Six Database Queries That Will Transform Your Planned Gift Program

Katherine Swank

Twenty “average” planned gifts* can provide $1,000,000 of mission revenue to your organization. Do you know how to find the best-qualified prospects in your constituent pool for planned giving marketing? Can you separate out the ones that might want to hear about a CRT from those that might be interested in a charitable gift annuity? Who owns large amounts of securities and should know how to donate stock to the organization? With marketing responses in hand, do you know what possible assets the responder might own which could help you guide a conversation about the use of such assets?

Think of the synergy the answers to these questions could have for your program promoting gifts of assets. If you’d like to learn more, this article is for you!
Prospect research and prospect research tools help you find these prospects and information quickly. Public record data and artificial intelligence provide you near-instantaneous information on your planned gift marketing respondents and new donors. Here’s a sampling of the prospect pools you can create:

• Constituents that have already made a planned gift to another organization
• Donors that are no longer working and are interested in estate planning, retirement, and financial planning topics
• Marketing respondents with extraordinarily large incomes
• Holders of large amounts of real property, business holdings, public company insider stocks and options
• Individuals with a very high net worth or large amounts of cash-type investments
• People who own income-producing property

If your organization is using Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint® (RP) prospect research software tool, you can be periodically updated on your constituent pool easily and efficiently.

There are only 2 steps needed to get started:

Screen constituent records through our WealthPoint database
Within ResearchPoint, you’ll need to screen desired records through the WealthPoint public-record database to access known philanthropic giving history on your prospect or list of prospects. This can be done:

• One prospect at a time, or
• Groups of two-or-more prospects at one time

This Knowledgebase Solution tells you more. But wait! Your list of records isn’t yet in ResearchPoint, but it’s in Raiser’s Edge? Here’s how to quickly move your list into ResearchPoint for screening.

Create and Periodically Refresh Queries to Find Great Prospects for Gifts of Assets
Now that your screening has completed, create any or all of the following queries in ResearchPoint to sort through and find your priority prospects. Also remember, queries can be changed to move the parameters up or down; so, if household income of $500,000 is too low for your inquiry, change the query parameters higher. It’s easy!

• Known planned gifts to other organizations
• Real estate, business, or stock holdings exceeds $5 million
• Income-producing property owners
• Annual income exceeds $500,000 or Net worth exceeds $5 million or Invested Assets exceeds $5 million
• Older Age or Birthdate
• Estate, retirement, and financial planning interest

Use the step-by-step query detail I’ve provided on the attached sheet to create these queries in ResearchPoint. Through linking records and syncing data from ResearchPoint into Raiser’s Edge and RE NXT, you can use much of this data to filter on lists you have there as well.


If you need help in creating these queries in ResearchPoint, reach out to our stellar Support Analyst team at www.Blackbaud.com, Support, and then Chat.

* Assumes an average planned gift of $50,000.