Wealth and Ratings and Requesting Research

Summary

In this article, you’ll learn about the Wealth and Ratings page in ABE, how to access it on a constituent record, and how to interpret the information displayed, including gift capacity and likelihood ratings.

Key Takeaways

Wealth and Ratings can be accessed via a link in the left taskbar on individual consistent records.
This view in ABE provides insights about a constituent’s gift capacity and likelihood to give via model scores and wealth screening data.
Such information is confidential and may only be used in accordance with WFAA’s polices, including its data disclosure and confidentiality policies.

What Is the Wealth and Ratings Page?

Wealth and Ratings is a page view within ABE CRM that provides both wealth-related information — real estate, stock investments, business assets and income/compensation — as well as constituent scores and ratings, including likelihood, gift capacity estimate, and gift capacity rating.

Capacity ratings and likelihood scores help prioritize prospects, because it’s helpful, when dealing with big lists of individuals, to focus first on the ones who have the greatest potential to make a gift.

Gift capacity approximates a prospect’s philanthropic ability to give by examining assets, giving history, and other sources of estimated wealth. This estimate can provide a baseline for an ask amount, a number that naturally becomes more precise when informed by a development officer’s conversations with the prospect.

Likelihood helps signal the probability of making a specific type of gift — major, planned, leadership level — and reflects personal characteristics, giving behavior, and engagement behavior in its calculation. Likelihood scores range from 1 — the top tier and most likely to make a gift — to 9, the least likely.

How to Access a Constituent’s Wealth and Ratings

Log in to ABE CRM.
Navigate to a constituent record.
Under “More information” on the left panel, click Wealth and ratings.

How to Interpret Wealth and Ratings

A constituent’s Wealth and Ratings page includes two tabs, each displaying information about the wealth and associated categories of the chosen household.

Screened date	This date denotes when the most recent wealth screening occurred.
Assets	Wealth owned by the constituent or spouse broken into real estate holdings, businesses, securities, income/compensation, and other assets.
Total identified assets	The wealth screening attempts to match the constituent’s name and address with publicly available records about assets; what comes back from the screening is categorized as “Total identified.” Depending on the commonality of the name or whether the property is owned or rented, these “identified” assets may or may not be attributable to the prospect.
Confirmed assets	Assets show up in the “Confirmed” category for one of two reasons: 1) they are automatically confirmed if the assets can be tied to the constituent with a certain set of strict match criteria; or 2) WFAA’s research team has “hand-validated” the assets and confirmed them.

How to Interpret Gift Capacity

Gift capacity examines three categories of data for a particular constituent — confirmed assets, giving, and general wealth data — and adds up the totals for each of these data sources. The gift capacity estimate is determined by the largest of these three source subtotals.

How to Interpret Likelihood

Things to Remember

Capacity estimates and ratings are — and should be — fluid; they are only a starting place and will never replace what we can learn from qualification and cultivation efforts. Please share any information you have about a prospect’s capacity with WFAA’s Research and Prospect Management (RPM) team.
Capacity estimates are based on giving capacity over five years, because WFAA considers major gifts to be payable in installments over a five-year period.
Data updates occur overnight, not in real time.

Requesting Research

The Research and Prospect Management team has many products and services to offer, some of which are available to campus partners on the condition that it is treated confidentially and in accordance with WFAA’s policies, including its data disclosure and confidentiality policies. Below is the process through which you can request more information on a prospect or inquire about assistance with research needs. Your request will be evaluated by a member of the RPM team, and someone will reach out to you to discuss the feasibility and other details of your request.

On the navigation bar, click Prospects.
Select Add a Prospect Research Request.
On the action toolbar, click Add.
Complete the fields and options on the “Add a prospect research request” window.
Select the Record Type (e.g., individual, organization).
Add the prospect(s) for which you want research. Search for and select “Unassigned” for any request not directly related to a specific constituent record in the system (e.g., a prospect identification request for a list of prospects in Seattle).
Indicate the estimated Priority, whether low, medium or high, and choose a Due Date.
Choose the Research Type (e.g., biographical information, capacity review).
Select the Request Reason (i.e., stage — identification, qualification, cultivation, etc.).
Indicate the Site (i.e., department/unit).
In the Notes field, add a description of the request. Please be descriptive and detailed in this section.
Finally, click Save.

Gift capacity estimate	A prospect’s estimated ability to give, calculated as a raw dollar amount. Gift capacity calculation shown above.
Gift capacity rating	The letter-grade bin into which the prospect’s estimated gift capacity dollar amount falls:
Individual gift capacity	An individual’s capacity to give a gift over five years.
Household gift capacity	Household gift capacity simply looks at the capacity of spouse A and spouse B, and displays the larger of the two.

Likelihood rating	Likelihood ratings are unit agnostic; in other words, they help us determine who is most likely to give to the university, not necessarily to a specific school or department. They are dynamic, refreshing weekly. Likelihood is ranked from 1 to 9, with the least likely to make a particular type of gift being in a higher numbered bucket. These buckets, when paired with gift capacity, point us to the right people to talk to first:
Major gift rating	A constituent’s probability that their largest gift, in the next five years, will be between $25,000 and $499,999.
Leadership annual gift rating	A constituent’s probability that their largest gift, in the next five years, will be between $1,000 and $24,999.
Planned giving rating	A constituent’s probability that they will give a planned gift. This is the only model score that doesn’t tie to specific predicted gift amount; it’s simply the likelihood of the gift itself.