Wealth Screening & Prospect Research: A DIY-First Guide

The two halves: capacity and affinity

Every prospect rating reduces to two questions, and confusing them is the most common mistake small teams make.

Capacity is the financial ceiling — the largest gift a person could plausibly make over a multi-year period without changing their lifestyle. It is read from wealth markers: the assessed or market value of real estate, ownership stakes in private businesses, holdings of publicly traded stock, compensation, and the size of past charitable gifts. Capacity is always an estimate, often a wide range, and it tells you nothing about willingness.

Affinity (sometimes split into propensity for charitable giving generally and affinity for your cause specifically) is the connection — whether this person has a reason to care about your mission. Signals include prior gifts to you, gifts to organizations like yours, volunteer or board history, a personal or family link to the issue you address, event attendance, and warm relationships with people already in your orbit.

The field's most durable finding is that past giving is the single best predictor of future giving — and giving to similar causes is among the strongest affinity signals you can find. That is why your own database usually out-predicts any purchased dataset for the prospects you already know.

A wealth screen alone only fills in the capacity axis. The affinity axis comes from your own records and relationships — which is precisely why screening is a starting point, not an answer. For turning a qualified prospect into a cultivated relationship, see moves management and major gifts.

Free DIY research, source by source

Before paying anyone, work these free sources in order. For a list of 20 to 50 warm prospects, an afternoon here often beats a screening run.

1. Your own giving history (start here). Your CRM or spreadsheet already holds the most predictive data you own: gift recency, frequency, total cumulative giving, largest single gift, years of consecutive support, event attendance, and volunteer or board service. Sort your file by cumulative giving and by consecutive years before you look anywhere else. See donor segmentation for how to slice this.

2. ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer. Nonprofit Explorer publishes Form 990, 990-EZ, and 990-PF filings. Search a prospect's family or private foundation to see its assets, grantees, and typical grant size; search nonprofits where they sit on the board; and confirm gifts they have made that appear on a foundation's grant list. It is free and covers filings going back roughly two decades (as of 2026 — verify).

3. County property records. Most county assessor and recorder offices put parcel data online for free: owner name, assessed value, sometimes recent sale price. Real estate is the most accessible wealth marker for everyday major-gift prospects. Use assessed value as a floor; market value is usually higher.

4. SEC EDGAR. EDGAR full-text search surfaces filings for public-company insiders. Directors, officers, and owners of more than 10% of a registered company's stock must file Form 4 disclosing their holdings and trades (as of 2026 — verify). This only helps for the subset of prospects tied to public companies, but where it applies the data is precise.

5. LinkedIn and the open web. Confirm current employer, title, board seats, and professional affiliations — context that sharpens both capacity and affinity. Use only information relevant to your fundraising relationship (see the ethics section).

6. Candid Funding Information Network. Many public libraries and partner sites offer free or low-cost in-person access to Candid's funder and grantee databases — useful for connecting a prospect's foundation to causes like yours.

How capacity estimates work (and their limits)

Wealth-screening vendors and DIY researchers both lean on the same rules of thumb. Knowing the math lets you sanity-check any vendor score — and reminds you how rough these numbers are.

Real estate to net worth. A primary residence is only a slice of someone's net worth. Practitioners commonly assume real estate represents roughly 20% to 25% of an individual's total net worth, so a quick floor is: estimated net worth ≈ home value ÷ ~0.20–0.25 (as of 2026 — verify; the IRS estate-data ratio is lower for very wealthy individuals, which inflates the implied net worth).

Net worth to giving capacity. A widely cited heuristic is that a prospect's five-year giving capacity is around 5% of net worth, and ask ranges of roughly 1% to 5% of net assets over three to five years are common (as of 2026 — verify). An income-based shortcut estimates annual capacity at about 10% of income.

Worked example: a capacity and affinity scoring grid

Here is a simple, defensible grid a volunteer or staffer can build in a spreadsheet. Score each prospect 1 to 5 on a few capacity factors and a few affinity factors, total each axis, then plot them into a quadrant. The numbers below are filled in for three sample prospects.

