Increase online giving with wealth screening
Today’s post comes from Michael Lukich of WealthEngine, an online wealth intelligence tool to help nonprofits find potential donors.
Over the years, wealth screening has become a valuable tool for fundraisers. The concept is simple. An organization takes the prospects and donors they already know and have within their database, and they enrich those profiles with 3rd party data to give information about income, lifestyle, and affinity data.
So what are some of the benefits of screening?
Without screening, you may have limited information on these individuals – their name, contact info, and possibly their past donations to you. By screening them, you add much more data to that record. That allows you to better identify, segment, and prioritize prospects with certain attributes. You can execute targeted fundraising campaigns, improve your major gifts, and find more prospects that align with your cause.
At WealthEngine, we’ve taken the standard screening model and improved it significantly by adding a real-time component to it. We call it On Demand Screening.
On Demand Screening is a solution that integrates directly into the platforms of nonprofit organizations to instantly screen donors and prospects as they interact with the organization. After implementation, the wealth data and other attributes about an individual are provided when that person inputs their information into online web forms such as registration or donation forms.
Tailored donation pages to increase donations
A favorite use case of ours involves a nonprofit that has fully embraced personalization due to real-time screening. Like most nonprofits, they have a donation page with suggested donation amounts. After implementing On Demand Screening, they now screen their potential donors before showing those suggested donation amounts. The organization shows personalized amounts on the donation page based on their screening results. This has yielded in an increase in conversion and donations by showing potential donations that match up to the capacity of the individuals.
For example, say an individual starts donating on your site but is a recent college grad with high student loans who is living with his parents. This may be a major donor in ten years, but for now it’s likely most appropriate to suggest small donations like $10 or $50 max. But if a more senior donor who has established giving history and many properties to her name comes in, $100 as a starting point would be totally reasonable.
As a nonprofit today you have a lot of competition for donor attention. Screening can help you stand out in these ways:
- Never miss an opportunity: Every day, high-potential donors visit nonprofit websites and donate. However, these organizations may not know it until much later when they perform their annual screening. When donors give online, they are engaged at that moment, looking to make a difference. That engagement can fade as time passes so it’s important to act right away to generate deeper support and larger donations. Screening in real-time empowers organizations with the necessary real-time insights to maximize the potential of high-capacity online donors.
- Fundraising automation: Screening can enable you to route prospects directly from your online donation system into your donor management system (such as Salesforce). From there, you can trigger several automated actions, such as including donors in email nurture campaigns, routing donors to specific teams for further action, or customizing their online experience – all based on rules and segmentation that are defined internally.
- Personalized donor experiences: If you can start personalizing the experience of your donors and prospects from their first interaction, they will likely give more over the long term. As new prospects are in the process of giving online, their propensity and capacity are uncovered through screening. This enables for real-time personalization of the rest of the online experience with that donor. For example, depending on the capacity of the donor, an organization may change the default online donation options on-the-fly.
Getting started with On Demand Screening is straightforward. Using the API developed by WealthEngine, you have a direct connection to our powerful data platform, giving you access to over 240 million consumer profiles. A complete solution can be integrated into an organization in as little as a few weeks.
Do you want to learn more about On Demand Screening and how your organization can benefit? Idealist Consulting is here to help you.
