You’ve just done your first wealth screening and you have lots of new data that will hopefully help your organization meet new prospects and raise even more money.
But what do you do with all that data? You don’t want the time or money spent on the wealth screening to go to waste! How do you take the next step?
Consider taking these three steps to transform your new-found wealth of data into actionable goals. Some of these suggestions may happen simultaneously; some are steps you might want to work on before you get your screening data back.
1 – Have a plan for how prospect research is going to handle the data
You are likely going to get a lot of data back–maybe 100 records, 1000 records or even 100,000. The data is going to be raw, unverified data. That means that there are going tobe some false positives, like misattributing a lot of wealth to one person with a common name like Jane Smith, or even false negatives, such as people who may not initially appear wealthy but are actually high net worth individuals.
Ideally, you should have a plan to verify the data. It’s unlikely that you will be able to verify everything, and probably not worth the time to do so. But you can come up with ways to segment the data so you can verify the best opportunities. Maybe you start with people with the highest number of found assets, going from the top to bottom. Maybe you have a specific geographic location in mind. Perhaps you plan on verifying a certain number of prospects. Figuring out how to handle verifying the data is critical.
Another critical task is to figure out how you might be getting capacity ratings into the database. That will require working with your IT or data team to import capacity ratings. Of course, not all of the data is going to be verified, but you do want the best bits available for the future.
2 – Work with leadership to roll out new prospects into gift officer portfolios
You’ve got this whole new group of prospects, but how will they turn into gifts received? By getting those names out in front of gift officers! But this is going to require some thought and buy-in from leadership.
Part of that work may be explaining the importance of this data. Hopefully that step happened before the screening even took place. Together with leadership, you can come up with a plan to assign folks into portfolios. One way is to automatically assign the top prospects to gift officers based on criteria–such as by amount or geographic location. Another way is to present gift officers with a list of promising folks and have them select the ones they want.
Some organizations may assign those top new prospects to their president and board chair. Others may come up with plans to bring top new prospects to their boards by geographic locations as well.
Some organizations may want to assign prospects before they are verified as a way of getting the ball rolling. When resources are scarce, making appointments first to establish interest can be a legitimate strategy. Just make sure the gift officers, staff and board members know that the data is unverified and that there may be some false positives etc.
There are a lot of different ways to roll out the findings of a screening but it’s important to have a plan and stick to it.
3 – Leadership should identify new goals for these new prospects
With all these new prospects, hopefully assigned to specific people in the organization and possibly volunteers, leadership should ideally have goals set up for the new prospects. It may be rolled into overall goals for a gift officer–goal for number of phone calls, meetings, even solicitations.
Or it can be new goals focused on the new prospects, such as reaching 50% of the new prospects in one year and 100% by year two. That way, there is accountability and known goals for gift officers and other people to work the new prospects from the screening.
Additional Resources
- The Results are in! Common Wealth Screening Questions | Aspire Research Blog 2019
- The Path(s) to Major Gift Fundraising | Jennifer Filla Blog 2018
- After the Wealth Screening: Taking a New Direction | Jennifer Filla Blog 2018
- Warning! Wealth Screenings Create a Skills Gap | Jennifer Filla Blog 2014
