publicly available information on real-estate holdings, stock ownership, charitable contributions, and other data. The information that the searches uncover can help an organization identify donors who have sufficient assets to make a large contribution.
But one of the challenges is that “even a moderately successful screening” is likely to identify more potential donors than the organization’s fund raisers can get to right away, Troy Smith, associate director of prospect research at Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, N.C., told participants here at APRA’s annual conference.
APRA is a membership organization for fund raisers who focus on researching prospective donors and managing information about contributors.
“It’s a good problem to have,” said Mr. Smith. But the question then becomes what to do with those donors until a fund raiser can start to build a deeper relationship with them.
An organization might be tempted to stop soliciting such donors for annual gifts until someone can interact with them personally, but Mr. Smith thinks that would be a mistake.
“Give them opportunities to continue to give,” he said.
What a group might want to do is move them into a special society for big annual-fund donors where they will receive special mailings, or start inviting them to special events.
Said Mr. Smith: “Find ways to warm them up until [gift officers] can get to them.”
