Best Prospect Research and Wealth Screening Tools
These tools tell you what a donor could give, not whether they will. None publishes pricing. Under a few hundred donors, manual research using public records is genuinely better. The question that should stop most purchases is who will act on the output.
Prospect research tools tell you what a donor could give. That is a genuinely useful thing to know and it is not the same as knowing whether they will, which is the distinction this page keeps returning to because it decides whether these products are worth their price to you.
What wealth screening actually does
It matches your donor file against public and licensed data: property records, SEC filings, political contributions, published gifts to other organizations, business affiliations. From that it produces a capacity estimate and usually a propensity score.
Capacity estimates are reasonable at the top and weak in the middle. Someone with a large publicly recorded property portfolio and disclosed philanthropy is straightforward to assess. A comfortable retiree with a paid-off house and no public footprint is invisible, and a meaningful number of significant gifts come from exactly that profile.
The second limitation matters more. Capacity is not intent. The output tells you somebody could write the cheque, not that they would, and the sector’s most common expensive mistake is treating a screening list as a prospect list and working names with money and no relationship.
The tools
DonorSearch
Best for: organizations that want screening plus a substantial free knowledge base.
The most established name in this space and the one most nonprofits encounter first. Screening, prospect generation, and integrations with the major CRMs. It is also, unusually, a genuine publisher: a large library of fundraising guides that many organizations use without ever buying the product.
Wrong for: small organizations with a few hundred donors, where the same money spent on a part-time fundraiser will do more. Pricing is not published, so budgeting requires a conversation.
Kindsight, formerly iWave
Best for: teams that want scoring they can interrogate rather than accept.
iWave rebranded to Kindsight and the product now sits alongside an AI-flavoured fundraising suite. Its long-standing strength is a transparent scoring model where you can see which inputs drove a rating, which matters when a gift officer needs to justify why somebody is in a portfolio.
Wrong for: anyone expecting the rebrand to have simplified the product. It is a research tool for people who will spend time in it. Pricing is not published.
WealthEngine
Best for: large-scale screening of big files.
Built for volume, with a large consumer data set behind it and API access for pushing scores into other systems. If you need to screen tens of thousands of records rather than research individuals, this is the shape of tool that does it.
Wrong for: small files, where per-record economics make no sense, and anyone wanting deep individual research rather than bulk scoring.
Windfall
Best for: organizations that want net worth estimates rather than tiers.
Takes a different approach, modelling household net worth on a continuous basis and refreshing it, rather than assigning capacity bands. Sold across commercial sectors as well as nonprofits, which shows in the integrations.
Wrong for: organizations wanting philanthropic context. A net worth model tells you about wealth, not about giving behaviour, and those are different questions.
Doing it yourself
Best for: most organizations under a few hundred active donors.
This belongs on the list because for a large share of readers it is the correct answer. Public sources cover a great deal: county property records, SEC filings for public company insiders, FEC political contributions, other organizations’ published annual reports and donor listings, obituaries, and LinkedIn.
Screening 300 donors by hand is a few days of work and produces better results than a subscription, because a person reading the same sources notices context an algorithm does not.
Wrong for: files in the thousands, where the arithmetic flips decisively and manual research stops being feasible.
Capacity is half the question
Every product above answers the same half: how much could this person give. The other half, whether they are inclined to and what would move them, sits in your own records rather than in any external database. It is in contact reports, event attendance, email replies, volunteer hours and the notes nobody indexes.
That is why a screening exercise so often produces a list nobody works. The names have money and no relationship, and a gift officer sensibly prioritises the donor who replied to something last week.
The useful sequence is to rank your existing engaged donors by capacity, rather than to rank a capacity list by engagement. Start from people who have already shown up. Tools that work on the engagement side of this, reading your CRM and correspondence rather than external wealth data, are a different category and we cover them in AI tools for nonprofit fundraising.
If the engagement half is what you actually lack, that is a different purchase. Tools in that category read your CRM, your documents and your correspondence rather than external wealth data, and rank the donors who have already shown interest. Gratefully is the most reachable at $4,800 a year, against unpublished pricing for everything on this page. It tells you nothing about capacity, which is what the tools above are for, so the two answer opposite halves of the same question. See AI tools for nonprofit fundraising.
Before you buy
| Question | Why it decides the purchase |
|---|---|
| How many records, and how often? | One-off screening of a small file is a service purchase, not a subscription |
| Who will act on the output? | A screening with nobody to work the results is a report, not a programme |
| What is your major gift threshold? | If it is $1,000, screening tells you little you could not infer from giving history |
| Does it integrate with your CRM? | Scores in a separate system are scores nobody sees |
| How is capacity derived, and can you see why? | An unexplainable rating cannot be defended to a board member |
| What is the refresh cycle? | Capacity data ages, and stale ratings quietly mislead |
The second question is the one that most often should stop a purchase. Screening produces work rather than money, and it produces a great deal of it. An organization without the staff time to run the resulting portfolio has bought a list. Our page on how many prospects a gift officer can manage sets out the arithmetic, and it usually implies a far smaller working list than a screening returns.
