Developing a Major Gift Program with Wealth Screening

very excited you've joined today to learn more about, developing a major gift program using law screening and and data driven practices. Before we get started, we do have a bit of house keeping. So anyone who's registered today will receive a follow-up email with the full recording. We do have a q and a, portion at the end of our presentation today, but there's also a q and a option, in Zoom for you to send your questions. So while we'll be sure to address them at the end, we'll try to address them as, we go throughout the presentation as well if we're able to. So feel free to use the q and a feature here in Zoom. In addition, we're gonna be launching some polls throughout our our webinar, so we'd love for your participation. This really helps us drive understanding of who's in the room and making sure that we're catering our topics to things that are gonna be really helpful to those that are here today. So for those of you who may not be familiar with Windfall, we are a data company that's based in San Francisco, and our mission has been since we were founded in 2016 to help nonprofit organizations more effectively engage with constituents and donors. And we do this by providing accurate and best in class data and propensity modeling. We got our start being focused specifically on identifying and understanding affluent households in which we define affluent as a household having a net worth of a million dollars or more by taking into account both assets and liabilities to give a true reflection of a household's net worth. We build, continuously update, and own our own proprietary dataset, and this database includes coverage of over 20,000,000 affluent households in The United States and over a $100,000,000,000,000 in total wealth. We have the privilege of working with over 1,500 customers as well. And to give you some context on who you're hearing from today, my name is Meg. I'm a customer solutions engineer here at Windfall, working directly with our customers, helping them leverage their data. And prior to my time at Windfall, I spent over seven years working in the nonprofit world in both fundraising and programmatic roles. So really enjoy seeing the successes that our customers have utilizing the data. And with that, I'm gonna let Jamison introduce himself, before we continue. Hello. Welcome, everyone. My name is Jamison McKay. I'm an enterprise account executive here at Windfall. I've been here for about three and a half years, spent nearly a decade working, in tech and data, industries. So, yeah, really excited to to chat with you all today. And today, our topic is going to be digging into how you can further develop a major gift program using a data driven driven approach. But we've also recently released some incredible case studies where you can actually learn directly from Windfall customers on exactly how they achieved success with Windfall data when it came to their major donors. And so these are available on our website, but please dig in. We hope they're helpful, and we're excited that, we've partnered with these customers to be able to share their successes. As I mentioned, we have some polls for you to participate in. So here we have our first poll that I'm gonna launch on your screen asking why did you join this webinar. And you'll see some of the options here around this question with being... You know, trying to build out a major gift program, whether you're finding major gift prospects already in our database and how you can do that more effectively, how... If you're curious on how AI can help you prioritize prospects, and if you're here today to learn more about windfall data product and services. And it is a multiselect, so feel free to select all of the options that apply. We'll go ahead and end the poll in a few seconds here as I see a lot of answers coming in. Alright. I'm gonna go ahead and end the poll now and share those results, but it looks like many folks here are kind of at the beginning phases of building out or trying to expand their major gift programs or looking for ways to more effectively prospects that are already in your database. So that's really great. We're gonna be able to hit on a lot of those topics today. Appreciate you sharing. We'll have more polls coming at you in a moment. So for today's agenda, we're gonna start with a quick windfall overview before layering in some economic context for major gift households. We'll also be covering how to utilize different data points for prioritization and identification of those households. So really speaking to one of the reasons folks mentioned as being here is finding those prospects within their database. We'll also talk through harnessing AI modeling to predict major gifts with predictive modeling and taking that to the next level for your organization as well as best practices for implementing AI into major gift workflows. And as I mentioned, we'll be running through a q and a at the end if time allows. In addition, before we get started, I wanna make sure it's clear around what we are going to be covering in today's discussion and things that we won't be covering in today's webinar. So today, really, what we're gonna focus on is our mission and high level product offerings, strategies that you can use to leverage some of these attributes to identify major gift candidates, and really how your small team can get started in growing and developing your program, and as well as as I... We mentioned before, those best practices for AI implementation and propensity modeling. What we won't be covering are specific details about Windfall's dataset and how we approach wealth, implementation of different CRMs or data management techniques, details for each model that Windfall uses, or our pricing and engagement strategy between Windfall and your organization. However, we are happy to discuss this with you after the webinar in which you can reach out, and we'll schedule a conversation to explore what this might look