Prospect research guides

Donor Research Tools in 2026: What Each One Does, Costs, and Misses

By the AlmaConnect News editorial team · Updated October 2026 · 12 min read

Donor prospecting software and prospect research software cover several jobs. Start with the information your team needs: capacity estimates, changes in a prospect's circumstances, verified background information, or a profile of someone new. Wealth screening, monitoring, research databases and AI-native tools serve those needs; free public records support manual research. A screen and monitoring can work together when you need both capacity and timing information. Few vendors publish prices; iWave starts at $4,500 a year. Test your shortlist on donors you already know before signing a contract.

Disclosure. We make AlmaConnect News, one of the monitoring tools below. Nobody paid to appear here. We read every vendor's own pages, pricing pages, press releases and Capterra reviews in September 2026, and every price is labeled Published, Reported or Quote only. We don't rank tools across categories, because they don't do the same job. Our own tool gets a "watch out for" line like everyone else's. Corrections go in the changelog at the bottom.

Five questions, five kinds of tool

A useful comparison groups tools by the work they support. A wealth screen estimates capacity; a news service tracks changes; LinkedIn helps with career research. The table below maps those jobs to the donor cycle.

The question you're asking	Category	When in the cycle	Examples
Who in my file could give a major gift?	Wealth screening	Identify, qualify	iWave, DonorSearch, WealthEngine, Windfall, ResearchPoint
What just happened to someone I already track (news, job change, SEC filing)?	Continuous monitoring	Cultivate, time the ask, steward	Insightful Philanthropy, AlmaConnect News, Nexis alerts
Is this true, and is it safe to take the gift?	Research and due-diligence databases	Qualify, vet the gift	Nexis for Development Professionals, Wealth-X
Who is this person I just met?	AI-native profile tools	Identify, qualify	DonorAtlas, Dataro
Can I answer it without a budget?	Free public records	Any stage	SEC EDGAR, 990s, property records

Use the donor-cycle stage to narrow your shortlist. Each category supports a different part of the work.

Capacity estimates for the same donor can differ across tools. Philanthropy-first tools (DonorSearch, iWave, Blackbaud's Giving Search) weight what a person has already given. Wealth-first tools (WealthEngine, Windfall) model what a person is worth. A retired executive with a large portfolio and a modest giving history will look bigger in the second kind. Blackbaud itself positions ResearchPoint against competitors that "overestimate" capacity. Ask every vendor how its estimates compare with what donors actually gave.

The 2026 market: who owns whom

The category consolidated fast, and most comparison pages haven't caught up.

Date	What happened
Jan 2024	Latest WealthEngine product release we could find (CoreLogic property data, new matching engine)
Feb 2024	iWave and UC Innovation merge to form Kindsight
Jul 2025	Kindsight acquires Affinaquest (Advancement RM CRM)
Sep 2025	EverTrue acquires DonorSearch
Jan 2026	Windfall raises $65M from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital
Mar 2026	Blackbaud's Development Agent generally available to US Raiser's Edge NXT customers
Jul 2026	Dataro's Bloomerang integration goes live
Sep 2026	Kindsight launches AI agents for iWave (Screening Agent in beta)

Check your CRM's screening integrations before making a shortlist. Bloomerang includes a DonorSearch-based Generosity Score with every subscription. Neon CRM resells Windfall exclusively. DonorPerfect has a two-way DonorSearch integration. Raiser's Edge NXT ties natively to ResearchPoint.

Before you buy anything: check which screen your CRM already bundles. You may be paying for one.

Wealth screening: who in my file has capacity?

Wealth screening tools match your records against giving, property, securities and business data, then return a capacity estimate per person. They're the right tool when you have more names than anyone could research by hand. Each screen is also a snapshot of the data available when it runs. For more detail, see our wealth screening vs continuous monitoring guide.

iWave (Kindsight)

Best for: Researchers who want deep desktop research plus screening, and teams that value published pricing.
How it works: Philanthropy-first scoring. Kindsight states 1.5B people records, 156M+ property and 228M+ charitable-gift records.
Price: Published. Starter $4,500 (1 user, 1,500 screens), Professional $5,800 (3 users, 5,000 screens), Premium quote only (5 users, 20,000 screens).
Integrations: CRM integration starts at the Premium tier.

Watch out for: A university with 100,000 alumni won't fit the published screen caps, so negotiate a full-file screen separately. Capterra reviewers (4.4 from 94 reviews) praise its depth and flag cost and the token model: "you don't know if someone is worth spending your profile token on until after."

