By Will Schrepferman
CEO, DonorAtlas
It's Monday morning. You have a donor meeting Thursday, and you're pulling up her record for the first time in a few months. Her giving history to your organization is there; a first $50 in 2011, steady annual support, a $5,000 gift after the gala in 2017. There's a contact report from your predecessor noting she once mentioned wanting to endow a scholarship. There's a capacity score from a screening run two years ago. It's useful. It's also not enough. So you open another tab and start Googling.
What's in a donor profile?
If you asked most fundraisers this question (and trust me, I have), they would describe what's in their CRM. That's half the answer.
A complete profile, though, has two halves: what your organization knows about the donor, and what the world knows about the donor. Until recently, only the first half was conveniently available. That's starting to change, and the teams treating both halves as non-negotiable are seeing the results.
The Internal Half: What Your CRM Already Has
Your CRM ideally holds the institutional memory of every touch your organization has had with a constituent. This data is irreplaceable. Nobody else knows that your donor gave her first $50 fifteen years ago, or that she sat next to the board chair at last year's gala, or that she told a gift officer (in passing, at coffee) that her late father had been a first-generation college student. A donor profile without that context is incomplete.
But your CRM, by definition, only knows what you already know. It's a mirror of your relationship, not a real window into the person.
The External Half: What Lives Outside Your Walls
The other half is everything your organization doesn't already know: bio and background; career arc, and how this person built their wealth; giving to other organizations (when, to whom, at what level); boards they sit on; professional and personal networks, including who in your existing network knows them; public interests, causes, affiliations. This is the context that actually explains capacity and gets at a prospect’s “why.”
This is the half that answers "who is this person, and why would they say yes to us?" It's what a gift officer needs to tailor a case, calibrate an ask, and find the right warm introduction.
To be clear: external research is context, not omniscience. It won't tell you everything about family dynamics, health, or timing. It won't replace a gift officer's read of the person across the table. But it's the difference between walking into a meeting with an empty, unverified capacity score and walking in with a sense of who you're about to sit with.
Every fundraiser knows that this external half of the donor profile matters. The problem has always been getting it.
Why Most Profiles Have Been Have Been Half-Complete for Decades
Assembling the external half by hand is slow work. A thorough write-up on one prospect takes thirty minutes at minimum, and once you fall down the inevitable rabbit holes it can easily run to hours before you have anything a gift officer or principal will actually read.
The tools fundraisers have reached for to speed this up (traditional wealth screens and prospect research databases) help, but they don't close the gap completely. A screen will tell you someone owns a $4M house and holds stock in a particular company. What it won't tell you is how they made the money in the first place, what they care about, which of their giving patterns align with your mission, or how they're connected to anyone on your board. You also usually can't see where a capacity score came from, which means a gift officer either trusts the number blindly or does the verification work themselves. Either way, there's still a research job left to do before the data is usable in a meeting.
Large advancement shops have solved this by building sophisticated research teams. Good researchers turn raw data into judgment; they know what matters for a given prospect and what doesn't belong in front of a gift officer at all. Even as AI accelerates the availability of data, this expertise is going to be as valuable as it has ever been for big shops.
But most organizations don't have a dedicated research function, and for them the external half of the donor profile gets done in whatever time the development director can steal between everything else. Which usually means the top ten prospects get a proper dossier, and everyone else in the portfolio gets a screening score and a best guess. Not because fundraisers don't know the external context matters; there just aren't enough hours in the week.
What a Complete Profile Looks Like Now
AI can now assemble the external half–pulling sources across the open web, synthesizing a profile, and citing every fact back to where it came from–in minutes instead of hours. At DonorAtlas, we've built this so that every claim in a profile, from a net worth estimate to a board seat to a giving history at a peer organization, links back to the source it came from. The citations matter as much as the speed: they let a gift officer trust the profile without re-doing the research, and let a prospect researcher spend their time on judgment instead of assembly.
For shops with a research team, this means researchers spend less time gathering and more time doing meaningful prioritization and analysis. For shops without a research team, it means every donor in the portfolio can have the kind of profile that used to be reserved for the top ten.
Which brings us back to Monday morning. You're prepping for Thursday's meeting. Your CRM tells you she gave her first $50 in 2011 and mentioned a scholarship in 2017. Now, sitting alongside that, you have the other half (who she is in the world, how she built her wealth, what she's funded elsewhere, who on your board she already knows) cited, current, and ready before you've finished your coffee. Both halves of the profile, in front of you, before the meeting starts.
That's what a complete donor profile looks like. It's what the best conversations have always started with. What's changed is how many people now get to have them.
Will Schrepferman is the co-founder and CEO of DonorAtlas, the first donor research platform built from the ground up with AI. He raised his first dollar when he was 13, studied data science at Harvard, and is now on a mission to build the tools that fundraisers need in order to work smarter, save time, and raise more.