like for your particular organization. And we're already into poll number two. But, again, this is gonna give us really great context for what we're looking for today. But poll number two is, how does your organization currently identify major gift What are you currently doing to find them for your pipeline and grow your pipeline? Is it through a wealth screening vendor, past giving in your CRM, board or staff referrals, those relationship connections, or no set process yet may be a bit varied in your approach. Alright. We're gonna go ahead and end. We've got enough participation. I'm gonna go ahead and end now to share the results, but it seems to be kind of across the board pretty evenly split. Right? You're using maybe a well screening vendor to help you identify prospects, maybe utilizing some of the... Your first party data around past giving tendencies or board and staff referrals to know who to prioritize. And so with those poll answers in mind, you can start to really think about where your organization lands when it comes to incorporating data driven or AI approaches with this data maturity curve that we're gonna show on this slide. And so what you're really seeing is a maturity curve for how well data is able to support AI and action. We have the x axis as maturity, which means how sophisticated your use of data is, not how long you've been around. But the y axis is business value because the more mature your data foundation is, the more AI can actually do for you. And so we break this into a few... Three stages. One is to establish where most organizations start. They're working out of their CRM, segmenting on transactions, transactions, maybe layering in third party data or enrichment. And if your poll answer was more basic segmentation or reporting, you're likely right here in the maturity curve. And then the second stage we have is around drive. This is where you start to get more value from the same data, smarter segmentation, better reporting, tailored direct marketing, and predictive models. If your answer was that you're already using data and workflows but still want better targeting or prioritization, you're probably in this stage. And then the third phase is where data begins to trigger action automatically. So this is in the orchestrate phase. AI can generate content. Systems can alert teams when something changes, and prescriptive workflows begin to happen. If your answer was that data was already embedded in decision making, workflows are moving into this stage. So the key point is that this isn't about good or bad answers. It's just about identifying where data can start doing more for the work of your organization. And so we're gonna do a quick recap of windfall, but we will get into more of the specific strategies your team can take. And so we'll move quickly through this overview, but we wanna make sure everyone has an understanding of what Windfall is before we stop... Start talking about how to use it to really drive prioritization of your major gift pipeline. And so here at Windfall, our mission is to change the way that organizations understand and engage their donors and prospects. We are at our core data company and since our founding have been hyper focused on providing high quality data to nonprofit customers. I already mentioned we work with over 1,500 organizations and have a lot of have a lot of really great resources and case studies that have developed from working with these organizations. And from all of that work with our customers, there are many ways in which we find they are using our data effectively. And so these are really the three main use cases that we wanna highlight that we found are finding a lot of success for our customers. The first is around identification and prioritization. Using a precise network figure, you can stack rank your database by net worth. Maybe you have a thousand records or 10,000 records or even a 100,000 records. There's only so many hours in the day, and prioritization can help you figure out where to spend your time. Secondly, we help you segment your data, which we like to call finding hidden gems here at Windfall. So imagine a $10 donation comes in. Maybe, you know, based on some of the, identification processes you already have in place, you're not gonna tap that person as a potential major donor. But by overlaying windfall's data, you realize that this person has a net worth of 10,000,000 or even $100,000,000. Maybe instead of just a thank you letter, this calls for some deeper engagement and stewardship and an immediate phone call from an assigned prospect manager. We hear stories from users about positive impact created from these hidden gems every single week. And so recently, for example, a new customer screened an event list with us and found a new attendee they had never talked to before with a high net worth. And so their team prioritized stewarding them at that event and received a first time gift of $2,000. So just a great example of finding hidden gem, acting on it, and getting real results. And finally, this third main use case is around engagement. We talked about that net worth figure, but in addition to net worth, Windfall is also enriching other triggers that you can use to personalize your outreach. Things like recent moves or divorce or liquidity events can help understand who you should be acting on right now or maybe holding off on. Maybe do they own a boat, or are they a multiproperty owner? Through knowing what a person is interested in philanthropically and how they might be using their free time, you can craft the best opportunity for a great conversation or solicitation letter. And so while we've covered the main ways customers use our data, the top use case we covered was around hidden gems. And this really highlights the importance of our business model being an unlimited screening model. And that's really important because some organizations may be limited by traditional law screening approaches based off of a credit based system. So maybe your