DonorSearch (EverTrue)

Best for: Small and mid-size shops, especially on Bloomerang or DonorPerfect, where it's already built in.
How it works: Philanthropy-first. Charitable and political giving, real estate, stock, business and nonprofit affiliations, with models for major-gift likelihood, retention and upgrade.
Price: Quote only. Third-party estimates conflict, from "$600+/yr" to $4,000 to $12,000/yr, so ask.
Integrations: Claims 40+, including Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Virtuous, Bloomerang and Blackbaud.

Watch out for: Reviewers mention dated real-estate data and weak Raiser's Edge integration. Now part of EverTrue, so expect bundle offers.

WealthEngine (Altrata)

Best for: Teams that want modeled net worth and income on large files, via app or API.
How it works: Wealth-first modeled scores. Its API documentation is the only public match-rate disclosure in the category: about 90% of records matched by name and address, about 20% by email or phone alone.
Price: Quote only. Billed per profile.
Integrations: Salesforce, API.

Watch out for: The latest product release we found is from January 2024. Ask what has changed since.

Windfall

Best for: Finding $1M+ households fast, especially on Salesforce, HubSpot, Neon or Bloomerang.
How it works: Wealth-first household net worth, refreshed weekly, plus career attributes.
Price: Quote only.
Integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, GiveCampus, Neon (exclusive reseller), DonorPerfect, Virtuous, Bloomerang.

Watch out for: Capacity is not inclination: a high net-worth estimate says nothing about willingness to give, so pair it with giving history and affinity.

Blackbaud ResearchPoint

Best for: Raiser's Edge NXT shops that want everything in one place.
How it works: WealthPoint screening, the Giving Search gift database and ProspectPoint predictive models.
Price: Quote only. Unlimited users.
Integrations: Native to Raiser's Edge NXT; import and export elsewhere.

Watch out for: Built around Raiser's Edge NXT; with other CRMs, data moves by import and export.

Tool	Scoring	Price	Price model	Named CRM integrations
iWave	Giving-first	From $4,500/yr (published)	Users + screens + profiles	Premium tier only
DonorSearch	Giving-first	Quote	Subscription or per record	40+ claimed
WealthEngine	Wealth-first	Quote	Per profile	Salesforce, API
Windfall	Wealth-first	Quote	Subscription	7 named
ResearchPoint	Giving + models	Quote	Unlimited users	Raiser's Edge NXT

Ratings range from 4.4 to 4.9, so read the reviews for specific problems with matching, data freshness, integrations and support.

Continuous monitoring: what just changed?

A promotion or company sale can change your view of a prospect after a screen has run. Monitoring tools watch news, employment and filings for people you already track. Alerts can surface a new job, insider stock sale, acquisition, board appointment or obituary before the next screening.

In this example, the January screen stays unchanged through December. Monitoring adds the promotion, acquisition and board appointment between screens.

Insightful Philanthropy (NewsBank)

Best for: Teams that want deep archives and obituary coverage alongside prospect research tools.
How it works: States 14,000 news and information sources across 200+ countries, 40+ years of archives, and obituary and funeral-home notices.
Price: Quote only.

Watch out for: Ask how alerts are matched to the right person and how often they arrive.

AlmaConnect NewsOurs

Best for: Teams that need news, job-change, SEC-filing and property alerts across their prospect file, with updates in the CRM.
How it works: Four monitoring products that watch your whole file, bought together or on their own: news alerts (states 400,000+ sources across 50+ countries, covering funding, awards, leadership and obituaries); job change alerts (which also keep your records current through our DataMine enrichment product); SEC filing alerts (insider trades on Forms 3, 4 and 144, large-shareholder filings, proxies and M&A filings); and property purchase and sale alerts.
Price: Quote only.
Integrations: Raiser's Edge NXT (Blackbaud SKY API), and Salesforce-based Ascend and Affinaquest. News lands as notes on the constituent record; job changes update employment relationships.

Watch out for: It doesn't produce wealth scores or capacity estimates, so you'll still need a screen or research database for capacity.

Also in this category: Nexis for Development Professionals includes news archives and donor-tracking alerts (covered below). EverTrue offers social media listening inside its engagement platform. Windfall's weekly net-worth refresh is monitoring of a kind, limited to wealth changes. Google Alerts and Talkwalker Alerts are free; Talkwalker covers news, blogs, forums and X and supports Boolean queries. Both send email alerts, leaving CRM entry and same-name checks to your team. That manual review becomes harder as the number of tracked names grows.

