Donor Profile Template
Preparation for a conversation, not a dossier. A page and a half or nobody reads it. Free Word download, nine sections weighted towards what actually decides how a visit goes. The working test for everything in it: would you be comfortable showing it to the donor?
A donor profile is preparation for a conversation, not a dossier. If it takes more than a page and a half to read, nobody will read it before the meeting, which defeats the purpose entirely.
Free Word template below, nine sections, weighted towards the parts that actually determine how a visit goes.
What most profiles get wrong
They lead with wealth data, because wealth data is easy to obtain and looks like research. Capacity estimates, property records, business affiliations, other giving.
That information is genuinely useful and it is the half a vendor can sell you. What decides whether a meeting goes well is the other half: what this person actually cares about, how they like to be dealt with, what went wrong last time, and what they said in a car park in October that nobody wrote down.
The template puts identity and giving history first because they are quick, then capacity with its sources, then the qualitative sections at the point where they get attention rather than at the end where they get skipped.
The working test
Record only what you would be comfortable showing the donor.
It is a simple rule and it resolves nearly every judgement call in donor research. Speculation about a divorce fails it. A note that they mentioned their daughter is at Michigan passes it. An assessment that they are “difficult” fails it; a note that they prefer decisions in writing and dislike being telephoned passes it and is more useful anyway.
This is not only an ethical position. Files written to that standard are better files, because they contain observations rather than opinions, and observations are what a colleague can act on two years later.
Recording capacity honestly
Every capacity figure needs a source and a confidence level beside it, and the template has a column for exactly that.
A screening estimate and a published gift to another organization are not the same kind of fact. By the time a number has passed through a profile, a briefing and a board conversation, that distinction has usually been lost, and somebody is preparing to ask for a figure derived from a model nobody has examined.
| Kind of evidence | How much weight |
|---|---|
| A gift they made to you | Fact |
| A gift published in another organization’s report | Fact, though the year matters |
| Property or SEC records | Fact about assets, not about willingness |
| Vendor capacity rating | A model. Useful for sorting, not for setting an ask. |
| Something a board member heard | Note it, attribute it, do not build on it |
The section that earns the meeting
Section 8, for this meeting: purpose, what a good outcome looks like, what you will ask for if anything, who attends, who opens, who asks, and the agreed next step regardless of outcome.
That last item is the one people leave blank and it is the difference between a visit that advances something and a pleasant conversation that ends in “we will be in touch”. Decide the next step before you walk in, and the conversation has somewhere to go whatever the donor says.
It also makes the profile useful to the person who inherits this relationship later, which given median tenure in a fundraising job of two years is a realistic planning assumption rather than a pessimistic one.
The sections people leave blank
Two, consistently, and they are the two that matter.
What they actually care about. Not which programme area they have given to, which is in the database anyway, but why. The reason is almost always personal and almost never recorded: a family member who used the service, a belief formed decades ago, a professional connection to the field. It comes up in conversation and disappears the moment nobody writes it down.
The way to fill it is to ask directly and then write the answer in their words. Donors are rarely reluctant to explain why they give. They are rarely asked.
History with us, including what went wrong. Complaints, a mishandled acknowledgement, an event they disliked, a period when nobody contacted them. Profiles that describe uniformly smooth relationships are not preparation, they are marketing, and the officer who walks into a meeting unaware of a complaint from eighteen months ago will find out about it in the room.
Both sections require the person writing to have had real conversations and recorded them. Neither can be bought, which is precisely why they are worth more than the sections that can.
When to write one
Before any solicitation visit, before a board member meets a prospect on your behalf, and before a briefing conversation. Not for every donor in a portfolio, and not on a schedule.
A profile is triggered by an event. Writing one for two hundred donors annually produces two hundred documents nobody opens, which is a common and expensive form of looking busy.
What should be maintained continuously is the underlying record: contact reports entered the day they happen. A profile assembled from a good record takes twenty minutes. One assembled from memory takes half a day and is wrong.
Briefing someone else from it
Most profiles are written for the person who already knows the donor, which is the case where they add least. The profile earns its keep when somebody else is walking into the room: a board member, the executive director, a new officer inheriting the relationship.
For those readers, cut it further. What they need is the name and how to say it, the relationship in two sentences, what the person cares about, what this meeting is for, what they are being asked to do specifically, and what not to raise. Capacity analysis should usually be left out entirely, because a figure that was only ever a model has a way of being mentioned aloud.
Brief verbally as well as on paper. A document handed over five minutes before a meeting is not preparation, and the questions someone asks in that briefing conversation are reliably the ones the written profile forgot to answer. Those questions are worth adding to the document afterwards.
Keeping it accurate over time
A profile is a snapshot and it ages badly. Capacity changes, people retire, relationships shift, the person who wrote it leaves.