organization did a screening once every three years, or they're selective about who they screen, which ends up just being constituents they already know. With that approach, you'll identify some affluent folks, but what about everyone else? If you're not able to take a look at your broadest database population, you'll probably miss out on some affluent gems that weren't on your radar. Radar. And beyond screening everyone, unlimited syncs allow you to capture up to date information, which becomes especially important with stock market changes that we've seen, interest rates, tariffs. There's a lot of things that are changing at any given point in time. And so we're able to let you sync with us, and we update our data every single week to capture those wealth creation and destruction events. We recommend wealth screenings throughout the year versus wealth screening once annually or even every few years. Our goal is just to make sure that you're getting the most value out of your system instead of having to curate what records you submit and potentially miss out on some of those hidden gems. And so our platform is built on data driven development, and it starts with wealth screening. Whether you're sending us data via CSV or a direct CRM integration, we're matching your constituents against our proprietary database. So when we find a match, we enrich that record and... With precise data, and this includes things like net worth or some of the triggers I mentioned, but also our career intelligence and even newer insights, like if a household has a DAF affiliation or crypto interest, really dependent on your specific subscription. And while screening is the starting point, our customers can also leverage our existing data science team and infrastructure to build custom propensity models that are going to leverage your first party data and machine learning and AI to really help answer the question, not just who's affluent and maybe broadly philanthropic, but who is very likely amongst our constituents to make a very specific gift in a specific time frame to your organization. And for organizations managing multiple databases, we offer our data link solution. So this is really designed to help you understand how constituents are engaging across your entire ecosystem. So it really helps you either deduplicate records and start to connect the dots, really giving you a 360 degree view of your donor. And this ensures that your team isn't really working with fragmented information, but working with a single system of truth. And finally, one of our most important offerings is what we already discussed, and that's our pricing model. We don't charge on the number of records you screen. We don't use a credit based system. We provide unlimited screens and syncs for all of our products. So with an integration, you can truly be getting the freshest results directly in your CRM or with the CSV process that gets you data on a weekly or monthly basis. To highlight some of the specific attributes we provide back to organizations, this is the list of triggers we provide for our standard wealth screening subscription. I mentioned we return data points providing precise net worth on affluent households, but we also return really useful triggers that Jameson will talk more about that can help you further prioritize your major donor prospects. And if you have our wealth screening premier, you'll also have access to our DAF and crypto signals in addition to our career intelligence data points you see here. These provide a more firmographic look as well as career information of a constituent that can be paired with the wealth triggers or used on their own to segment and start to really understand your constituents. Maybe someone's recently been promoted, and we wanna reach out, and congratulate them, or maybe someone is actually at a company that we've been trying to have a sponsorship or more corporate support discussions with. Maybe we can use reaching out to that person as a way to help us move that company level conversation along. And so we're, you know, done with the overview of. We're about to jump in kind of the meat and potatoes of our presentation today. And before we do that, we do wanna set some context around understanding some key ways that, are key factors that are influencing these major gift households that we see today. And one of those factors is the new tax reality. And so before we dive into strategies for developing a major gift program, let's ground ourselves in data. The snapshot here shows the nonprofit giving trends that have shaped our landscape since 1990, and more importantly, how the market has adapted to the unique volatility of the last few years. At Windfall, we lead with data. And looking at the chart on the right, you'll see giving in nominal dollars over the last three decades. While we aren't adjusting every bar for inflation here, the trajectory is still clear. Philanthropy is incredibly resilient. Even through major downturns, like the dot com bubble in 2001 and the Great Recession in 2008, the decreases were relatively muted. This shows that while giving might stagnate or dip during a recession, it rarely collapses. In fact, since 1990, we've seen only a handful of years where giving didn't grow compared to the year prior. In fact, according to the newly released Giving USA 2026 report, US charitable giving hit a record landmark last year, crossing 617,000,000,000 for the first time just... Despite it being an overall mixed economy. However, beneath that headline number, 2025 highlighted a clear tale of two donor bases. On one hand, high capacity and structured vehicle... Giving vehicles are powering the growth. We saw a 20 surge in bequest giving reaching over $62,000,000,000 alongside a 30% jump in grants from DAFs like Vanguard Charitable and a record $4,000,000,000 giving Tuesday. And on the other hand, giving as a percentage of overall philanthropy dropped to 64%, down from 80% decades ago, and small dollar contributions under $100 dropped