Political Giving Can Signal Big Potential for Charitable Donations

After the 2008 election, Rachel Link, who seeks out information on potential big donors for an upstate New York university, saw something unusual.

She was combing through campaign-finance data at OpenSecrets.org, a site maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics, when she found a university donor who had given the allowable maximum amount of $2,300 to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Not only that, but the donor’s wife and his 18-year-old son each gave the same amount to Mr. Obama, too.

“Immediately, this gentleman went to the top of my prospect list,” says Ms. Link, who works in the fundraising office at the University at Buffalo.

Now that more electronic records have been turned into easy-to-access free databases, and donors are giving far more to political organizations than in past election cycles, the number of fundraisers like Ms. Link combing for information is on the rise.

Fundraisers are using such information to figure out who among their donors they can ask for bigger gifts—and how much. They know that heavy political giving during election years is a telltale sign that someone may be wealthier than a nonprofit realized, and what’s more, they are interested in giving some of their money away.

“Sophisticated nonprofits have realized that it’s an effective way to approach this problem of raising money in this terribly competitive environment,” says Cecilia Hogan, director of university relations research at the University of Puget Sound and author of Prospect Research: A Primer for Growing Nonprofits.

A Winning Formula

Getting political-giving information is relatively simple.

All Ms. Link did was type in the donor’s last name and his ZIP code in the OpenSecrets search engine, and she noticed three similar accounts.

Until then, she hadn’t regarded the man as having enough wealth to make a big donation. He had given a small sum to the university and lived in a modest house in a nice neighborhood.

But the 2009 discovery of his family’s political donations was a huge giveaway. Ms. Link says the university doesn’t want her to disclose what happened when a fundraiser approached the man, but she can say, “my suspicions were founded.”

Ms. Link says she has seen enough connections between political giving and charitable donations to come up with a rule of thumb: A $5,000 political donation in one election year typically means that person has enough money to make a $500,000 gift to charity.

“If they give $10,000, then they’re a million-dollar prospect,” she says.

Marianne Pelletier, a senior consultant in business intelligence at Cornell University who directed its prospect-research team, used another yardstick. She looked for people who gave to both parties (“someone who likely owns a business and is playing both sides”) or those who donated a total of at least $40,000 to political campaigns over the years.

‘Tight Correlation’

DonorSearch, a company that helps colleges, hospitals, and large charities screen their donor database, says that its examinations of donor records have shown that people who give at least $15,000 to national political campaigns over the years have almost always made at least one gift of $10,000 or more to a charitable cause.

“At those levels, we flag it,” says Bill Tedesco, chief executive of DonorSearch. “There’s a very tight correlation between the two of them.”

Ms. Hogan of the University of Puget Sound says charities are smart to tap the political databases for information on their donors.

“At best,” she says, “campaign contributions can give us an idea of who has disposable income and who puts money behind their passions.”