Soapbox Engage Blog

Identifying and building relationships with more mid-level and major donors over time helps ensure your organization can meet its fundraising goals and keep growing sustainably.

But you have to approach this kind of relationship-centric fundraising efficiently to preserve your nonprofit’s precious time and resources. That’s where donor qualification comes in.

This guide details five best practices to improve your nonprofit’s approach (or help you get started for the first time).

Fundamental Donor Qualification Best Practices

1. Perform donor prospect research first.
2. Identify your donor qualification criteria.
3. Make your donor meetings personal and engaging.
4. Incorporate disqualification when appropriate.
5. Make donor qualification an ongoing activity.

When done well, donor qualification will boost your development team’s return on investment and help you build solid portfolios of productive relationships. Let’s start with a little context—what is donor qualification?

Why Donor Qualification Matters

The process of donor qualification helps you determine if a donor’s current capacity and affinity to give are aligned with your current needs and goals. It involves reviewing your most up-to-date insights about mid- or major-level donors or prospects, including most notably:

• Current wealth markers
• Developments in their personal and professional lives
• The recency and value of past donations

As you review this information, you’ll weigh it against your nonprofit’s current qualification (and disqualification) criteria to help rank or prioritize each prospect in your outreach strategy. We’ll discuss giving capacity, affinity, and qualification criteria in the sections below.

So why does it matter? Because cultivating and soliciting major gifts takes time, this vetting process allows you to keep your fundraising plans prioritized and up-to-date. It also helps you to more easily recognize new prospects as they come into contact with your organization.

Donor qualification should be treated as a fundamental underlying process that keeps your development work running smoothly and minimizes wasted time and effort.

1. Perform prospect research first.

Prospect research is the process that nonprofits perform to identify new prospective donors and learn more about current donors. It should be the bedrock of your donor qualification approach.

The information you learn through prospect research can be gathered from a range of sources, including purpose-built databases, publicly available property and SEC records, your team’s conversations with prospects, and supplemental append services. This information falls into two general categories:

• Philanthropic indicators: Also called affinity indicators, these markers tell you about prospects’ giving habits as well as their interests, personal passions, and involvement with other nonprofits. Use this data to determine whether the prospect has an interest in your mission and is philanthropically motivated.


• Wealth indicators: This data gives your nonprofit an idea of the prospect’s ability or capacity to give. Common wealth markers include real estate ownership, business connections, past donations to other nonprofits, stock ownership, and political giving.

What you learn during prospect research will directly figure into the qualification process, so it’s important. It can reveal valuable new donors for your mission or show you that a donor isn’t the right fit for a large solicitation right now, saving you both the time and effort involved in having one-on-one conversations.

The prospect research process can be time- and labor-intensive, so it's important to manage your work and data insights efficiently. Most nonprofits use a portfolio-based approach, in which individual fundraisers or gift officers own the relationships with set numbers of contacts. As Graham-Pelton’s guide to prospect portfolio management highlights, “knowing how to properly build and maintain a prospect portfolio year-over-year is crucial for long-term success.”

2. Identify your donor qualification criteria.

Donor qualification is about more than just checking boxes during a wealth screening. This process should involve getting to know more about your prospects' lives and building personal relationships. The key to learning more valuable information about prospects is by asking the right questions.

The questions you ask donors should be a mixture of personal inquiries and questions about their philanthropic involvement. However, the overarching goal of most questions you ask should be to learn more about the prospective donor’s giving capabilities and motivations. For example, you might ask prospects the following questions:

• How have you and your family fared in the past year?
• How did you become involved with our organization?
• Where does our organization fall among your other philanthropic priorities?
• What do you enjoy doing in your free time?
• Do you have any upcoming vacations or plans for the holidays?

Combine these personal insights with data to help lay out specific criteria for different giving contexts. These are your qualification criteria, the characteristics that a prospect should display before being moved ahead for continued cultivation and solicitation. For example, your criteria for your general major giving program might include:

• Current wealth markers that indicate giving capacity within our organization’s definition of major gifts
• Active engagement with our nonprofit, i.e. donated, attended an event, or had a conversation with a gift officer within the past X months
• Has been in contact with our organization for at least X years and has a warm relationship or personal attachment to the mission
• No personal developments that might preclude giving right now, like recently losing a job

From here, you can develop more specific sets of criteria for different giving programs. A hospital’s grateful patient fundraising program, for instance, would include criteria relating to services received by the prospect or their loved ones. A university department might prioritize graduates who are currently working in high-profile positions.