nearly 10% year over year. We are truly living in a dollars up, donors down environment where high capacity engagement is paramount. As we move into year end 2026, major donors are reacting to shifting market conditions and the evolving tax landscape, which I'll touch on in a second. And so one of the biggest things impacting fundraising in 2026 is the new tax bill that took effect on January 1. The one big beautiful bill act is a major new law signed by president Trump in July 2025, and you can think of it as a huge update to the tax code that changes how much income tax most Americans will now pay as of January 2026. The main goals of the bill are to make the lower tax rates passed in 2027... Sorry, 2017 permanent and create new temporary ways for people to reduce that taxable income. The permanent changes reflect changes that are here to stay and prevent a huge tax increase that was scheduled to happen in 2026 when taxes reverted back to those pre 2017 levels. The seven current income tax brackets, which determine your tax rate, are made permanent. This prevents the rates from automatically increasing to the older higher levels, meaning donors' income tax rates are locked in at the current lower level with the highest rate remaining 37%. Most people don't itemize or list out every deduction like mortgage interest or charity. Instead, they take the standard deduction, which is a fixed amount that lowers their taxable income. So for a married couple, that amount is roughly $32,000 in 2026. This means that for most people, it isn't worth itemizing and deducting donations is less important. The tax bracket for having children is made permanent and increased to $2,200 per child... The tax break. Excuse me. And to the limit on how much money a person can leave to heirs without federal estate tax is increased significantly to $15,000,000 or 30,000,000 if you're a couple. This will really only apply to and benefit the wealthiest estates and makes it much easier to pass large portions to the next generation tax free. The temporary changes are new unique deductions that apply for a few years, 2025 through 2028, mainly for middle come... Income workers. And the new deduction that lets you subtract up to $25,000 of your tip income from your taxable income will mean that service workers like restaurant staff or delivery drivers will pay significantly less tax. The new deduction that lets you subtract up to $12,500 of your overtime pay from your taxable income, which encourages working extra hours by making a portion of that overtime tax free. An extra $6,000 deduction for people aged 65 and older, though it's phased out for higher earners. The limit on deducting state and local taxes or SALT is raised to $40,000 up from $10,000 for many taxpayers. People with adjusted gross income of under 500 k in high tax states like California and New York who itemize their deductions can now subtract a much larger amount of their state and local taxes from their federal federal taxable income, and this is scheduled to remain effective through 2029. And Trump accounts are a new $1,000 seed funded savings accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028. And so the big question is, how does this impact their donors, and how should they act now and in the coming years? When it comes to our growth, we're probably going to acquire new donors on GivingTuesday, but it's really important to establish strong communication and stewardship for those new donors. And a lot of times, we've worked through... We've worked really hard to acquire those new donors, right, throughout the year as we're trying to spread awareness. And the end of year is a really great time to capitalize on all the groundwork and make sure we've seen a return on the resources we've dedicated to acquiring these new supporters. But it's important to move quickly to develop relationships with those new donors and to start to cultivate their support for your organization. With just sixty days to convert those first time donors into recurring givers, we have to be strategic with our approach and recognition of those new supporters and spending time with the right folks. And as we mentioned, the OBBA or... Has provisions that impact tax incentives for charitable giving. It essentially reduces the tax break for the wealthiest donors and introduces a new small tax break for everyday donors. These changes all started January of this year. And so your major donors are people who list out deductions, their mortgage interest, property taxes, and charitable giving rather than taking the standard deduction. And this is where the biggest challenges lie for 2026. Before 2026, wealthy donors who itemize their deductions could begin deducting charitable contributions from the first dollar. In 2026, the new point 5% floor on charitable deductions weakens the tax incentive for the first few thousand dollars of giving for many wealthy donors. So as an example, if a donor earns $500,000, the first 2,500 they give to all charities is now not tax deductible. For your wealthiest donors in the top tax bracket starting in 2026, the tax value of their deduction is reduced from 37¢ to 35¢ on the dollar. In other words, the tax break for $100,000 gift drops from 37,000 to $35,000. Everyone is holding their breath to see how this impacts major donors, while a 2025 study of affluent philanthropy noted that 81% of affluent households, those with over $1,000,000 in net worth and or an annual income over $200,000, gave an average gift of $33,000 in 2024. And trends also show that overall participation by members of this affluent group dropped since 2017. So will it continue to drop as incentives to give are reduced is the question. And another big change starting in 2026 is the new corporate giving floor, which means that corporations can only deduct charitable gifts that are above 1% of their taxable income. This eliminates the tax benefit for most small to midsized corporate charitable donations as the first 1% of the gift is no