wealth screenings Archives - Helen Brown Group

April 4, 2019 By Helen Brown

Six Tips to Make Your Next Wealth Screening a Success

David Hargadon is a go-to expert on our team, especially where wealth screenings are concerned. This week I asked David to share some of his best tips and tricks for getting the most out of your wealth screening investment. Thanks, David! ~Helen

Wealth screenings can be daunting undertakings, and I can definitely say that I’ve done my fair share of them. Over the past several years, I’ve conducted dozens of wealth screenings, screening hundreds of thousands of prospects, so hopefully some of these tips and tricks I’ve learned can help make your next wealth screening a success for your organization.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

Many of the potential hiccups that arise through wealth screening processes can be avoided by making sure your data is clean prior to sending files off for processing. Before a wealth screening is one of the best times to clean up addresses, employment information, spouse information and more. Consider doing a data append to make sure your data is as current as possible. Having this information up to date and current can help reduce false positives in your results, making the verification process run much more smoothly. [Read more…]

January 19, 2017 By Helen Brown

Disentangling facts and values in the UK’s wealth screening controversy

This week we are honored to welcome guest contributor, Ian MacQuillin, founder and director of Rogare, the fundraising think tank at Plymouth University’s Hartsook Centre for Sustainable Philanthropy. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a serious change threatens to alter the landscape for fundraising and prospect research in the UK. I’m not succumbing to hyperbole when I say that very soon wealth screenings and possibly even prospect research could be greatly curtailed or eliminated altogether. Unless awareness is raised and the momentum shift is altered, the impact on the charity landscape will be devastating. I am grateful that Ian agreed to share not only what’s happening in the UK, but also how these changes could impact us in North America. I hope you will join me in sharing this article socially to help educate our peers. ~Helen

Abbaye de la Sauve Majeure – Ulysses, by Ophelia2 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

It’s possible that during the course of 2017, using Google to research a potential donor will be declared illegal by Britain’s data protection regulator. [Read more…]

December 22, 2016 By Helen Brown

A Passion Play, or How To Fix Your Lousy Wealth Screening Results

By English: Petty Officer 2nd Class Arcenio Gonzalez Jr., U.S. Navy [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

An awful lot has been happening regarding wealth screenings in the UK, and to quote a wise mentor, “Dark times lie ahead of us…” It’s a big deal, and everyone in fundraising (and especially prospect researchers) needs to know about this.

What’s going on, briefly? The British Information Commissioner’s Office’s (ICO) levied substantial fines against two large and well-respected British charities, publicly berated and shamed them for – amongst other things – conducting wealth screenings and prospect research. It’s a very worrisome time in the UK for our colleagues right now, and the fundraising community over here should take note – and provide moral support.

More on this developing story will be found here on the Intelligent Edge, but in the meantime, please take a moment to visit the Further Reading section at the end of this post to get yourself caught up on the ICO ruling and the UK fundraising community’s reaction to it. [Read more…]

November 17, 2016 By Helen Brown

Why wealth screenings – and prospect researchers – are so reliant on real estate

Here’s the complaint I hear frequently about wealth screenings, prospect research, and real estate: Knowing what our prospect holds in real estate is useless! She’s never going to give any of those houses to our organization!(*)

That’s absolutely right. She’s probably not. But that completely misses the point of why real estate is key.

Here’s why:

Imagine with me that you’re on a lovely sailboat. You’re out for the day with friends in the Caribbean enjoying the sun and the breeze. You’re moving along at a pretty fast clip with the wind, but all of a sudden an unexpected gust causes the boom to flip from one side of the boat to the other, and somehow you’re overboard.

The water’s warm but it’s going to take a few minutes for your friends to turn the boat around and get you. That thin orange ring they tossed you is by no means reliably holding up your weight, but it’ll help keep you up while you tread water until the boat comes back. That orange ring may be crummy, but it’s the most solid thing you’ve got right now. [Read more…]

August 27, 2015 By Helen Brown

What makes for a successful wealth screening?

Despite the title of this popular article, we love wealth screenings here at HBG. What we don’t love is when all that time, work, and money spent on a wealth screening go to waste. My colleagues Maureen, Tara, Heather W. and I were talking about this one day, and we were brainstorming so many great ideas that I asked them if we could capture them in a podcast for you. [Read more…]

November 20, 2014 By Helen Brown

International wealth screening companies

If you’re like most mid-to-large sized charitable or educational organization, you have a growing number of prospects and donors that live outside your home country.

