Wealth Screening Results - Where Do You Begin

There are several reliable vendors who can do a wealth screening of your database.  How you choose a vendor will depend as much on your budget as it will on the format in which the data is returned to you.  I have worked with several wealth screening vendors over the years (some that no longer exists) and while they all have similarities, there are differences that you need to explore as you choose the right vendor for your organizations needs.  All of the wealth screening vendors will return a lot of data back to you, and at first glance it is both quite promising and incredibly overwhelming.  The question is what do you do with the screening data once you have it back.  Where do you begin?

WHO WILL HANDLE THE PROJECT
If you have a team on staff that does your prospect research and prospect management - there can be a strategy of "divide and conquer" within that team as they attack the screenign results for multiple angles.  If you have a solo PR/PM professional on staff - that person will need a well laid out strategy on how to prioritize tasks based on the needs of the larger team, and will nee the larger tam to give them time/space to do the validation and data analysis work necessary.  If you do not have a PR/PM professional on staff - you may need to determine who on your staff is capable of taking on this project, or you may look for farm out this project to a consultant of freelancer who has expertise in wealth screenings, data validation and data analysis.

WHY SHOULD THIS PROJECT BE A HIGH PRIORITY
You have already spent a respectable amount of money to do the screening and your screening results have an uncertain shelf life.  Those of us who did screening before the housing market crashed back in 2007/2008 remember all too well how quickly our pre-2007 screening data became irrelevant.  In order to make sure that your investment in a screening was money well spent, you need to devote resources (people and hours) toward validating and analyzing the wealth screening data in a timely fashion.  Often this is easier said than done, but you have already made the investment in the screening, which is a large portion of the project - so it makes fiscal sense to invest in completing the project.  Simply doing a screening is not enough to enhance/improve the work that you are already doing.  You need to make it a priority for someone (or a small team of people) to work furiously to validate the results before the data becomes old or irrelevant. 

VALIDATION OF SCREENING RESULTS IS KEY

Above and beyond anything, you must VALIDATE you screening results.  I cannot say this enough ... validation is key to the successful use of your wealth screening results.  The data that the screening returns to you is raw data.  Until a PR/PM professional has the opportunity to verify the results, that  screening data must be presented as "unverified" results.  For example, you may have screened someone named John Smith Jr. - but the screening results come back with a couple hits for a John Smith who is not YOUR John Smith.  It could be that there is another John Smith who shares similar data points as YOUR John Smith.  It also could be that the results came back blended with the results for his son, John Smith III, or for his dad John Smith Sr.The logic used is the algorithms that these screenings use cannot replace the eagle eye of a well trained researcher ... so validation is KEY.

HOW TO SEGMENT THE DATA FOR VALIDATION
Going through the list of screening results can be a daunting task, and a time consuming one.  You need to create a strategy for how to segment the results in a way that you are validating the results in an order that makes sense for your organization.

A few approaching on how to segment the results:

1. Look at your top rated prospects and see if the screening results back up your ratings.  Perhaps you had over/under rated a prospect - this is a good time to correct the rating.
2. Look at those who the screening rated as your top prospects, but perhaps you have rated lower, or have not rated at all.  It is possible that there are some viable new prospects in that segment who have been flying under the radar for one reason or another.  You will want to see who you can add to your prospect list.
3. For an educational organization, looking at specific class years first - perhaps your reunion giving program is basing their reunion giving program (and thus the reunion asks) on the validated screening results, in which case you would want to decide which class years you need to validate first..   
4. Look at the outliers, those who don't seem to be in alignment between your ratings and the rating that the screening recommends.  If an outlier is rated highly by the screening, is there an opportunity to engage that prospect? If an outlier is rated low by the screening, are you holding on that prospect for the wrong reasons?

SUMMARY
Getting the results from your wealth screening validated is not up for debate, this is an absolute MUST if you hope for your wealth screening project to have a positive impact on the fundraising efforts of your organization.  You must invest not only in the screening, but in the resources (people and time) it takes to go through your data so that it becomes highly useful information for your organization.  You want to find new highly rated prospects, you want to verify that your current prospects are rated correctly, and you want to remove anyone from your prospect pool who has been overrated.  And once that is done - you create strategies for your gift officers so that they can go out and cultivate these prospects into the donors who want to invest in the mission of your organization and the work that your organization does.  It is all interconnected - so we need to work both ends of the spectrum - bogged down in the minutia (validating the wealth screening data) all the while remembering the big picture goals (the mission of your organization).