longer deductible. A smaller company giving a $10,000 charitable donation may receive zero tax benefit, making the gift more expensive. And this provides a huge opportunity to fundraisers in 2026 for your annual fund or mid level givers. The new $1,000 universal deduction or $2,000 for married couples filing jointly, which began again on the first of this year, is above the line deduction designed to benefit taxpayers who take the simple high standard deduction, like $32,200 for a couple. We'll call these your everyday donors and probably accounts for at least 90% of your database and donor file. This means that donors who usually don't get any tax benefits from giving charitable gifts because they don't itemize will now receive a tax benefit from their giving. It could also mean that some of your smaller dollar donors delayed giving year end gifts in 2025 in order to make the gift in 2026 where they will receive an incentive. On another big note here is the new law specifies that the universal deduction does not apply to contributions made to donor advised funds or DAFs or private nonoperating foundations. The restriction applies directly to the moment the individual donor makes the gift. If a non itemizing donor contributes $1,000 in cash to a DAF, they cannot claim the new $1,000 universal deduction on their federal tax return for that contribution. The deduction is intended to incentivize immediate funding of public charities, not to give a tax break for contributions to vehicles like DAFs or private foundations where the funds are held and the grant making is deferred or controlled by the donor. In 2025, many fundraising teams were in a spirit to secure multiyear pledges for the major tax shifts that took hold. As we move into 2026, the role of a director of major gifts must pivot from a closer to acting as a true philanthropic adviser. We aren't just asking for gifts anymore. We're helping our donors navigate a much more complex financial landscape. And for those owners who don't front load their giving in 2025, our 2026 strategy centers on the bunching approach. Because itemized deductions now only apply to gifts that exceed the point five percent floor of donors' adjusted gross income, we need to get consultative. Right? We need... We should be advising our donors on their financial planners to make one very large contribution every two or three years rather than a smaller annual gift. This strategy ensures that they clear that point 5% tax floor in their bunch here, maximizing their benefit while keeping their long term impact on our mission the same or even higher. As you prioritize your outreach, keep a close eye on donors in high tax states like California, New York, and Illinois. And even with federal changes, the $40,000 salt cap means that these individuals are still highly likely to itemize, making them more responsive to tax advantaged giving conversations. And so we should also be looking at, looking for mission first profiles, people with top political donors who are accustomed to giving based on conviction rather than tax incentive. For those of you leveraging advanced wealth intelligence, this is where you can really sharpen your focus without just looking at raw net worth. You wanna look for signals of sophistication, like trust association, foundation officers. These donors are already using complex giving vehicles and will be the most receptive to a proactive conversation about appreciated stock or qualified charitable distributions from their IRAs. By focusing on these money in motion and liquidity triggers, you can identify exactly when a donor has the capacity to make that one large multiyear bunch gift. This strategic approach is our is our known major donor actually sets the stage, for our next challenge, identifying the people we don't know yet. So let's talk about how we find those hidden gems in your database and who are really ready to make this jump. But before we jump into that, we do wanna name one more factor that's impacting major donors in this year, and that's that we're in a current tax reality of, you know, impact that's really impacting philanthropic trends, but we're also currently in the process of a great wealth transfer. And so by 2045, the below generations will inherit or have a windfall of tens of trillions of wealth. A portion will be allocated to philanthropy by the older generation, so planned giving and major giving should be a focus right now for your team. One important piece for fundraisers today should be relationship development with the heirs, and we cannot overstate this. Heirs often don't consider parents' financial advisers, and studies show that they don't follow their philanthropic tendencies as well. So having up to date data and wealth signals that show up in younger populations are a key foundation to then build strong relationships on and capitalize on their ability to give major gifts. And so with this context now, I'm gonna pass it on to my colleague, Jamison, to jump into those real strategies for your major gift pipeline. Great. Thank you, Meg. Yeah. So now let's get into meat and potatoes here of what's gonna help everyone understand some key ways to feed your giving... Major giving pipeline. But first, of course, we have another windfall poll. So if you don't mind participating, we would love to get a sense of, you know, challenges around your major giving program. So we'll just leave that up for a moment here. Get a quick pulse for participants, see kind of what's coming up. Just give it another ten seconds or so. Thank you for your participation. Great. So this... And it looks like another very diverse kind of across the board responses here. 31% of respondents saying not enough qualified prospects, slightly more saying gift officers are stretched thin. And we also have a decent amount of people also who are saying that their donor data is not reliable as well as, not knowing how much to ask. So, all really helpful and, interesting, points there. Thank you again for for sharing