The discipline that keeps it honest is dating everything. Every capacity figure, every observation, every note about what somebody said should carry the date it was true. A profile where nothing is dated reads as current no matter how old it is, and that is how an organization ends up asking a retired donor for a gift sized to their working income.
Rewrite rather than patch when a profile is more than about two years old. Patching accumulates contradictions, and the contradictions are invisible to the reader who was not there when each layer was added.
The assembly can be automated once the underlying records are good. Gratefully generates briefings and handover dossiers of roughly this shape from the CRM, documents and email, with each claim cited back to the record it came from, which is the property that matters most in a document somebody will act on. The limit is the same one this page keeps returning to: it can only assemble what was written down, and sections 4 and 5 are exactly the parts nobody writes down.
Where it sits
Attached to the donor record in your CRM, not in a folder of documents. It contains personal information and belongs under the same access controls as the rest of your donor data, which means not being emailed around as an attachment before every meeting.
The profile prepares a conversation. The moves management tracker manages the pipeline it sits in. And the research behind the capacity section, if you buy it, comes from the tools we cover in prospect research and wealth screening, where the same caution about capacity versus willingness applies.
Download this template
Free, no email address, no signup. The full text is on this page as well, so you can read it before you download it.
Questions people ask
What is a donor profile?
A short briefing document about an individual donor or prospect, prepared before a meeting. It covers who they are, their giving history with you, an estimate of capacity with its sources, what they care about, how they prefer to be dealt with, where the relationship stands and what this particular meeting is meant to achieve.
Also called a prospect profile or a briefing document. The distinction from prospect research is that research gathers information and the profile is the one-and-a-half page version somebody will actually read in the car.
What should a donor profile include?
Nine things: identity and preferred form of address, giving history including consecutive years, capacity with sources and confidence, what they actually care about, how to deal with them, history with your organization including anything that went wrong, current stage and anything in progress, the plan for this specific meeting, and the sources used.
The two most valuable sections are what they care about and how to deal with them, and they are the two most often left blank because they cannot be bought from a vendor.
Keep it to a page and a half. A longer document does not get read before the meeting.
What should not go in a donor profile?
Anything you would not be comfortable showing the donor. That single test resolves nearly every judgement call.
Speculation about health, relationships or finances fails it. Subjective character judgements fail it and are less useful than the observation underneath: not that someone is difficult, but that they prefer decisions in writing and dislike being telephoned.
Also leave out anything you cannot source. A figure with no origin becomes a fact by repetition, and by the time it reaches a board conversation nobody remembers it was a guess.
Who should write donor profiles?
Whoever owns the relationship, with research support if you have it. The person who will be in the room needs to have thought about the meeting, and outsourcing that thinking to a researcher removes most of the value.
Where there is a dedicated prospect researcher, a sensible division is that they supply the capacity and background sections and the gift officer writes the qualitative sections and the meeting plan.
In a small organization it is one person and it should take twenty minutes, assuming the contact reports have been kept.
How often should profiles be updated?
Before each significant meeting, rather than on a schedule. A profile is triggered by an event.
Updating two hundred profiles annually produces two hundred documents nobody opens. What should be continuous is the underlying record: contact reports entered the day the contact happens, which is what makes assembling a profile quick.
If writing a profile requires reconstructing two years of history from memory, the problem is not the profile process. It is that contact reports are not being written.
Do donors have a right to see their profile?
In the US there is generally no federal right for a donor to demand their file, though state law and any privacy commitments you have published may create obligations. Some organizations voluntarily provide it on request.
The practical position matters more than the legal one. Write every profile as though the donor might read it, because occasionally they do, and because a file that could be shown without embarrassment is a better file.
If your privacy policy makes commitments about donor information, read it before writing your first profile rather than after someone asks.
How is a donor profile different from a CRM record?
The CRM record is complete, structured and permanent. The profile is selective, narrative and prepared for a particular moment.
A record holds every gift, every contact and every field. A profile answers one question: what does the person walking into this meeting need to know, in the time they will actually spend reading?
The profile should be assembled from the record and stored back against it, not maintained as a separate parallel system. Two sources of truth about a donor will disagree within months.
Should board members get donor profiles?
Yes, when they are meeting a prospect on your behalf, and keep them shorter than the staff version.
A board member needs the person's name and pronunciation, the relationship, what they care about, what the meeting is for, what they are being asked to do specifically, and what not to say. They do not need the full capacity analysis, and giving it to them risks a figure being mentioned that was only ever a model.
Brief verbally as well. A document handed over five minutes beforehand is not preparation, and the questions a board member asks in that conversation are usually the ones the profile forgot to answer.
This is reference information, not legal or tax advice. Rules vary by state and change over time. For a decision that carries real consequences, check the current text at irs.gov or your state registry, and talk to a nonprofit attorney or CPA.