Donor capacity: 4 ways to gain insight

Determining donor capacity is one of the most critical and challenging parts of prospect research. There’s rarely a clear answer, and getting it wrong means potentially missing a major gift opportunity or damaging donor trust with an unrealistic ask. Yet every successful fundraising strategy depends on getting it right.

Guessing at donor capacity costs organizations major gifts. Gathering actionable insights allows you to base your asks on evidence, not assumptions.

What is donor capacity?

Donor capacity measures how much a prospect has the financial ability to give. A capacity rating is typically expressed as the total amount someone could contribute to all causes over a five-year period.

Unlike propensity or affinity, donor capacity doesn’t reflect motivation or emotional connection. It’s a measure of potential resources only. Most organizations assess all three indicators together but still treat them separately. It’s entirely possible for someone to have high capacity without any demonstrated philanthropic interests.

For fundraisers, capacity ratings offer valuable insight when preparing a major gift ask, but there’s no one-size-fits-all formula. Each organization defines and verifies capacity in its own way, using donor data, experience, and judgment to build a realistic picture of giving potential.

The three types of capacity ratings

There are three types of capacity ratings that reflect how much research has gone into determining a donor’s financial ability to give. 

1. Baseline

A baseline rating is a quick, unverified estimate based on one or two visible assets or wealth indicators found through manual research or donor search software. It offers a starting point and is a snapshot of potential giving ability. Use this level to segment or prioritize donors for deeper research, but only share it with gift officers if they fully understand it’s just a preliminary rating.

2. Verified or confirmed

A verified rating involves further manual or electronic research to confirm assets and wealth indicators. This rating should be applied with a consistent method to estimate the capacity of potential donors.

This step validates promising prospects identified in baseline wealth screening. The exact verification process varies by organization and by the level of detail each gift officer requires.

3. Strategic

A strategic rating is the most in-depth form of capacity analysis, combining multiple verified data points to narrow the giving range and determine a specific ask amount. It takes significant time but provides the highest accuracy and confidence, making it essential for personalized major gift strategies.

Why is donor capacity so important to nonprofits?

Understanding donor capacity allows nonprofit organizations to focus their time and resources on prospects who truly have the ability to make the greatest impact. It transforms your fundraising efforts from guesswork into strategy by:

• Identifying high-impact prospects: Capacity insights help spot people with the financial power to make major gifts or lead capital campaigns. Without them, you risk overlooking donors whose full potential is hidden behind modest past giving.
• Using resources efficiently: You can’t cultivate every donor as a major donor. Knowing who has the financial means allows major gift officers to focus their time, outreach, and stewardship where it matters most.
• Increasing gift size and impact: When you know someone’s capacity, your asks will match their potential. An ask too low will leave money on the table, while asking for too much often discourages giving.
• Strengthening donor relationships: A right-sized ask shows understanding and respect. It builds trust and encourages long-term engagement rooted in confidence and shared purpose.

Ways to determine donor capacity

A donor’s financial picture extends far beyond what’s publicly visible. Homes, board memberships, stockholdings, and other assets tell part of the story, but true capacity also depends on income, liabilities, and how wealth is structured. The wealthier a person is, the more complex their holdings often become.

As Helen Brown, founder of The Helen Brown Group, explains, “for some prospects publicly-identifiable wealth only comprises a tiny fraction of net worth since so much of their wealth is private. For others, identifiable wealth well over-inflates net worth since it ignores the liabilities on a household’s balance sheet.”

In short, capacity estimates are informed approximations, not absolute truths. As researcher Mark Egge puts it, “the capacity rating represents a rough estimate of the best possible gift we could get from the prospect, assuming our organization is their top philanthropic priority and that they do not have any other negative factors limiting their ability to give. The rating takes into consideration only the information available to the researcher.”

Look for multiple indicators of wealth

High-capacity donors often distribute assets across businesses, investments, real estate, and other high-value assets, which makes a single data point misleading. Strong capacity analysis draws from multiple indicators, including property values, stock holdings, business ownership, and professional roles, to build a realistic picture of financial ability. Using advanced prospect research software with diverse data sources ensures your insights reflect real giving potential, not just what’s easy to find online. 

With that in mind, the most effective prospect research approach combines data, context, and judgment. There are four practical indicators to use that will uncover and evaluate a prospective donor’s capacity.

1. Stock holdings and transactions

Publicly available filings, such as those from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) or Canada’s SEDAR, reveal a prospect’s stock ownership and trading activity. These are powerful indicators of liquidity and financial capacity. The available records detail insider transactions, share volumes, and purchase or sales prices, providing clear signals of wealth-creating events.

Prospect research software that scans SEC data makes this process faster and more accurate, allowing you to search by individual or company and set alerts for major transactions. Combined with verified databases, this information builds a strong baseline capacity rating based on a donor’s current estimated holdings.

2. Wealth acquired through financial compensation

Occupation is one of the clearest indicators of wealth. High-paying or equity-driven careers, especially in finance, often generate significant income and assets. Compensation from employment, board memberships, or business ownership reveals both earning power and access to equity, stocks, and other assets that rarely appear in public filings.

Specialized databases help identify individuals with high earning potential by aggregating estimated income, professional data, and company affiliations. For deeper analysis, tools like Infinata evaluate executive compensation, stock ownership, tenure, and company revenue to generate detailed wealth scores for senior leaders at publicly traded firms.

Finance and investment 

In the finance and investment sector, wealth often extends far beyond base salaries. Hedge funds, private equity, and venture capital firms operate much like mutual funds for ultra-high-net-worth investors. Minimum investments start around $1 million with potential returns exceeding 10–30% over several years.