your experience. So now as we think about establishing a foundation of data and learning more about our constituency, these are some aspects of identifying major donors that we want to consider. What's the holistic view of our constituents and our donors? How engaged are these individuals with our organization? What does their wealth situation look like? What are some interests or other aspects of their life that might be relevant to us? What do they do for work? What does that tell us about them as a constituent? Then how confident really do we feel in our, gift asks? How much are we asking for? These kinds of things, are really important considerations, to feel confident about building out that pipeline. Also, how well have we cultivated these donors and constituents historically? Do you know which groups of donors are the most successful? Have you ever asked for a bigger gift from certain donors who've shown a consistent track record, of supporting your organizations? Or do you have clearly defined specific gift thresholds? These are all questions that your team should be discussing internally to help you understand, what is our ideal major donor profile, and who are those major donor candidates that meet these criteria that we have, you know, aligned on as a team. Now another important factor for understanding this major giving population is, taking a look at the increasing prevalence of DAF or donor advised fund utilization. Understanding the shift can help us better understand our major donors and understand, you know, why is this trend happening essentially. So one of the first things we think about is flexibility. The benefit to the donor is allowing that individual, when they use a DAF, to set aside those funds today and secure an immediate tax benefit while choosing to distribute those funds at a later date, giving them that flexibility. The vehicle also encourages strategic legacy planning. So unlike a private family foundation, for example, which carries significant fiduciary and administrative responsibilities, a DAF is a much simpler vehicle to manage. So this low barrier to entry makes it an ideal tool for these major gift donors to engage in the next generation of major gift donors, so those heirs and that wealth transfer that we're talking about. We often see donors using their DAFs as a, quote, charitable training ground involving their children or other family members in the decision making process for recommending grants and donations to specific organizations. Another critical benefit is anonymity. While a private foundation is required by law to publicly list every organization it supports, a DAF offers a layer of protection so a donor can recommend a grant anonymously, which is a major motivator for those who prefer to keep their philanthropic interests private. Finally, it's worth noting that the strategic overlap between these vehicles exists. So for many donors that leverage a family foundation, a lot of times, they're also operating in a DAF. So in some cases, a donor may even move funds from their foundation into their DAF, specifically to try to maintain a higher level of anonymity for making certain gifts. A 2025 Bank of America study on the affluent population's philanthropy, there was an interesting poll about why people use these kinds of giving vehicles. When asked what they use these giving vehicles for, the majority, 70% of affluent individuals who had a DAF said it was for tax considerations. 47% of these affluent individuals with a private foundation also said tax considerations was their primary reason, for having that foundation. Many who indicated that they had a charitable LLC indicated it was for multigenerational engagement. When asked if they had made a donation to a giving vehicle in 2024, 91% indicated that they had. So this disruption is happening and impacting traditional fundraising metrics. So major DAF supporters like Fidelity Charitable, DAF Giving three sixty, and Vanguard Charitable are seeing pretty staggering increases in in distributions over over double digit year over year, with Fidelity alone reaching over $18,000,000,000. This growth makes traditional gift capacity scoring systems less effective. If your organization is relying on legacy data that might overweight past giving history as part of the capacity score, you're most likely not going to, you know, be able to understand that donor's true capacity because their wealth is sitting in these structured nontraditional vehicles. Wealthy individuals are highly analytical and often utilize these funds to manage some of their quiet anxieties like tax regulations. To convert this capital into donations, we have to leverage sophisticated wealth data that will reveal precise net worth, liquidity, giving propensity, things like that beyond our standard observed giving patterns. Additionally, we need to change our language so that we are adjusting and tailoring our messaging towards a more strategic partnership type of offering for that household and or sponsor. So this shifting philanthropic environment makes it really important to understand where are your donations coming from when we analyze it from the perspective of donation size and of wealth. Ideally, we wanna see a consistent upward trend that shows donations amounts increasing in parallel with the the rate of wealth or net worth. In this example, we can see that donation size is actually remaining flat or consistent between the 1,000,000 to $5,000,000 net worth range. Now as a major gift officer, I would be wondering, a, do any of the donors in my portfolio fall into one of these net worth buckets? And b, if so, what kind of ask amount are they receiving? Some donors or hidden gems in this 1 to 5,000,000 net worth range may actually just be waiting for the right ask to take their next... Their giving to the next level. This is also the kind of analysis that organizations will sometimes use to understand the levels of, opportunity within their database. If you are not a Windfall customer yet