Mixing DEI and Major Gift Prospecting

Mixing DEI and Major Gift Prospecting

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How can I source great major gift prospects but include more types of people? Especially if I don’t have authority to do anything but research and certainly not make systemic change at my organization?

If I can’t change the donor acquisition strategies, if I can’t change how my organization puts itself out in the world to attract diverse donors, or if I can’t change a myriad of other important things to really move the needle on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), then what can I do?

Plenty! You can focus on the work that you do and make small changes that spread out like ripples in a pond.

Stop Fighting to Swim Upstream

When the prospect research field first started talking a lot about DEI in 2020, there were so many conversations about collecting data. If we could just segment our donors by race or ethnicity or disability or other data points reflecting minority status, then we could do better prospecting.

For a while I couldn’t figure out why I found this approach felt so problematic to me. “Know thy Donor” is a great example of descriptive analytics in action. But having done some prospecting work outside the donor database, specifically to broaden a donor pool by acquiring affluent or HNW Black community members as donors, it was my experience that it quickly became a fight to swim upstream on that task.

I spent many hours hunting down pictures and trying to discern someone’s skin color, which was an uncomfortable and inexact effort — much like trying to append data such as ethnicity or race to a donor record. Apra, an association for prospect research professionals, specifically says in its DEI Data Guide that using something like a picture to ascertain race or purchasing racial data appends are practices to avoid.

There has to be a better way.

Every time I see a “Black Alumni Group” or some other group that a nonprofit creates to facilitate people to connect with the nonprofit and self-identify, it feels like a respectful, meaningful, and transparent way to collect this key information about interests and potentially identity.

But that doesn’t help me when I’m prospecting for an organization that does not collect this data.

Start Floating Downstream

I recently read a provocative Op-Ed in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, “Philanthropy Could Learn a Lot About Diversity by Studying What Sports Teams Are Doing Right,” by Eboo Patel (2023), in which he suggests the following:

“Well, 60 years ago, white people dominated sports. And then the racist barriers were dropped, the standards stayed the same, and Black people soared.”

This really got me thinking. What nuance might he be leaving out? What if we judged a major gift prospect by the same standards, blind to minority status? Well, if we were doing a great job of that in our field, we would already be getting a diverse major gift prospect pool.

We know that minority prospects with the same wealth profile as the traditional white male prospect get rated lower by algorithms. A simple example is a female prospect with the same wealth profile as a male prospect living in the same household (i.e., power couples) and the male prospect receives a higher wealth rating. We know there is bias in the traditional wealth screening algorithms.

If I am not in a position to change the screening and ratings system, are there ways that I might “float downstream,” making changes within my wheelhouse with the goal to include more people?

I’ve been focusing on the first two tactics below to change things in my major gift prospecting technique, with the third tactic on my radar.

Focus on creating better affinity scoring

At Aspire, we build on the following fundamental segmentation philosophy:

High Affinity (“love of organization”) + High Wealth = Major Gift Prospect

We often work with organizations that have just hired their first major gift officer or are trying to take their major gift team to the next level of success. Pairing High Affinity with High Wealth yields prospects most likely to be responsive and build the team’s confidence and skills.

Theoretically, the higher the affinity, the higher the gift capacity as a percentage of net worth. If we need to ask for million-dollar gifts and our prospect is rated just under that threshold, but has really high affinity, might s/he be a hidden gem?

But I recognize that the way we at Aspire frequently define affinity by RFM score (recency, frequency, monetary) is very limiting. While some of our clients have nothing except giving history to analyze, that is becoming less and less true.

Even small development offices are using more digital fundraising techniques and that equates to more digital data to inform affinity. But when this data is cobbled from multiple different platforms, it is very time-consuming to standardize and score. Low-budget, first-time major gift programs still get a great return on their investment on the “something is better than nothing” axiom.

However, the work of Joe Stabb makes a compelling case for leveraging multiple digital fundraising data to prospect for major gifts, especially if you can recruit capable volunteers (Chronicle of Philanthropy 2023 | #ChatBytes podcast episode).