Scoring key (1 = low, 5 = high): rate each factor from what your free research turned up.

How to read it:

• Rivera screens wealthy (a high-value home, a private business, generous gifts to peer charities) but barely knows you. The move is not an immediate major-gift ask — it is engagement to build affinity first: an invitation, a tour, a conversation about the mission.
• Okafor is the textbook major-gift prospect: solid capacity and the highest possible affinity (a loyal multi-year donor with a direct personal link to your cause). Assign a relationship manager and begin moves management now.
• Lindqvist has modest capacity but real loyalty — the ideal monthly-giving, stewardship, and eventual legacy-giving prospect. Steward warmly; do not over-invest research time chasing a major gift that is not there.

Total time to build and score this for 40 prospects: a few hours, $0 in tools. That is the bar a paid product has to beat for a small shop.

Ethics and privacy: the Apra norms

Prospect research means assembling a file on a private individual, so the profession holds itself to written ethics. The Apra Statement of Ethics is the standard reference; its principles apply whether you use free public records or a paid tool.

• Relevance. The most underused test: just because information is findable does not mean it belongs in a profile. Collect only what is relevant to the fundraising relationship — wealth markers, philanthropic history, mission connection — and leave out the rest.
• Accuracy. Record sources and dates. Flag estimates as estimates. A capacity range pulled from a home value is a hypothesis, not a fact about a person's finances.
• Confidentiality. Restrict prospect files to staff and volunteers who need them, store them securely, and honor donors' privacy preferences and any requests to be left alone.
• Use public sources properly. Apra's social-media guidance is that researchers should not 'friend,' be friended by, or enter personal relationships with prospects to gather information. Use only what people have made genuinely public.
• Comply with law and policy. Follow applicable privacy and data-protection law and your own organization's gift-acceptance and data policies. See governance and compliance.

When a small org should pay for screening

Paid wealth-screening platforms aggregate property, business, stock, philanthropic, and demographic data and return capacity/affinity scores in bulk. They are genuinely useful — but the value is a function of list size, not prestige.

Pay when you can answer yes to most of these:

• You have 1,000+ records to screen at once (a full house file, a capital-campaign list, an event or acquired list) — more than you could read by hand.
• You are launching a major-gifts or capital effort and need to find hidden capacity across the whole database fast.
• You have a person who will act on the results — qualify, assign, and cultivate. A screen with no follow-up is wasted money.

Stay DIY when: your active prospect list is small enough to read individually; you have not yet exhausted your own giving history and free public records; or you do not yet have capacity to follow up on what a screen would surface.

Pricing scales with database size and features; smaller nonprofits typically pay a few thousand dollars per year and larger lists cost more (as of 2026 — verify directly with vendors, as published pricing is limited). DonorSearch is known for the depth of its proprietary philanthropic (past-giving) database, which makes it strong for bulk-screening 1,000+ records to find prior donors. iWave (Kindsight) emphasizes broad multi-source aggregation and customizable scoring. Compare a few against your actual list before committing, and budget the subscription deliberately — see budgeting.

Putting it into a repeatable workflow

Research is only valuable if it feeds action. Build a simple loop your team runs each quarter.

1. Pull the list. Start with your own file — top cumulative givers and longest-loyal donors — plus any new warm names from events or referrals.
2. Research free first. Run the starter kit above; record sources and dates.
3. Score the grid. Rate capacity and affinity, plot the quadrant, and write a one-line recommended next step for each prospect.
4. Screen in bulk only if warranted. If the list crosses ~1,000 records and you have follow-up capacity, run a paid screen and merge scores back in.
5. Assign and cultivate. Route high-capacity/high-affinity prospects into moves management; steward loyal lower-capacity donors through retention and stewardship.
6. Log and refresh. Capture every interaction in your CRM and re-research before each major ask, since wealth and affinity both change.

Done this way, prospect research stays honest, low-cost, and tied to relationships — which is the only way it actually raises money for a small organization.

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