and you are interested in seeing, this kind of complementary analysis, please feel free to reach out. So now let's dig into wealth and historical donations as a a method for understanding our major donors. So one thing that we can do is organize results into four quadrants as we'll show here, starting with your lower wealth matches with varying donation histories. Lower wealth and lower donation history. These matches are strong candidates for your annual giving and stewardship teams. Continue to cultivate these relationships and monitor closely for changes in donation patterns or increases with, their wealth. Lower wealth and high donation history. One step with this group would be to assign these to a leadership annual giving officer and continue to steward these donors. High wealth and high donation history. Verify that these donors are assigned to a gift officer, and they are receiving dedicated one to one stewardship and outreach. We wanna keep those people close and ensure that we're continuing to engage and renew those donations. Finally, the high wealth but low donation history quadrant. This is what we wanna think about in terms of our hidden gems. These donors likely have the potential to increase their giving when asked in the correct way. Affluent constituents with sustained engagement for your organization may be primed for an increase in their ask amount. Now to ground these principles in reality, let's briefly touch on a quick case study here with the High Fives Foundation. Now they have a small lean team, and they used wealth screening to identify wealth within their existing donor base, very quickly found a hidden gem, a donor that they already knew who was on their radar as a consistent supporter, but didn't realize, that they had such significant untapped potential. So instead of, moving forward with their generic ask for this historical donor, they use these insights to craft a highly personalized purse... Proposal for a specific program sponsorship that was very well aligned with the donor's interests that they had shared with the team. The outcome was staggering and immediate. The donor increased their annual giving by four x up to a $100,000 per year. As their CRM administrator noted, this helped them move from guessing affluence to knowing net worth and was a huge game changer for their solicitation strategy. So this is just one example that we like to highlight to to really bring to life the notion of identifying those hidden gems within your database. Now this is great for understanding wealth and some characteristics for identifying, you know, those hidden gem prospects. But how do we actually harness AI models as part of of this process? So something we like to do is if we think back to that kind of maturity curve for data, this is how we think about analytics in terms of maturity. And so starting with descriptive analytics, those are all the things that we think about as platforms that provide us with reporting or insights to give us a good sense of what has happened in the past. Now you might internally have analysts who diagnose those reports and give us a clearer understanding of what actually happened. And so that's how we think about diagnostic analytics. Right? Why something happened. Now there might be some annotations on the graph here, some event that actually did happen, and that's really in the middle category. So when we start to think about predictive analytics, that is predictive AI. So this means using historical analysis of things that have happened in the past to help us confidently predict future outcomes. For example, the likelihood of an individual to make a major gift. And now the last step here in this analytics maturity curve is around prescriptive analytics. So this is really thinking about how do we make that thing happen, that thing that we want to replicate. All considerations around AI, we like to consider this as a activation of your data. AI is really, at the end of the day, just the activation of data in ways that drive our business forward, and so the underlying data is, you know, incredibly, incredibly important when we think about these kinds of models. So important, in fact, that we feel that we should make a public service announcement that no matter how good your AI model is, whatever kind of AI strategy you're using, the data that that AI is trained on is paramount. The quality is going to have a outsized impact on the actual performance and utilization of those AI tools and models. And so we're gonna jump into our last poll here, and thank you again for your participation. We wanna understand within this notion of AI and AI strategies, do you use machine learning models right now as part of your major gift strategy? We'll just leave that up for another ten, fifteen seconds or so just to get a sense of where folks are at. We, again, thank you for your your engagement. We love to see, you know, where folks are at with these things. And so it's looking like a good split again across either yes through a vendor or consultants, not yet, but we're looking into it, and as well as no. No machine learning models as of yet. Small minority is building their own models internally, which is great. We love that. But, again, we can see folks are all over the map in terms of their current experience. And so why use AI driven propensity modeling? So I think that probably the audience on here today knows better than anyone else that wealth is just the first qualification, but it's not the only factor. Just because somebody has a high level of wealth does not necessarily mean they have the likelihood or the propensity to make donations to our organization at, you know, that higher level that we're looking for. And so if we build out this example, we can actually see, you know, two prospects that, you know, maybe they're both And if we only have time in the day to reach out to one of these folks, most likely, we're gonna prioritize the person with the higher net worth because they have a greater giving