When comparing monitoring tools, ask these questions:

Ask	Why it matters
How are prospects added: whole-file upload or one at a time?	Decides whether you monitor 50 people or 50,000
What signals: news only, or also job changes and SEC filings (e.g. Form 4 insider sales)?	Job changes and stock sales are the moments that change an ask
How is the right person matched?	Same-name false positives waste researcher hours
Real-time or daily digest?	Speed matters for liquidity events
Does it write back to the CRM, and as what (notes, employment records)?	Alerts outside the CRM get lost; job changes should update the record, not just notify
Price and price model	Per prospect, per seat or flat

One caution on marketing numbers: source counts aren't comparable. "14,000 sources" and "400,000 sources" count different things, so neither tells you which tool will catch your donor's news. Test on your own prospects.

Research and due-diligence databases: is it true, and is it safe?

These are where a researcher goes to verify a fact, build a full profile, or check that a gift won't embarrass the institution.

Nexis for Development Professionals

Best for: Deep verification and ethical gift screening at larger shops.
How it works: LexisNexis states "more than 81 billion public records from over 10,000 trusted sources," plus wealth scores, relatives and associates, court cases and negative news. Premium adds Nexis Diligence+ for reputational-risk screening. It also offers cited AI answers.
Price: Quote only (Essentials, Premium and Enterprise tiers).

Watch out for: Its own page warns that records "may contain errors." Treat it as a starting point for verification, not proof.

Wealth-X (Altrata)

Best for: Ultra-high-net-worth and international prospects.
How it works: Dossiers built by 400+ researchers, each detail "substantiated by two independent, credible sources," across 33+ languages. The only clearly global option here.
Price: Quote only.

Watch out for: Built for the very top of the wealth pyramid; overkill for a regional annual-fund file.

Often listed, but not donor research: Candid (Foundation Directory) and Instrumentl research foundations and grants, not individuals. Candid publishes prices: Free, Premium $219/month or $1,199/year, Ultimate $1,699/year. Instrumentl costs $299 to $999/month billed annually, with a 14-day trial. Useful tools, just not for finding individual donors.

AI-native tools: who is this person?

The newest category, AI prospect research tools, builds a profile on demand from the open web, including for people who aren't in any vendor database.

DonorAtlas

Best for: Researching new names quickly, with every fact cited.
How it works: Draws on public records, news, nonprofit filings and company databases; cites each data point; shows net worth as a range; natural-language search.
Price: Reported: "starting at $5,000 per year," per a third-party review. The site says licenses are priced to need.
Integrations: Raiser's Edge NXT, Salesforce.

Watch out for: Misses paywalled datasets and people with a small digital footprint; shallower than incumbents on real estate and historical wealth.

Dataro

Best for: Predicting who in your existing file will give, upgrade or lapse.
How it works: Machine-learning models on your own donor data, plus US-only prospect research from public sources.
Price: Published. Essentials from $15,000/yr plus $0.10 per active donor; Growth from $25,000/yr plus $0.12 per donor.
Integrations: Bloomerang (live July 2026) and others.

Watch out for: A predictive platform, not a research tool. Its value depends on how much giving history you have.

General chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity)

Best for: Summarizing filings you've already found, drafting a briefing from your own notes, preparing questions.
How it works: General-purpose language models, some with web search.
Price: Free to about $30 per user per month.

Watch out for: Facts you haven't checked (they can confuse two people with the same name), and donor data pasted into a consumer app without reading its data terms.

"AI-powered" no longer separates vendors: Blackbaud, Kindsight, Windfall, DonorSearch, LexisNexis and Candid all ship AI features now. What separates them is where the data comes from, whether each fact is cited, how confident the match is, and whether your donor data trains their models. DonorAtlas says it never uses client data for training; Kindsight lets customers opt out of its AI features. Ask every vendor.

The free stack

Free sources can help research capacity, affinity and timing. Check the coverage and limits of each source before relying on it.

