TL;DR
- A frontline officer carries 150 names and genuinely knows about twenty. Six officers gives an institution real depth on 150 people, against a file of forty thousand.
- Donor knowledge has almost always been a capacity problem, not a research problem.
- Wealth screening was rationed twice: first by budget, then by attention.
- Coming soon: Every contact synced into Virtuous Momentum will soon come back with a wealth and capacity profile…no CRM+ requirement, and an explicit no-match state when the data is not there.
- A capacity estimate is not knowledge of a person. What a wider view changes is the question: from “who is worth my time” to “who have I never had a reason to look at.”
Years ago I sat in a conference room with a printed list of names a model had ranked. That work eventually became two patents. At the time it was just paper.
What stayed with me was how the gift officers read the page. They scanned the top, recognized a handful of names, then stopped at the first one they did not know. Someone asked, carefully, whether the model had made a mistake.
It had not. The donor was real, lived a few miles from the hospital, and had been giving modest gifts for years. Nobody had ever called them. The reason was arithmetic.
I have carried that room through every version of this work since, because the sector keeps treating donor knowledge as a research problem. It has almost always been a capacity problem instead.
Look at the arithmetic honestly. A frontline officer carries a portfolio of roughly 120 to 150 names. Ask that officer how many of those people they could describe without opening the database, whose spouse they could name, whose reason for giving they actually understand, and the number collapses to around twenty.
I do not mean that as a criticism of gift officers. It is what human attention does under load.
Now scale it. Six officers with genuine working knowledge of twenty or twenty-five people each gives an institution real depth on roughly 150 human beings. Set that against a file of forty thousand.
The organization will say, sincerely, that it has forty thousand donors. It has forty thousand records and a few hundred relationships. Everyone else is a name, an address, and a giving history.
Why Concentration Accelerates the Decline
This is the engine underneath the numbers that have been alarming our sector for about a decade. Total dollars keep climbing while the number of households giving keeps falling, and the response to losing donors has been to concentrate harder on the ones still visible.
It is a rational response to a capacity constraint, and it accelerates the problem it is trying to solve. You cannot retain people you have never once looked at.
Wealth screening is not new. But screening has been rationed twice over.
First by budget. Prospect research has always been priced as a major gifts expense, so the organizations that most needed a wider view were the least able to buy one.
Then by attention. Even where a screen was affordable, the file would arrive, the top two percent would move into portfolios, and the rest would sink back into the database untouched. Screening confirmed a shortlist someone had already intuited.
What Gets Rationed Long Enough Starts to Look Like a Value
When an institution can only know a few hundred people, it eventually builds a theory of philanthropy in which only a few hundred people matter.
Major gifts becomes the prestige role. The annual fund becomes a volume operation measured in response rate. The language hardens. We say “our donors” and mean the ones in portfolios, and we say “the file” and mean everyone else.
Nobody decided this. A constraint hardened into a worldview, which is how most bad worldviews arrive.
This is the instinct running underneath the work Gabe Cooper and I have been doing on what we call N1 philanthropy, borrowed from precision medicine’s premise that the meaningful unit of study is the individual rather than the average. In medicine, treating everyone in a category identically was what you did before you could see well enough to do otherwise. Then imaging improved, sequencing got cheap, and the category stopped being the point. Philanthropy has been waiting on the same shift, and what it has been waiting on is cost.
Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights
Coming soon: we will be changing how Virtuous Momentum handles donor data. Every contact synced into the platform will come back enriched with a wealth and capacity profile: an estimated wealth score, estimated net worth, a five-year estimated donation capacity, estimated property value, and total estimated property equity.
This new capability will be built from third-party income and net worth signals along with real estate records. And it will apply to every contact, not the top of the file, and not only the accounts that use our deeper research product.
This will all be made possible using our AI-powered prospecting tool, Virtuous Insights, which will soon feed this data into Momentum.
