Major Donor Prospects

Staci Strauss

Hello, how is everyone using Raiser's Edge to find major donors? I look forward to your advice.

Joe Moretti

@Staci Strauss You may want to start with folks who have a certain level of life time giving, say $50,000 and up or whatever criteria your organization defines “major donor”. Also if you use a research tool that gives Net Worth, you may want to use that also.

Dariel Dixon

It all depends on what the strategy is for major donors. I think looking at a list of donors who have made gifts at that level is a start. Maybe branching out to donors who are moving through the pipeline and have increased their giving. From there, everything else kinda gets into prospect research and there's other tools for that like @Joe Moretti mentioned.

RE can help you determine who to research, but can't perform the research.

Miki Martin

@Staci Strauss we added ResearchPoint two years ago with hopes of utilizing the added searches to identify new donors in our database that had not been approached for larger gifts. Unfortunately, right after that our Major Gifts person left and we have been waiting to fill that so our resource has gone mostly unused.

While NXT does have some ratings available without the ResearchPoint ratings, they are not necessarily as helpful as something like RP. You could always start by querying your database for those with five stars or four, which in database view would be your A and B ratings, I believe. Without having something more to help you drill down further, though, that does not necessarily help you to understand what type of donor they are or where they typically give.

I hope this helps some. Good luck!