"Nonprofit organizations must secure principal gifts to sustain their mission," said Richard Becker, president of Target Analytics. "This type of philanthropy is critical to maintaining development efforts. Since donors capable of making large transformative gifts behave differently than other constituents, it is essential to employ all available methods, not just wealth analysis, to uncover them in your database."

The Principal Giving Solution examines a broad array of hard asset information, demographic characteristics, statistical analysis, and known giving patterns. The resulting data is made available via an easy-to-use segmentation tool that places principal gift prospects into four tiered categories based on the strength of their likelihood and their capacity to make a principal gift.

"Most traditional screenings offer a one-dimensional wealth analysis, but don't provide several other factors that contribute to the overall picture of a person's likelihood to give a principal or transformational gift," said John Greene, Target Analytics director of operations and data management. "The Principal Giving Solution captures all of the unique characteristics of principal gift donors and helps nonprofits truly understand which prospects make up the very top tier of their donor pyramid."

Farm Sanctuary, focused on protecting farm animals from cruelty and promoting compassionate vegan living, is one of the first organizations to use the Principal Giving Solution with a goal of obtaining principal gifts to grow the organization and the impact it has.

"We've identified that the area of the greatest latent potential to fuel growth is in major gifts," said Nikki Bollaert, Farm Sanctuary's senior director of development. "The success of this project with Target Analytics will help us make a jump in bringing our mission to more people."

After completing an initial statistical modeling project with Target Analytics, Farm Sanctuary was able to identify 22,000 high-value prospects. "It was overwhelming to know that our best prospects numbered over 22,000," said Bollaert. "We are a small shop with limited resources, and we didn't have capacity to have that many people in our portfolios. There was too much good information!"

With the Principal Giving Solution, Target Analytics was able to apply additional segmenting based on national giving data and current engagement levels and further segment the top prospects to identify potential principal givers. "The Principal Giving Solution helped us prioritize our efforts for the people who can give the highest possible gift in the shortest amount of time," said Bollaert.

Going beyond wealth

The Principal Giving Solution goes beyond wealth analysis, as segmenting on wealth alone can result in missing 40 to 50 percent of potential principal gift prospects. To increase accuracy, a prospect's inclination, capacity, and wealth must be reviewed. The Principal Giving Solution uses a nonprofit's data and Target Analytics proprietary national profile of 100 million constituent giving patterns to take into account the unique philanthropic behavior of high net worth and ultra high net worth individuals, ensuring principal gift prospects are measured against the correct peer group.