capacity. However, if we overlay a propensity score to understand, well, who's actually most likely to, for example, make a one time $25,000 donation, turns out the person with actually a lower net worth, less than half of the other example constituent, is much, much more likely or has a greater propensity to support our organization at that defined threshold. And so, therefore, we wanna dedicate our research, our stewardship, our engagement resources around this higher propensity constituent. And now major giving is the focus of our conversation today, but something to note is that really any type of outcome or model that your organization has historical examples of, Windfall can really build a model around that. So as long as we have enough what we refer to as ideals, folks who've done the behavior that we wanna replicate, we can build a model that matches, you know, and scores individuals on their likelihood to replicate that. And so these are some common examples and use cases, but still keep in mind that each and every model is fully custom to your organization and tailored specifically to your goals. Something else to note about, this kind of modeling is that this is not a static score, that is just, set it and forget it or refresh it every year or a couple of years. This is an ongoing living, breathing score that we're measuring and iterating on and feeding data back into to make sure it's improving over time, and we're getting a good sense of, you know, what kinds of changes are occurring from the wealth standpoint, from their engagement with your organization standpoint, and how is that impacting the actual propensity of these constituents to convert at specific levels. And so if that's a little bit about how, you know, these actual models are built and rolled out, what are the business practices or operational rules that folks are using to maximize their adoption and use of these predictive models. We can see that, you know, here, we're digging deeper into portfolio segmentation and conversations. So we've created another quadrant system similar to our wealth quadrant, but that is now focused more on giving propensity. So the axes of PTG score and assignment to portfolio or gift officer can be used for more strategic and ongoing reassignment conversations as well as larger larger conversations about what do we wanna do with people who are either being removed from a portfolio because they're, they have a low propensity, or being reviewed for a different type of portfolio, or allocation, when no space is available. For example, email only campaigns for low PTG and unassigned constituents. We're increasing the call or personal letter outreach for those high PTG, prospects and hidden gems that are currently unassigned. We see the most successful propensity, to give users creating data driven rules to guide prospect management further research and on the fly designations. So to that end, some key questions that we hope our PTG users are considering are things like how many prospects can your team reasonably handle right now in a given year? Are you going to be taking apart portfolios and redoing them from scratch, or are we kind of just refreshing who goes into those portfolios? What rules can we put in place for top prospects? Whatever, you know, whenever we've decided what that cutoff will be, can that group be put into a holding portfolio, for example, to be monitored by the team for future assignment? Can that group get more event invitations or special emails that look more personalized but aren't time intensive for the team. Now here's some examples of, you know, rules that your frontline team can use to make it easier for them to engage with and take action on this kind of data. For example, a prospect researcher maybe will see someone's in the top 2% of scores but hasn't actually given in five years. They can immediately place that individual in a cultivation pool and tagged with a business rule that if they make a gift, we need to take a closer review and engage with that person strategically. Or if somebody makes their first gift over a thousand dollars and we see that they're in the top 1% of PTG scores. That's amazing. Let's immediately assign that person to a portfolio and send them a quick email to that gift officer to create stewardship and qualification workflows. Or on the other end of the spectrum, someone who previously was a principal gift owner but is now in the top fifteenth percentile. They are not ready for another ask of that level just yet. So should... They should continue to stay where they are and be given time to build up to another large gift while still receiving all your content in appreciation for their previous giving. So, hopefully, it's helpful to hear a couple examples of how organizations are implementing strategies around these predictive models. I wanna close out with a couple key points to to keep you... Keep this top of mind for you. So the first one is start now. A lot of organizations feel like their data is not in the right place yet or, you know, they have pitting priorities that make them wanna wait for the perfect time, but that leads to, you know, really missing opportunities. So perfection is the enemy of progress, and speed to implementation is is an advantage here for moving that needle. Second, let AI do the heavy lifting. This isn't about replacing your team. It's about using AI to automate the more manual aspects of your work so that you can dedicate that time and resource towards your strategic activities and, you know, building those relationships. Third, identify the low hanging fruit. Set realistic goals and go after those easy high impact wins first to build internal momentum and confidence in your strategy. And then finally, we want to encourage you to measure and celebrate your success. Document those results early and often. Providing the ROI on these small wins is how you will, justify, budget spend and, showcase, the improvements in efficiency that you are rolling out, to your team.