This mix of qualitative and quantitative insights will reinforce to your team that giving motivations and situations are complex, shaped by wealth, personal circumstances, and the work that you put into relationship-building.

3. Make your donor meetings personal and engaging.

Since it can be difficult to schedule conversations with busy prospective donors, your nonprofit should take advantage of any time you have with them.

Make these meetings personal and get your prospects involved in the conversation to cultivate a deeper connection to your mission. These strategies can help make your meetings with prospective donors more personalized:

• Recognize major life events. Keep track of any life events you’re aware of so that you can send cards or have quick phone calls.


• Follow-up on past discussions. Actively recall things you and the prospect discussed in previous conversations to show attentiveness and interest. For example, if your prospect talked about their daughter starting college that fall, ask how she’s adjusting.


• Invite them to events. Inviting prospects to your organization’s events is one of the most direct ways to encourage future involvement. Try referencing something you picked up in past conversations.


• Get them involved. Encourage involvement in your nonprofit’s work. Many organizations ask their major donors to provide feedback on cases for support as a way to increase engagement and start building buy-in for campaign solicitations, for instance.


• Be prompt. Communicating in a timely fashion is very important and can go a long way in facilitating a deep, personal connection. Respond to any messages you receive from qualified prospective donors as soon as you can, and personalize your responses.


• Personalize your thank-yous. Send highly personalized thank-you messages—ideally a handwritten letter, phone call, or in-person meeting—for any contributions they make to your organization, including their time at events.

4. Incorporate disqualification when appropriate.

Not every donor qualification process results in the prospect contributing a major gift to your nonprofit. To focus your team’s energies and generate the best results, you’ll need to take some prospects out of the running. In cases like these, disqualification is just as important as qualification.

Disqualification could happen for a variety of reasons and simply means that the prospective donor likely won’t be able to meet your nonprofit’s needs and expectations or that the prospect isn’t interested in moving forward. A few of the reasons why you might need to disqualify a prospect include:

• The prospect doesn’t respond to your communication efforts over a six-month period.
• Your organization is not a philanthropic priority to the prospect.
• They are unlikely to ever make a major gift.
• They decline to make a major gift.
• The prospect asks not to be contacted by your nonprofit.

Disqualifying donors can seem like a negative aspect of the donor qualification process, but it is necessary to stay on track, prioritize your development efforts, and help make your moves management process more efficient. By focusing on viable prospective donors, you can boost your team’s morale and productivity and increase the likelihood that your organization will close on major gifts.

5. Make donor qualification an ongoing activity.

As mentioned above, qualification needs to be a regular part of your development work, baked into your regular processes.

Why?

Donors’ lives, interests, and giving capacities change over time. Not to mention, your organization’s priorities change over time, as well. One giving program may take precedence over another depending on your current initiatives.

Remember, too, that nonprofit development is time-intensive work. It requires extensive one-on-one engagement and individualized research from your gift officers. Without a clear plan for prioritizing their time, you run the risk of having unproductive conversations and spending too much time on prospects who ultimately aren’t interested in giving right now—leading to reduced ROI and less impact on your mission.

If qualification isn’t done consistently, it’s not very useful. But it’s thankfully easy to avoid this outcome. Create a standard cadence for both:

• Running qualification screenings, comparing prospects’ current wealth information and your personal insights to your criteria.


• Reevaluating your qualification criteria to ensure they still align with your organization’s priorities and reflect new information you’ve learned. For example, you may discover that prospects who consistently open your emails, attend certain events, show up as active participants on your silent auction bid sheet, or take any other action tend to give more reliably or at higher values.

Regular requalification can benefit your nonprofit’s employee retention efforts, too! Fresh insights and clearly prioritized outreach lists empower your gift officers to have the greatest possible impact, giving them the direction they need to succeed.

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Donor qualification helps streamline your nonprofit’s development efforts so that the major gift identification and donor stewardship processes run smoothly. A strong qualification process paired with a robust donor management system can help improve your organization’s donor stewardship capabilities by forming deeper relationships between you and your supporters.