Hand-researching your top 25 prospects for free
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Our 2026 survey of 100 U.S. fundraising professionals found that 95% of shops under $250K raised spend nothing on wealth screening, with a median of $0. They are not neglecting something — they are correctly identifying that a $4,000 subscription cannot pay for itself against a prospect list one person can hold in their head.
But “no software” should not mean “no research.” Here is what you can establish about 25 people, for free, in about a day.
Start with your own data
Before any external source. Pull your own giving history and sort three ways:
Largest single gift, ever. Not last year — ever. Someone who gave $5,000 once in 2019 has demonstrated capacity nobody currently acts on.
Longest consecutive giving streak. Twelve years at $100 is a stronger signal than one year at $1,000. Loyalty predicts major gifts better than size does.
Anyone whose giving stepped up. A donor who went from $250 to $1,000 made a decision. That decision is worth a conversation.
This costs nothing and produces a better starting list than any screening tool, because it is built on behaviour toward you rather than capacity in general.
The free external sources, in order of usefulness
1. Other organizations’ donor listings. Annual reports, gala programs, capital campaign donor walls, symphony and museum member lists. Most are online as PDFs.
This is the best free source in existence and almost nobody uses it systematically. A named gift level at another organization is demonstrated giving at a stated amount — vastly more predictive than any wealth marker, because it proves both capacity and willingness.
2. Family foundation 990s. If a prospect has a family foundation, its 990-PF lists assets, total grants and every recipient. That tells you what they give, to whom, and at what size. Free from the IRS, from Candid, and from ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer.
3. Property records. County assessor sites are public and usually searchable online. Real estate is the wealth indicator most commercial tools lean on, and you can check it yourself for a shortlist.
4. Corporate and professional information. Company websites, LinkedIn, professional directories, SEC filings for public-company insiders. Role and tenure tell you a great deal about income, and a business owner’s position is often the largest part of their balance sheet.
5. Obituaries and local news. Bequests, family relationships, honours, board service. Unglamorous and genuinely informative.
What to record, and what not to
Record: capacity indicators with their source, giving to other organizations, connections to your board, and any stated interest in your cause.
Do not record: anything about health, family difficulties, politics, or anything you would be uncomfortable with the person reading. The working test is whether you could show a prospect their own file without embarrassment. That standard also happens to be good practice under most data-protection expectations.
Store it where access is restricted, and be able to say who can see it.
Building the estimate
You are not producing a number. You are producing a range and a rationale.
“Owns a home assessed at $1.4M, is listed at the $10,000 level in two other organizations’ annual reports, has given us $500 a year for nine years. Plausible ask: $10,000–$25,000 for the campaign.”
That sentence is more useful to a gift officer than a proprietary score, because it shows its working. A rating someone can explain gets acted on; an unexplained number gets ignored — which is also the strongest argument for the commercial tools that show their sourcing.
What this cannot do
Scale. Twenty-five people is a day. Ten thousand is not a project you can staff.
Rank a whole file. Hand research tells you about people you already suspect. It cannot surface the quiet $80-a-year donor sitting on significant capacity, and that is exactly what screening a full file is for.
Consistency. Your judgment on Monday differs from Friday. A model applies the same rules to everyone.
When to start paying
The trigger is not a revenue number, it is a capacity one: the month hand research stops keeping up. If someone owns major gifts, their calendar has room for visits, and the prospect list has outgrown what one person can maintain — that is the case for a subscription.
Our survey puts mean prospect research spend at $1,319 for shops raising $250K–$1M and $4,135 at $1M–$5M. Entry subscriptions are reported from around $4,000–$5,000 a year: Kindsight from about $4,150 for one user and roughly 1,500 screens, DonorSearch from about $4,000 for a small file.
There is also a middle option most shops miss. DonorSearch’s pay-per-record screening, reported at roughly $1–$2 per record, screens a file once with no subscription at all — which is the right shape for pre-campaign feasibility, since that is a project rather than an ongoing need. Our wealth screening guide covers how to compare vendors properly using a test file of people whose capacity you already know.
Until then, the day spent on your top 25 is the better investment, and it is the one that tells you whether anyone is going to make the visits at all.
Common questions
Can you do prospect research without paid software?
Yes, for a small list. Public 990s, property records, corporate filings and published donor listings will get you a defensible capacity estimate for 25 people. What you cannot do by hand is screen a file of 10,000 — that is the point at which software earns its price.
Is it ethical to research donors?
Researching public information about someone's capacity to give is standard practice in fundraising and is covered by professional ethics guidance in the field. The lines that matter are using only appropriate sources, storing findings securely, restricting access, and not recording things that are not relevant to the relationship.
What is the single most useful free source?
Other organizations' donor listings — annual reports, gala programs, capital campaign plaques. They show demonstrated giving at a stated level, which predicts future giving better than any wealth indicator.
When should we stop doing this by hand?
When the month you spend keeping up stops being enough. If your prospect list has outgrown what one person can maintain, or you need to rank a whole file rather than a shortlist, that is a real case for a screening subscription.
This post is part of the guide to the grassroots fundraising stack (under $250k raised).