Source	What it shows	Limitations
SEC EDGAR (full-text search since 2001)	Insider holdings and sales (Form 4), executive pay	Only covers public-company insiders, and you have to check it yourself; some monitoring tools send filings as alerts
ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer / Form 990	Board seats, officer pay	Donor names on Schedule B are redacted on public copies
Foundation 990-PF	Grants a family foundation made	Shows the foundation's giving, not the family's wealth
County property records	Home ownership and value	Assessed value can be a fraction of market value (Cook County assesses homes at 10%); trusts and LLCs hide owners
FAA aircraft registry	Aircraft ownership	Owners may now withhold name and address (2024 FAA Act)
Honor rolls and annual reports	Who gave where, at what level	Ranges, not amounts; often out of date
LinkedIn	Career moves, affiliations	Self-reported; checking thousands of profiles by hand doesn't scale
Talkwalker / Google Alerts	News on named people	Manual, no CRM, same-name noise

⚠️ Don't use FEC data for fundraising. Federal Election Commission rules prohibit using contributor information "for soliciting contributions (including any political or charitable contribution)." Apra's ethicist advises nonprofits not to use FEC data at all. Some published free-tool lists still recommend it.

Allow time for manual research. Practitioners estimate 3 to 4 hours for an in-depth profile, 10 to 15 for hard cases, and about an hour per qualified new name when prospecting outside your file. Free works for a few dozen known prospects a year. Ranking thousands of donors to find hidden capacity can't be done by hand. (Those thresholds are our judgment, not a study.)

What it really costs

The table separates published prices from third-party reports and products that require a quote.

Tool	Price	Status (read Sep 2026)
iWave	Starter $4,500 · Professional $5,800 · Premium quote	Published
Candid	$0 · $1,199/yr · $1,699/yr · Enterprise quote	Published
Dataro	From $15,000/yr + $0.10 per donor	Published
Instrumentl	$299 to $999/month, billed annually	Published
DonorSearch	~$4,000 to $12,000/yr typical (reports conflict)	Reported
DonorAtlas	From $5,000/yr	Reported (vendor, via third party)
WealthEngine	Per profile	Quote only
Windfall, ResearchPoint, Nexis, Wealth-X, Insightful Philanthropy	No public figures	Quote only
AlmaConnect News	No public figures	Quote only

Prices move. iWave's list prices rose about 8% during 2026, so any third-party figure older than a few months is probably wrong.

What a budget typically buys:

Budget	What it gets you
$0	The free stack above, plus any score bundled in your CRM. Good for a few dozen prospects a year
~$5,000/yr	One researcher's subscription: a screening allowance plus profiles (e.g. iWave Starter), or an AI-native research tool
~$15,000/yr	A screen plus monitoring, or a predictive platform
$50,000+/yr	Enterprise: full-file screening of a large alumni or patient base, monitoring, and a due-diligence database

Contract terms to check before signing: auto-renewal notice windows, token or credit overages, screen caps against your file size, renewal price caps, and whether you can export your data if you leave.

How to choose

Start at the top. Whichever box you land in, finish with a blind pilot on donors you already know.

Fewer than ~50 researched prospects a year and no researcher on staff: use the free stack and whatever your CRM bundles. Spend money later.
Your CRM bundles a screen (Bloomerang, DonorPerfect, Neon, Raiser's Edge NXT): use it first. Then add monitoring across your file so you know when to act.
A large university or hospital file: negotiate a full-file screen, monitor the whole file continuously (news rarely warns you in advance about whose life is about to change), and keep one research database for verification and gift vetting.
Ultra-high-net-worth or international prospects: Wealth-X or Nexis, because the standard screens are US-centric.

Then run a blind pilot. Take 50 donors you know well: your board, recent major donors, a few people you know aren't wealthy. Send the same list to every shortlisted vendor without telling them who is who. Score each on three things:

Match rate: how many did they find? One UK consultancy reports wealth-list match rates of just 1 to 3% for cold lists, so headline match rates deserve scrutiny.
Accuracy: do capacity estimates line up with what you know these people have given?
False positives: how many wrong people, or wrong facts, came back?

As Dataro puts it: "Marketing claims are not proof." Download the vendor pilot scorecard (Google Sheets, free, no email required): enter what you know, enter each vendor's answers, and it scores match rate, capacity agreement and false positives for you.

Questions for every vendor:

Where does each data point come from, and how often is it refreshed?
Does it write back to our CRM, and which fields?
Can we speak to a customer our size?
What training is included?
Is our donor data used to train your models, and can we opt out?
What security certifications do you hold? Hospitals: will you sign a BAA?

Hospitals, universities and the UK

Hospitals. HIPAA allows a limited set of patient information to be used for fundraising without authorization: name, address, dates of service, department and treating physician. Patients must be able to opt out. The American College of Physicians says physicians shouldn't take part in patient wealth screening. Ask any vendor that will touch patient data to sign a business associate agreement.