The privacy question, which nobody asks
Screening is lawful and standard practice. It is also compiling a financial profile of a supporter who did not ask you to, and donors are frequently surprised to learn it happens.
Two positions worth taking deliberately. Say so in your privacy policy, in plain terms, that you may use publicly available information to understand supporters’ capacity to give. And apply the test that governs everything in a donor record: would you be comfortable if this person read the file? If a research note would embarrass you in front of the person it describes, it should not be in there.
One-off screening versus a subscription
Worth asking about explicitly, because vendors lead with subscriptions and for many organizations the one-off is the right purchase.
A single screening of your file tells you what capacity sits in your existing donor base. That is a finite piece of information and it does not change quickly. Property and business holdings move slowly, and the file you screened last year is largely the file you have this year.
A subscription earns its cost when you are adding records continuously, when new prospects arrive faster than you can research them, or when you need scores flowing into the CRM automatically for segmentation.
If you are screening once to find out who is in your file, ask for that. It is usually available and rarely offered.
If you are specifically weighing a move away from the incumbent, we set out the three reasons people look and which ones another vendor actually solves in DonorSearch alternatives.
How this list was made
Products were selected on whether a US nonprofit under roughly $5m would plausibly consider them, and every entry names who it is wrong for as well as who it suits.
None of these vendors publishes pricing, so no figures are quoted. That is a genuine cost to a small organization: you cannot rule any of them in or out without a sales conversation, and this page cannot tell you what they cost because they do not say.
Questions people ask
What is prospect research?
Gathering information about donors and potential donors to understand their capacity to give, their philanthropic interests and their connections to your organization. Also called prospect development or wealth screening, though screening is really one technique within it.
Sources are public and licensed records: property, SEC filings, political contributions, published gifts to other charities, business affiliations, foundation directories.
The output is normally a capacity estimate and sometimes a propensity score. Capacity is what they could give. Whether they will is a separate question that external data cannot answer.
How much does wealth screening cost?
None of the major vendors publishes pricing, so we cannot quote figures. Expect a sales conversation and a quote based on your record count, the depth of data and whether you want a one-off screening or an ongoing subscription.
That opacity is itself a cost for a small organization. You cannot rule any of these products in or out without spending an hour on a call, which is a real barrier when you suspect the answer might be no.
Ask specifically whether a one-time screening is available. For many organizations that is the appropriate purchase and vendors do not lead with it.
Is wealth screening worth it for a small nonprofit?
Often not, and the deciding factor is not the price but whether anyone has time to act on the output.
Screening produces a long list of names to research, cultivate and solicit. Without a person whose job includes that work, you have bought a report. Portfolio arithmetic usually implies a working list far smaller than a screening returns.
Below a few hundred active donors, manual research using public records will do the job in a few days and produce better results, because a person notices context an algorithm does not. Above a few thousand records the economics flip decisively.
What is the difference between capacity and propensity?
Capacity is how much someone could give based on assets and income. Propensity is how likely they are to give to you, based on their behaviour and relationship with your organization.
External wealth data answers the first well and the second poorly. Propensity lives in your own records: giving history, event attendance, email engagement, volunteering, replies to things.
The common expensive mistake is working a capacity list without regard to propensity, producing a portfolio of wealthy strangers. Rank your engaged donors by capacity rather than ranking a capacity list by engagement.
Can you do prospect research without software?
Yes, and for a few hundred donors it is the sensible approach.
County property records are public and mostly online. SEC filings show insider holdings at public companies. FEC records show political contributions. Other nonprofits publish donor listings in annual reports, which tells you both capacity and philanthropic inclination. Foundation directories, obituaries and LinkedIn fill in the rest.
Screening 300 records manually takes a few days. The result is often better than a subscription because the researcher sees connections and context a matching algorithm misses.
Do you have to tell donors you research them?
It is lawful and standard practice, and you are not generally required to notify individuals. Whether you should is a different question and worth deciding deliberately rather than by default.
Two things are worth doing. State in your privacy policy, plainly, that you may use publicly available information to understand supporters' capacity to give. And apply the test that should govern any donor record: would you be comfortable if this person read their own file?
Research notes that would embarrass you in front of the person they describe do not belong in the system, whatever the law permits.
How accurate are capacity ratings?
Reasonable at the top, weak in the middle, and worth treating as a starting point rather than a fact.
Someone with substantial publicly recorded property and disclosed philanthropy is straightforward to assess. A retiree with a paid-off house, no public profile and considerable savings is largely invisible to these systems, and a meaningful share of major gifts come from that profile.
Ratings also age. Property changes hands, businesses are sold, circumstances change. Ask any vendor how often data refreshes, and never present a screening estimate to a board as though it were a verified figure.
What should you do after a wealth screening?
Far less than the file suggests, and this is where most screenings fail.
Take the results, cross-reference against engagement, and build a working list sized to the hours you actually have, which is usually a small fraction of what the screening returned. Assign every name an owner and a next action.
Then start with people who already have a relationship with you. A screening's most valuable output is usually not the wealthy strangers but the confirmation that three of your existing loyal donors have far more capacity than their giving suggests. Those three are the return on the exercise.