Wealth screening on a budget: what to do before you can afford it

Published June 24, 2026 · Part of the growing stack

Before you can afford wealth screening, research your top prospects by hand: published donor lists from peer organizations, foundation 990s, county property records, and your board’s knowledge of the community. A weekly top-25 routine covers a small file well. Buy a platform when hand research stops keeping up with the list.

The free sources that actually work

Peer organizations’ donor lists. Annual reports and gala programs from organizations like yours are published gift ranges attached to names. A donor giving at the $10,000 level across town has both capacity and inclination, and inclination is the half a wealth score can’t see.

990s. Every foundation’s 990 lists grants paid, board members, and asset size, free on public databases. For family foundations connected to your donors, this is complete giving history in a public document.

Property records. Most county assessors publish searchable ownership and valuation records. Real estate is the most visible asset class, and it is sitting in a public database.

Your board. Board members know who sold a business, who retired well, and who funds things quietly. A twice-yearly session walking your top donor list past the board surfaces more than any database. It costs a meeting agenda item.

The top-25 routine

Screening’s real product is prioritization, and a small shop can build that by hand.

1. Pull your top 25 donors by lifetime giving, plus any names the board flags.
2. Spend 30 minutes per name across the four sources above. Write down capacity signals, other philanthropy, and connection points.
3. Keep one profile page per prospect in your CRM or a shared folder.
4. Refresh five names a week. The full list turns over every five weeks.

That is a few hours weekly, and for a file of a few hundred donors it covers the segment where major gifts actually come from. The discipline matters more than the sources: research that never becomes a visit list is trivia.

The signal that you’re ready to buy

Hand research fails in one specific way: the list outgrows the hours. New donors arrive faster than five profiles a week can absorb, a campaign requires rating the entire file at once, or a new gift officer needs a portfolio built from 3,000 records rather than 25. When the constraint is throughput, no routine fixes it. That is what screening platforms are for.

At that point, book demos with DonorSearch and Kindsight, the two leading platforms. They approach the problem differently: DonorSearch built its reputation on weighting demonstrated philanthropy, while Kindsight (which many fundraisers still know as iWave) leans on wealth and capacity indicators. Bring ten donors you have already hand-researched to each demo and compare the platform’s read against what you know. That test tells you more than any feature matrix, and both sales teams handle it well. Our DonorSearch review covers what to ask.

Your hand-research months are not a detour. The profiles you built become the validation set for choosing a platform, and the routine of turning research into visits is the habit that makes the eventual purchase pay off.

Prospect research sits alongside your CRM and grant tools in the $250k-$1M stack.

This post is part of the guide to the growing fundraising stack ($250k – $1M raised).