Researching international prospects can be overwhelming, especially if you have a number of constituents and very little information. It’s fairly easy to hit up against a brick wall. What’s the most efficient way to get a window on your very best prospects overseas?

While not perfect, a wealth screening [Read more…]

September 18, 2014 By Helen Brown

Prospect identification: 4 ways to help retain new donors

One of the scariest things we know as fundraisers is that donor attrition is at stratospheric levels.

Studies by the renowned philanthropy scholar-evangelist Adrian Sargent have shown that (on average) charities lose 50 percent of their cash income from brand-new donors between their first and second gift, and up to 30 percent after that. (Read Dr. Sargeant’s outstanding article in Nonprofit Quarterly here). [Read more…]

March 27, 2014 By Helen Brown

Why wealth screenings are a waste of money

Money down the drain

“Yes, we did a wealth screening a couple of years ago. We didn’t really find it very helpful.” <pause>

“Well, to be honest, we didn’t really do anything with the information when it came back. It just kind of sat there.”

If I had a twenty for every time someone said that to me I’d be making major gifts already.

It absolutely kills me, too, because wealth screenings

a) are not cheap, and

b) can be worth every single penny.

[Read more…]

March 20, 2014 By Helen Brown

What your capital campaign plan is missing

There’s a critical piece of information missing from most capital campaign feasibility studies:

The amount of money an organization’s constituency can actually give.

We need the answer to that before we can set the goal, right?

And yet… most of the time nonprofit organizations launch their campaigns without knowing the full answer to that question. They wait until after they’ve launched to finally get all the pieces in place. Which seems kind of crazy to me.

[Read more…]

June 24, 2013 By Helen Brown

5 Great Ways to Find New Donors

You need new donors in major gifts, annual giving, planned giving, principal giving…okay, I understand: you need new donors in ALL areas of your fundraising operation. No worries. Here are just a few (of the many possible) remedies to help you identify and involve new donors.

Remedy #1: Have you taken care of donor attrition?

For many organizations, attrition numbers are scary-high right now. Do you know what percentage of your donors leave every year? It’s a lot easier (and cheaper) to keep a donor than it is to acquire a new one, so work at understanding how many are drifting away and why they leave. Then devise strategies to keep them.

Remedy #2: Do you know who your best prospects are?

It doesn’t matter if you work at an organization with less than 500 donors or one with a million. You need to get to know your donors better so you can find others like them. Data analytics – even basic queries – can provide characteristics of your best prospects to help you identify more people just like them. Slicing and dicing your data – even sparse data – will give you great answers. If you don’t have capacity to do it in-house, it’s very easy to find talented analytics experts to help you.

Remedy #3: Do you know what it is about your organization that donors love?

You may be surprised to learn that it’s not always a priority you’re pushing, but some other X factor that gets them jazzed. Ask them! Surveys are a great way to find out donor interests and opportunities you could capitalize on. (And don’t give me the old “but we’re not an alumni-based organization!” argument!) Alumni organization or not, don’t you have gorgeous t-shirts to give away as an incentive? Or what about a “Free ice cream cone in the splash park for donor survey responders appreciation day”? What do you have that prospects would value? Be creative and piggyback activities!

Remedy #4: Are current donors giving you what they’re giving other nonprofits?

An electronic screening can help you answer this question, and will help you elevate both annual fund and major gift numbers – probably significantly. Many of the vendors, in addition to providing asset information, also match the individuals in your database to donor honor roll lists of nonprofits across the US and United Kingdom. Someone who is regularly making gifts across town that are 10x what they give your organization needs to be asked for more.

Remedy #5: Maybe they don’t love you yet, but what about the ones who ‘Like’ you?

It’s a good bet that your nonprofit has some kind of social media presence at this point (and if not, it’s time to get a move-on). What have you done to convert those people who just Like you into future donors who love you? What can you offer them – of value – in exchange for their contact information? A study or white paper? Access to an invitation-only lecture? A free hour in the swimming pool? A ‘behind the scenes’ tour with the performers?

These are just a few of the many ways strategic prospect research can help you identify prospects. Thanks for reading – What ideas do you have for how you identify new donors?

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