What Is Donor 'Wealth Screening'? How Some Nonprofits Score Your Net Worth — and What We Pledge Never to Do

What people are describing

You give to a nonprofit. Months later, someone from that charity calls and asks for far more than you have ever given. There is a real chance software picked you for that call. It decided before any person dialled the phone.

The practice is called donor wealth screening. You may also see it called "wealth prospecting" or "prospect research." It is normal and widely used in professional fundraising. It is not a scandal or a fringe practice.

It is also something almost no donor is told about. We think it is worth explaining plainly, like anything else that affects people with cancer and the groups that ask them for money.

How it actually works

Several companies do this work. WealthEngine, DonorSearch and iWave are three of them. They build profiles on tens or hundreds of millions of people.

The profiles are assembled from records that are public or licensed. These include:

• Property records and assessed home values
• SEC filings, which list stock holdings for company officers
• Business roles and board seats
• Political donations, which are public by law
• Past charitable gifts, reported by other nonprofits or sold by data brokers

A nonprofit uploads its list of donors. Sometimes that is only names and addresses. The company matches each person against its database. It sends back a wealth score, also called a capacity rating.

The score is a dollar range: what the software thinks you could give. It may also flag you for "major gift potential." It may guess which causes you care about, based on your past giving.

Staff then use the scores to sort the list. Who gets a form thank-you email. Who gets a phone call. Who gets a visit from the director. And, most directly, what dollar figure appears the next time you are asked.

Every piece of data behind the score is public or licensed. Nobody is breaking into a bank account. But almost no donor knows their name went through this. Almost none knows a score is shaping how hard they get asked.

Why nonprofits use it

The reason given is efficiency, and it is a real one. A small fundraising team cannot research thousands of names by hand. A wealth screen finds the few donors whose gifts could change what the group is able to do.

The professional body AFP Global frames it as two separate questions. One is capacity: what someone could give. The other is willingness: whether they want to. Prospect research looks at willingness another way, such as through board ties or event attendance.

Used narrowly, that is defensible. Calling someone who has both the means and a real tie to the cause is not the same as cold-calling a list at random.

The industry's own guidance sets limits. It says to use only public data, to disclose it where practical, and to use it to care for donors rather than to pressure them.

Where it gets uncomfortable

The problem is not that the data is obtained illegally. It generally is not.

The problem is what happens without your knowledge. Your home value, your shares and your gifts to other causes become a number. A stranger uses that number to decide how much to ask you for. You cannot see your score. You cannot correct it. You cannot opt out of being profiled at all.

For a cancer nonprofit, this is a sharper version of an old problem.

Think about when people give to us. Someone gives in memory of a parent who died. Someone gives for the first time after their own diagnosis. They are not thinking about fundraising software. They are thinking about grief, or fear, or thanks.

A wealth score knows none of that. It sees a name, an address and a dollar range. A larger ask arriving in that moment feels very different once you know where the number came from.

What this does not mean

This does not mean wealth screening is illegal. It does not mean every nonprofit using it is acting in bad faith. It is standard practice, openly discussed in the field. Large hospital systems, universities and national charities all use it. The data behind it is lawful to collect and sell in the United States.

This does not mean every large ask comes from a wealth score. Plenty of it comes from a real relationship, a board introduction, or something the donor said they cared about.

This is not an accusation against any one organization. We are not saying a particular cancer charity crossed a line. This article explains a tool used across the industry, so you know what it is if you meet it.

Our pledge

We are a cancer nonprofit. We ask people for donations. So this is not abstract for us. It describes a tool we could use on the very people reading this.

We are stating plainly, in writing, that we will not:

• Never run donors or supporters through any wealth-screening, prospect-research, or donor-capacity-scoring service — commercial or otherwise — to estimate anyone's net worth, income, assets, or ability to give.
• Never use a wealth score, capacity rating, or similar profile to decide who gets asked for a bigger gift, who gets a personal outreach versus a form email, or how much to suggest someone give.
• Never buy, license, or accept donor wealth or capacity data from a third party about anyone who has given to, or engaged with, Cancer Explained.

If our fundraising ever grows to include a major-gifts program, it will be built on the same thing every other relationship on this site is built on: someone telling us, in their own words, that they want to give more or get more involved — never a machine's estimate of what we could extract from them. This pledge is now part of our published funding and donor-privacy policy, not just a promise made in a news article; see the full policy for how it fits alongside our other donor commitments.

The practical takeaway

If a nonprofit calls you out of the blue asking for a specific, unusually large amount, it is fair to ask them directly: how did you decide to ask me for this number? A well-run organization should be able to answer honestly. If the answer involves a "wealth screening" or "capacity rating" tool, that is not necessarily a red flag by itself — but you are entitled to know it happened, and to say no to being profiled that way in the future.

Questions worth asking any nonprofit you give to

• Do you use wealth screening, prospect research, or donor capacity scoring software?
• Can I opt out of being profiled this way?
• Is the dollar amount you're suggesting based on anything about me specifically, or is it a standard ask?

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Prepared by Cancer Explained's AI-assisted editorial system and checked against the sources listed below. This article has not been reviewed by a healthcare professional unless a named reviewer is specifically shown — it describes nonprofit-sector fundraising practices, not medical information.

Cancer Explained is published by the National Cancer Information Foundation as a nonprofit-oriented public-interest education project. It is not a diagnostic service, does not recommend treatments, and is not for emergencies.

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