Prospect Research Resources!

From our experience the info from iWave is more accurate than Wealth Engine. We haven’t tried DonorSearch.

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Genevieve Oliver
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2017 3:31 PM
To: Nicole Keating <nkeating@arshtcenter.org>
Subject: [Tessitura Development Forum] Prospect Research Resources!
Importance: High

Hi all, I am the Development Associate at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York. We are currently thinking about buying a prospect research tool, which my department hasn't done since the early 2000s. We have had product demos with the three prospect research resources that are integrated with Tessitura: 

iWave
WealthEngine
DonorSearch

We are leaning toward iWave and WealthEngine right now, but open to hearing more about DonorSearch from folks who use it. Does anyone have experience using any of these products? How was the integration with Tess, and the quality of the data you got back? I'm worried about the fact that WealthEngine has very little functionality for searching foundations and interpersonal relationships - is this a problem for you / have you discovered any workarounds? 

Thank you so much - any and all feedback is very useful :) I hope you are all well and to see you soon at TLCC! 

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We have used both WealthEngine and iWave.

WealthEngine has an integration with Tessitura which is very helpful.  You can see a summary of screening data on each screened record.   Before the integration existed, we imported data from W.E. into Tessitura and it worked well for segmenting prospect lists.  We are still using that data. WealthEngine has a great deal of educational information about using their tools.  I think it is pretty user friendly especially for folks who haven’t done research in a while.   W.E. also works very nicely for mass screenings.  The matches and capacity ratings seem more liberal than other tools.   

I think iWave does go deeper.  At the same time, my data team uses our research tool just to find old addresses and match our patrons up to research records.  iWave was not helpful in finding historical addresses for us.  My former Director of Research at a University says that iWave is a very good tool to use to “start” research on a prospect.  But Universities can afford several screening tools, so they have iWave, WealthEngine, etc.

Just FYI - I have also used DonorScape (GG+A) and we are currently using Blackbaud’s ResearchPoint (which I believe has the best philanthropic data since they just bought NOZA.)

Best of luck!

Tony

Tony Exler
Director of Data Standards
Nashville Symphony
Schermerhorn Symphony Center
One Symphony Place
Nashville, TN 37201-2031
T 615.687.6535 F 615.687.6403
texler@nashvillesymphony.org
NashvilleSymphony.org

From: Tessitura Development Forum [mailto:forums-development@tessituranetwork.com] On Behalf Of Michael Mariano
Sent: Monday, May 15, 2017 2:40 PM
To: Tony Exler <texler@nashvillesymphony.org>
Subject: Re: [Tessitura Development Forum] Prospect Research Resources!

A theatre in our consortium used two of those services in a close time period and found both of them useful for different purposes.

WealthEngine was good for doing mass screenings. We manually imported the screening information back into Tessitura as Attributes and continue to use them in prospect lists.

iWave is really good for digging deeper, screening individuals one-by-one and getting a readable report.  They also recently partnered with RelSci so interpersonal relationships are included.

We never tried any formal integration for either service, but the Development team was satisfied with both products.

-- Mike