“After spending about four hours analyzing six months’ worth of email data, he found the 20 people who had most often opened email communications and clicked on links inside. Yet no fundraisers had ever visited them or asked them for a gift in person.” (Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2023)

Also, at Aspire our clients with larger development offices in nonprofits with a strong IT team can usually identify key data pieces that suggest affinity, and their IT department can send us the files with matching ID numbers. So even with a nonprofit that is price-sensitive and new to leveraging their data for fundraising, better affinity scoring is possible.

We could prioritize very high affinity scores, and de-emphasize wealth scores, in the hopes of at least including more people, even if we may not know if we have included more diverse prospects.

Prioritize high affinity, but also other known markers

Once we have a segmentation strategy, at Aspire we usually need secondary markers for prioritizing prospects in what is inevitably a count of prospects too large for our client to tackle at once. Usually, we prioritize based on wealth ratings and philanthropy markers, such as “has a foundation,” “nonprofit leadership,” or “gifts to others >$0” and others.

While segmenting and prioritizing is happening before a researcher ever performs manual research on any one prospect, occupational clues are good markers of wealth, especially in the absence of other wealth markers. Appending this data, while not perfect, could aid in segmentation and prioritization.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy featured Sharise Harrison’s approach leveraging occupational data in its 2021 article, “Prospect Research Helps Fundraisers Examine Their Work for Bias,” saying:

“Even before the summer of 2020, Santa Clara fundraisers had begun to de-emphasize wealth screenings, which research suggests may lead development professionals to overlook donors of color. Harrison and her team instead were putting more weight on a person’s job title, affiliations, and connection to the university.” (The Chronicle of Philanthropy, 2021)

If we emphasize affinity in segmentation and philanthropy markers over wealth in prioritization, and especially if we can leverage occupational data, theoretically we will include more individuals. It still leaves lots of room for improvement. What about all the missing data? Highly philanthropic, wealthy individuals living in the low-income neighborhood they grew up in, perhaps active in civic or religious organizations, remain totally under the radar of our traditional prospect screenings.

Then again, there will always be some prospects that will be without the digital data necessary to identify them as a major gift prospect.

Leverage A.I. for greater accuracy, if possible

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and machine learning offer a lot of promise for a greater degree of accuracy as well as a wider range of accessible variables. A.I.-generated scores can mine treasure troves of external data and deliver eerily accurate results. Those scores can also be full of all the bias of the original dataset as well as historical data collection and other practices.

In his #ChatBytes interview to be published in October, Jon Garrow talks about a range of A.I. products that Willamette University leverages for better prospecting AND better alumni and donor nurturing. Beyond better wealth ratings, A.I. fueled tools can help better nurture donors at scale and can create better and more dynamic affinity scores across multiple datasets, such as giving and digital marketing data.

While there will definitely be a lot of inherited bias in A.I. generated scores, there is also a lot of potential to use the technology to identify affinity patterns that are currently discounted or overlooked because of bias. A.I. name-matching algorithms used across the entire donor base to nurture donors based on news reports and other information might also surface higher engagement across a more diverse group of donors.

Above All Else, Ask your Development Officer

I’m a big fan of Christopher Haight, Associate Dean of Development at Stanford and interviewed him for #ChatBytes (publishing in Nov 2023). When asked what a prospect researcher can do to improve the adoption and qualification of prospects by development officers, he recommends building a good relationship with your development officer.

If possible, the very first step you might take in your effort to be more inclusive is to open dialogue with your development officer(s) about what makes a great prospect. This does a few things, including:

  • You learn each person’s comfort zone for interacting with donors and can include information items that lean-in to their strengths.
  • You establish a rapport and trust for the inevitable difficult conversations that arise in every workplace – when you make an error, when they forget to tell you something, etc.
  • You can leverage your relationship to feed them prospects that look different from the usual, but you feel are hidden gems – one of them will be willing to take the risk.

Go All Nike on DEI and “Just Do It”

The reality of the prospect research life is that most of us lack authority to implement the kind of change we would like to see in our organizations. By all means, work to develop your influence and get promoted to more authority, but don’t wait to implement DEI tactics.

You can make changes in the areas you do have authority and discretion, such as major gift prospecting. But even within your authority, you won’t be able to have the impact you envision without developing strong relationships with your colleagues.

Additional Resources