What is Wealth Screening?
MortarStone’s generosity software was created to measure your givers’ recency, frequency, volume, and tenure. But up to this point, the software could not provide insights into the capacity of your giving households.
Wealth screening utilizes publicly available data and analyzes your pool of givers to determine their respective capacities to give. A simple example of this would be something similar to searching on Zillow or the county property tax roll to discern the approximate value of a home. In other words, wealth screening illuminates high-net-worth individuals to help you better understand the giving potential within your church.
Is Wealth Screening Right for Your Church?
Churches typically consider wealth screening when they need to gather giving data during the early stages of large-scale project-based activities.
These projects typically include:
- Capital Campaigns
- Fundraising Events
- Annual Fund Contributions
But beyond these project-based fundraising events, churches miss real opportunities to develop sustainable funding through asset-based giving. Wealth screening can help a church identify potential high-capacity givers with a heart for ministry that can give from their portfolio of assets. These givers may not have the liquid cash to make a generous gift but could make a gift from illiquid, non-cash assets. These gifts provide tax savings and can be income-producing for the giver and their dependents.
The Pitfalls of Traditional Wealth Screening
The first problem with traditional wealth screening is that it can only look to the past.
For example, suppose one giver in a batch of wealth screening data possesses a $3 million residence and earns a six-figure salary. What if that giver is getting divorced and will have to split their assets, pay for the divorce, and have their household income slashed?
The data might say they have a $3 million net worth, but that figure is highly misleading, with 80% of that wrapped up in their home.
No matter how much the wealth screening company might tout the “high quality” of their data, they can’t ever overcome these limitations on reliability.
The second major problem with traditional wealth screening is the data may leave too many unanswered questions. No matter what data gets delivered to you, a deeper examination will surface additional questions that cannot be answered.
For example, suppose the data says one person has donated $250,000 to a local non-profit that aligns with your church’s mission, vision, and values. If your church’s mission aligns with their charitable leanings, does that make them more likely to donate to your church? Logically, the answer is yes, especially when compared to a charity with opposite beliefs. But, a deeper relationship with this giver is essential to identifying what ministries they actually would like to support.
The third problem is that the wealth capacity reported by the screening data may be inaccurate or below the actual figure. Some wealth holders have learned how to conceal their true net worth by confining most of their net worth in assets versus bank accounts.
The Smarter Way to Screen Givers
Before you pay an exorbitant amount of money for wealth screening, there is a smarter, more accurate, and more economical way to identify high-capacity givers – MortarStone Giver Screens.
MortarStone can extract data from trusted sources to obtain reliable information to help you make strategic decisions. MortarStone uses the most up-to-date information provided by public sources through USA Data. This data gives you a reliable snapshot of your giver’s wealth as it corresponds with real estate value, household income, liquid assets, etc.
The value in MortarStone Giver Screening comes through our proprietary analysis of the overall giving potential through the ‘Giving Score’ and ‘Affinity Score.’ These scores are based on giving tenure, recency, and frequency, and then it overlays their giving with their wealth holdings to create scores for each household.
Using the household giving data provided in MortarStone to calculate these scores, you can see an accurate, more precise picture of who your givers are and their potential for giving large gifts.
If you’re already using MortarStone at your church, this feature is available in your platform. We are offering 25 free screens to see how it works to help you decide if MortarStone Giver Screening is right for you. Simply visit the ‘Giver Screening’ area after you log into your MortarStone account. If you have questions before you begin, please contact us for more information.
If you are not a MortarStone user, we’d like to offer a free demonstration of the software. MortarStone churches see an increase of 25% in giving in just one year of using our analytics, and our asset-based giving solutions have a 300%+ return on investment. Get your free trial today!