Two important details to note:
It will not require Virtuous CRM+
Momentum already ingests customer data regardless of the system it lives in, including Virtuous CRM+, Raiser’s Edge NXT, Salesforce NPSP, and Blackbaud CRM. If your database is not Virtuous, you’ll still get Insights data in Momentum.
It will tell you when it does not know
When the data is not there, the product will return an explicit no-match state, and it will tell you why: insufficient identifying information, or no property records found, which may mean the person rents, owns outright, or recently moved.
This is the ethical posture of the whole thing. A system that says “I do not know” is one you can reason with. A system that always produces a number teaches you to trust numbers that were never earned.
A Capacity Estimate Is Not Knowledge of a Person
It is an inference drawn from income signals, property records, and demographic proxies. Right often enough to be useful. Wrong often enough to be dangerous if you forget what it is.
Estimated net worth tells you nearly nothing about a person’s sense of belonging to a mission. Some of the most consequential donors I have worked with scored poorly on commercial models, because those models measure proximity to accumulated assets.
Or another scenario: An organization gets capacity data on all forty thousand records and uses it to build a bigger, better sorting machine. The top tier gets a human being. The next tier gets a personalized email. Everyone else gets the newsletter. Same rationing, larger spreadsheet, clearer conscience.
A wider view is worth having because it changes the question. The sector has spent fifty years answering “who is worth my time” by intuition. The question worth asking now is “who have I never had a reason to look at.” The first narrows the file. The second widens the field of view and hands the judgment back to a person, which is where judgment belongs. Keep the AI informational and the humans relational. A score is a reason to make a call. It is never a substitute for having made one.
Start With Five Conversations
Open your database and sort donors by estimated capacity, then filter out everyone already in a portfolio. Look at the first fifty names. Those are people who have been giving to your mission, some of them for years, who have never had a single individualized moment with your organization because there was no way to know they were there.
Call five of them this month. Not a solicitation. A conversation.
Then decide for yourself whether the constraint you have been managing around was ever really about research.
I still think about that conference room. The model knew nothing about the person whose name stopped the conversation. It knew a pattern, and the pattern made someone curious enough to pick up a phone. The gift that came later was produced by the conversation, and the algorithm only made the conversation possible.
The tools are finally good enough to tell you where to look. What to say when someone answers has always been the job.
FAQs
Will I Need Virtuous CRM+ to Get Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights?
No. Momentum will ingest contact data from Virtuous Insights regardless of the system it lives in, including Virtuous CRM+, Raiser’s Edge NXT, Salesforce NPSP, and Blackbaud CRM. Every contact synced into Momentum will come back enriched, whether or not your database is Virtuous.
What Will Be Included in Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights?
Virtuous Insights will provide an estimated wealth score, estimated net worth, a five-year estimated donation capacity, estimated property value, and total estimated property equity. These will be built from third-party income and net worth signals combined with real estate records. That information will then pass into Virtuous Momentum.
What Will Happen When Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights Cannot Find a Match?
It will return an explicit no-match state rather than a confident guess, and it will tell you why. The two reasons will be insufficient identifying information and no property records found, which may mean the person rents, owns their home outright, or recently moved. A system that reports what it does not know is a system you can reason with.
How Will Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights Differ From Traditional Wealth Screening?
Traditional screening was a periodic project: you bought a file, the top of it moved into portfolios, and the rest sank back into the database until the next screen. Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights will apply to every contact rather than a purchased slice of the file, and it will enrich on sync rather than on a purchase cycle. The difference is less about the data itself than about who it covers and how often it refreshes.
What Will Having Virtuous Insights Add on Top of Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights?
Wealth Scoring Powered by Insights will draw on third-party signals. Having Virtuous Insights adds scores modeled on your organization’s actual giving history and engagement, a composite giving score broken into wealth and capacity, connection, and likelihood, and suggested gift amounts based on different ask needs.
What Is N1 Philanthropy?
N1 Philanthropy is the idea that there are no “donors” or “prospects” — only individual people whose connection to your mission shifts continuously, so fundraising should borrow precision medicine’s logic and respond to each person’s real-time signals rather than the static segment they’ve been filed into.