Fund owners and partners in these firms frequently earn through:

• Asset management fees (about 1% of assets under management)
• Performance fees (roughly 15% of investment gains, known as carried interest)
• Returns on the firm’s own investments

Many of today’s top billionaires—464 individuals, or roughly 15% of the Forbes list—built their fortunes through finance and investments. Even those outside this group, with net worths in the $100 million to $1 billion range, still represent major philanthropic potential.

Employer and firm research

To identify finance-sector prospects, start with employer and firm research using advanced prospect research tools that include datasets from ZoomInfo and Dun & Bradstreet. Then cross-reference names with public SEC filings by:

• Searching the Investment Advisor Public Disclosure (IAPD) database for individuals or firms
• Reviewing Form ADV and Schedules A and B for ownership details
• Checking Section 7.B.(1) of Form ADV for information on each fund managed by a firm

Pro tip: Don’t overlook individuals who appear modest. Many finance professionals keep a low profile yet hold extensive assets through private investments and real estate. For a complete picture, combine capacity insights with affinity and propensity indicators to identify those both able and likely to give to your cause.

3. Real estate holdings

Real estate remains one of the most reliable indicators of donor capacity. Property data is often the only publicly available wealth record for most prospects, offering a practical way to gauge overall net worth. For roughly 80% of individuals in the US, real estate is the primary or sole asset researchers will find, and the percentage is even higher internationally.

Real estate data gives fundraisers a measurable starting point when income, stock, or business ownership details are limited. As Helen Brown notes, real estate is an excellent indicator of wealth and a green flag to dig deeper into a prospect’s financial picture.

Interpreting ownership

Owning multiple homes, investment properties, or mortgage-free residences signals financial freedom and liquidity. However, high-net-worth individuals often use trusts or LLCs to manage their assets privately, so be sure to search for homes and properties held in these structures.

Example: Consider a prospect who owns a mortgage-free $900,000 primary home in Palo Alto and a $700,000 lakefront property held in a trust for her family. 

The mortgage-free status signals stability and cash availability, while the trust indicates estate planning and multigenerational wealth. The secondary home’s location and type show long-term financial security and accumulated equity. Together, these details give your researchers a clearer picture of liquidity and wealth management, along with philanthropic potential.

Estimating capacity from real estate

A conservative industry formula will help approximate giving potential:

Property Value	Primary Residence	Additional Properties
Under $500K	5%	7.5%
$500K–$999K	7.5%	10%
$1M+	10%	15%

Applying this model to the example above: 

• Primary home: $900,000 x 7.5% = $67,500
• Lakefront property: $700,000 x 10% = $70,000
• Estimated real estate-based capacity: $67,500 + $70,000 = $137,500

This provides a realistic, data-backed baseline before incorporating other assets, income, or philanthropic indicators.

Canadian real estate data

Finding property information in Canada is more complex than in the US, but reliable tools do exist. Tracey Church and Celeste Bannon Waterman recommend using MLS.com for neighborhood-level insights and Manifold Data Systems, which analyzes census data to produce property valuations by postal code.

Real estate data doesn’t tell the full story of wealth, but it anchors capacity analysis in tangible, verifiable information. Combined with income, business, and philanthropic indicators, it gives you a solid starting point for understanding a donor’s full giving potential.

4. Charitable and political giving

A prospect’s past charitable activity is a strong indicator of their capacity to give. Reviewing historic donations helps estimate a donor’s giving potential. One simple approach is to average annual giving and multiply that figure by five for a baseline capacity. 

Tools like VeriGift provide detailed records of past giving, including gift size and frequency. This data helps you spot individuals with a history of significant contributions.

Foundation affiliations

Foundation affiliations strengthen the picture further. Someone who serves on multiple boards, especially a family foundation, likely has both wealth and an established framework for distributing it. Reviewing the foundation’s grant history will reveal its giving focus and philanthropic intent.

Example: Consider a donor who gives around $20,000 annually to education and health causes. Using the baseline formula, their estimated giving capacity would be roughly $100,000 over five years. If that same donor also manages a family foundation that awards $250,000 annually, their capacity and philanthropic readiness increase significantly.

Political giving

Political giving adds a secondary layer of insight into disposable income. While contributions don’t predict charitable behavior, they do signal financial means and flexibility. For US prospects, publicly available political donation records provide an additional data point for capacity research.

When viewed together—charitable giving, foundation roles, and political contributions—these data points help you form a clear, data-backed understanding of a prospect’s true giving capacity.

Tip: It’s not only about data!

Capacity ratings are as much about context as they are about numbers. Data offers structure, but communication ensures accuracy. 

Before finalizing a capacity rating, connect with your gift officer to understand what they already know, like personal insights, giving patterns, or qualitative cues, that will potentially shift the overall picture. Collaboration between researchers and fundraisers turns data into strategy, leading to more confident and personalized ask amounts.

How to use the information in your fundraising strategy

Once you have a baseline capacity rating, integrate it into your broader prospect management strategy:

• Prioritize prospects whose verified capacity aligns with your campaign goals.
• Tailor each ask amount based on a blend of capacity, affinity, and past engagement.
• Refine regularly by updating ratings as you uncover new wealth events, such as property sales or business exits.

Used strategically, capacity data transforms from static research into a dynamic fundraising tool, helping your team focus on the right prospects at the right time.

Donor capacity beyond the numbers

Assessing donor capacity blends data, analysis, and informed judgment. Real estate, stock activity, professional compensation, and giving history together build accurate donor capacity ratings and respectful ask strategies. 

Yet true capacity analysis goes beyond the numbers. By pairing financial insight with donor motivations and close collaboration between researchers and gift officers, your nonprofit will create data-driven, targeted fundraising strategies that inspire lasting philanthropy.

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