Independent schools pour significant resources into their advancement playbook: giving days, traveling to meet with donors, and appeals. Yet the highest-leverage potential donors are often hiding in plain sight.
Consistent small donors, young alumni, or new grandparents might possess major gift capacity. The problem isn’t a lack of prospective donors; it’s not being able to identify them.
Windfall recently sat down with leaders from St. Andrew's Episcopal School, International School of Boston, and Avon Old Farms School to discuss 2026 development and advancement insights. The consensus was clear: finding the next major gift requires shifting from ad-hoc wealth screening to a continuous engine for discovery and prioritization. The panel discussed five key ways to leverage continuous intelligence to surface major gift prospects and fuel their advancement strategies:
Traditional bulk wealth screening often fills your CRM with static and stale data that is 50% inaccurate, according to a study by Deloitte. This lack of precision causes schools to miss high-capacity households entirely or waste time on the wrong prospects.
By using deterministic wealth and career insights for education, you find donors who can give at your top level. This provides the clarity to rank visits and the confidence to make seven-figure asks. When data is right, your team has the base to be bolder.
"When my gift officers see the number, they have more confidence going in and asking the big ask. They're not going and saying, 'Really? A million dollars? Are you sure?'... The biggest goal was just not under-asking anymore."
— Sarah Wallace, Director of Planned Giving and Research, Avon Old Farms School
A major gift is often missed because the appeal happened at the wrong time. In 2026, replace one-off audits with a year-round cadence that aligns with your school's natural cycle:
"I screen as soon as we have next year's class in... I just find it helpful in the spring to have a sense of where we're headed and how we can be planful and mindful."
— Andrea Gosselin, International School of Boston
Traditional bulk wealth screening is often a “one and done” project. The problem with this approach is that wealth is dynamic. Static audits anchor your strategy to the past with data that is often years out of date. Shifting to a continuous discovery engine replaces these historical snapshots with timely intelligence. To find “hidden gems,” you need a strategy built on the most current financial picture of your constituents.
"A lot of our data was very outdated when I came... it was really important for us to freshen that data up and be able to trust it, because that's ultimately really the most important thing." — Molly Laukes, Director of Development Operations and Research, St. Andrew's Episcopal School
Travel is one of the highest expenses in advancement, yet trips are often built around habitual stops rather than current capacity. Before booking a flight to see a known advocate, use wealth data to identify donor clusters.
"If I know I'm going to Denver, I can just draw a little square [on the map], and everyone will pop up that's in your database in that area. If you see... a guy who's worth x, y, z money—hey, let's get some coffee."
— Sarah Wallace, Director of Planned Giving and Research, Avon Old Farms School
How much potential is sitting in the zip codes you already visit?
“Always-on” screening isn’t just for current parents. The most significant "hidden gems" are often the institutional advocates you aren't currently screening. By examining extended networks, you identify high-capacity donors with a vested interest in the school.
According to the CASE Insights on Philanthropy in Independent Schools report, parents and grandparents of alumni have surpassed foundations as the leading source of support. By consistently screening, you can identify these families more quickly and engage them while their connection to the school is at its peak.
"We uncovered a family through Windfall... they made a significant gift that paid for the tool. Our CFO was very pleased with the immediate ROI."
— Andrea Gosselin, International School of Boston
→ See how one large public university leveraged Windfall to achieve an 11% increase in major gift prospects for their $1 Billion capital campaign.
Ready to see how Windfall can surface the hidden gems in your own records? Request a complimentary Wealth Analytics Report to see exactly where your donor capacity is concentrated, and learn how to build a repeatable travel segmentation workflow your team can use year after year.