6 Quick Tips for Qualifying Potential Donors

Most everyone in development is engaged in a near-constant search for qualified prospective donors. Nexis for Development Professionals makes this critical part of the job much easier⎯and more fruitful. Here are six quick-start tips that will give you a sense of this tool’s power and possibilities. Of course, if you find these features attractive, know that there’s so much more that Nexis® for Development Professionals offers you.

Quick Start Tip 1: Start broad

When using our Individual Search feature, you’ll have the opportunity to input several fields of info about a person you wish to learn more about. However, we recommend that you begin your search by just inputting just their first and last name. Our Smart Indexing system takes all your search terms into consideration. So, if you input, say, a middle name or an address, you may miss out on helpful results that don’t include this information.

Quick Start Tip 2: Add essential terms and keywords

If the person you’re searching generates more results than you can manage, or if the results aren’t specific to your needs, you can narrow your search in a number of different ways. One approach is to indicate any terms or keywords you deem necessary. For instance, if you’re looking to learn more about a person, but you seek only content that references his or her company, city or university alma mater, you can confine your search to such results. Once looking at the results of a search, you can further refine and tailor them by using the “Include/Exclude” tool should you, for example, want only results that include the word “philanthropist.”

Quick Start Tip 3: Use all three source categories

Nexis for Development Professionals offers premium content in three categories: corporate connections and charitable giving, personal background and news, and wealth indicators. Each of these categories has a host of content types. For instance, the wealth indicator category includes content from WealthEngine™, Executive Compensation, Stock Ownership Transactions and Prospects of Wealth. (If by chance, you wanted to know if a prospect owns a yacht or private jet, this is one place where you’ll want to look). While there is a bit of content overlap among the three categories, there’s enough difference that you’ll almost certainly want to search results across all three.

Quick Start Tip 4: Share, file, email and more

We make it easy for you to save and share the data you find. Whether you want to file away results for later analysis or to share with colleagues, Nexis for Development Professionals makes it possible with just a click or two. You can download, print and email your results, and you can also to save them to a folder or place them in Dropbox.

Quick Start Tip 5: Find the good and the bad

No matter how big a check someone may be willing to write your organization, if that person comes with baggage due to, say, certain legal matters, it may not be worth it. Qualifying donors means ensuring that their reputation can't harm to yours. But don’t sweat it. Our database of negative news has your back. It will return results dealing with arrests, lawsuits and other potential matters of concern.

Quick Start Tip 6: Use alerts to stay current and seize opportunities

We also make it convenient to stay abreast of prospective donors in-the-moment. Set an alert for a person of interest, and you’ll receive an email anytime that person (or people)appear in any of our content sources. These alerts can tip you off to ideal opportunities to reach out to a prospect, such as after they received a new appointment to a board or after the closing of a major business deal.

As noted above, this is but a small sampling of what Nexis for Development Professionals has to offer. For more tips and tricks, view our on-demand training webinars or contact us directly. Our Customer Success Managers can help you find and qualify the donors your organization needs to fulfill its mission.