Universities. Check Ellucian CRM Advance and Raiser's Edge integration, and compare screen caps to your alumni file size before you sign. You already hold affinity data (reunions, event attendance, volunteering), so pay for capacity and timing, not affinity.

UK. Wealth screening without telling donors is a regulatory risk: the Information Commissioner fined the RSPCA £25,000 and the British Heart Foundation £18,000 in 2016, and 11 more charities £138,000 in 2017.

Five questions to ask any vendor about AI

In one survey, 92% of nonprofits use AI in some form, but only 7% report a major improvement, and 47% have no AI policy (Virtuous and Fundraising.AI survey of 346 nonprofits, December 2025). Surveys disagree on how many use predictive AI to find donors: 2.3% in one, 13% in another. Apra's Ethics in AI toolkit names four concerns: bias, donor privacy, vendor ethics and ongoing human review. Turn those into questions:

Provenance: where does each fact come from?
Citations: can I click through to the source?
Confidence: how sure is the match, and is it shown?
Training: is our data used to train your models?
Review: where does a human check the output before it reaches a gift officer?

Frequently asked questions

What is the best donor prospect research software?

There isn't a single best one, because donor research tools answer different questions. For capacity across a large file, the established wealth screens are iWave, DonorSearch, WealthEngine, Windfall and Blackbaud ResearchPoint. For what just changed, use a monitoring tool; for verification and gift vetting, Nexis or Wealth-X. Shortlist two or three for the question you need answered, then run a blind pilot on donors you already know.

How much does DonorSearch cost?

DonorSearch doesn't publish prices. Third-party reports range from about $4,000 to $12,000 a year for typical subscriptions, and the figures conflict. If you use Bloomerang, a DonorSearch-based score is already included.

How much does iWave cost?

Kindsight publishes iWave pricing: Starter $4,500 a year (1 user, 1,500 screens), Professional $5,800 (3 users, 5,000 screens), Premium by quote. CRM integration starts at Premium. (Read September 2026.)

Is wealth screening worth it?

It's worth it when you have more donors than you can research by hand and staff to act on the results. It isn't if nobody will follow up the top of the list. Run a blind pilot on known donors first.

What's the difference between wealth screening and prospect research?

Wealth screening is an automated, bulk estimate of capacity across a file. Prospect research is the human work of verifying, profiling and interpreting individuals. Screening narrows the list; research decides what to do with each name. More on screening vs monitoring.

What are the best free prospect research tools?

SEC EDGAR, ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, county property records, honor rolls, LinkedIn, and Talkwalker or Google Alerts. Don't use FEC contribution data for fundraising: federal rules prohibit it.

How often should we screen?

There's no industry standard. A screen goes stale as people's circumstances change, so many teams rescreen periodically and use monitoring to catch changes in between.

How do we know when a donor or prospect is in the news?

Google Alerts can cover a small list, provided someone reviews same-name matches and records useful news in the CRM. For larger files, a prospect news monitoring tool automates matching and surfaces events such as promotions, funding rounds, awards and obituaries. AlmaConnect News is our product: it tracks 400,000+ sources across 50+ countries and posts each relevant article as a note on the constituent record in Raiser's Edge NXT or Salesforce. See what it finds for your prospects.

How do we track job changes for alumni and donors?

Manual LinkedIn checks take more staff time as your list grows. A job-change alert tool tracks promotions, new employers and retirements across the file. Ask whether it also updates employment records in your CRM. Our AlmaConnect News product offers these updates alongside news, SEC filing and property alerts, with write-back to Raiser's Edge NXT and Salesforce (Ascend and Affinaquest). See how it works on your own prospects.

What is the 80/20 rule in fundraising?

It means a small share of donors typically contributes most of the dollars. Use it to describe the distribution of gifts, and review the wider database for prospects whose capacity or interest has changed since the last campaign.

What's the best donor database?

That's a CRM question, and it shapes your research options: Bloomerang bundles DonorSearch, Neon resells Windfall, and Raiser's Edge NXT pairs with ResearchPoint. Choose the CRM for your workflow, then see which research tools it already includes.

Changelog

October 2026: first published. Prices read on vendor pages on 24 September 2026; every claim checked against the sources below. We review this page every quarter.

Sources

Add news, job-change, SEC-filing and property alerts to your existing research workflow with AlmaConnect News.

See how it works →