Menlo School expands its donor research efficiently with Kindsight

Small team? No problem. Kindsight helps nonprofit teams of any size work faster and go further.

Menlo School is a private college preparatory school in Atherton, California. Their mission is to empower students to reach their fullest potential, develop the skills necessary for success in college, and become ethical, responsible, and engaged members of their communities. The seven-person Development Team at Menlo School helps move this mission forward by soliciting gifts from families and alumni, led by Vidya Kagan, the Director of Development Services.

“By and large, I do most of the research for our team,” said Kagan. “My team relies on me to uncover the top prospects to drive our fundraising efforts and support Menlo.”

The Challenge: Efficiently source donor intel

When Kagan and her team launched a capital campaign in 2015, they knew they needed to solicit both existing and new donors for gifts. The challenge was that they had little comprehensive donor intel in their database that the team could draw from before making an ask.

Kagan manually researched hundreds of parents, alumni, grandparents, and families in the Menlo community through platforms like LinkedIn and Google. But she needed a tool to help her confidently find, in a systematic, organized way, the right people to pass on to her team so they could make the right asks. That’s where Kindsight came in.

The Solution: A multi-use tool to streamline research

The Menlo School development team started using Kindsight’s iWave product in the Fall of 2015 to support their capital campaign efforts. “In the beginning, we mainly used Kindsight for campaign prospecting,” says Kagan. “I would share my Kindsight donor research with my colleagues, the Head of School, and our volunteers who would be making the asks.”

But as the years progressed and Menlo’s campaign kept moving along, Kagan also started using Kindsight to research new families and alumni. “We have about 100 families that join the Menlo community every year, so I run that through Kindsight,” she says. “Then I drill down into about a third of that list that have the highest Kindsight Score, and focus on those top prospects.”

Kindsight enables Kagan to work faster because it allows her to prioritize the donors by score. In a similar way, Kagan evaluates alumni based on their graduating year. She sorts the results by highest Kindsight Score and highest capacity, conducts in-depth research, and builds profiles on each alum.

Lately, Kagan leverages Kindsight’s Multi-Lens Modeling feature to look at donors through different lenses based on different projects. “It’s a more organic view of our prospects,” she says. “We use the ‘Education lens’, of course, and being able to look at other areas of affinity like Arts or Philanthropy simultaneously helps us get a clearer picture of our prospect’s interests and philanthropic inclination.”

The Outcome: A small-but-mighty team making the right asks at the right time

Menlo School started with a need to fuel their capital campaign and now uses Kindsight regularly to not only evaluate existing and new prospects, but also to dive into a deeper segmentation of their database. This allows them to go further, faster, with their small team. To sum up her experience with Kindsight, Kagan says, “Kindsight is educating my whole team so that we are as prepared as we can be to make the right asks to the right people.”