Fundraisers do most of their individual prospect research online. Patrick O’Heffernan shows you the pros, the cons and the costs.

Fundraisers researching US donors often start with newspaper websites, where they can search for current or archived information on individuals. News sources can provide very good personal details, but only a very small percentage of prospects will be available. Cost ranges from free to a very small fee per search.

Biographical sites like Marquis' Who's Who in America are very good sources of biographical information on prospects, but they can cost more than US$1,000 a year, a significant expense for most small social ventures.

More specific biographical websites offered by Internet Prospector are free, but more limited in scope. They include African Americans in Biography and Women in Biography. Celebrity information can be found on the free site Celebrity Fan Mail. These sites are free and can have very useful information, but they are quite narrow and have small databases.

A few commercial search services, like Lexis-Nexis, search US publications for prospect information. They are very powerful and can return critical financial and biographical data very quickly, along with news and feature stories, but they are also quite expensive, with annual costs running in the thousands of dollars for a single license restricted to one person or one computer per organization.

Multiple-source search is a very powerful category of search websites that research prospects through tens or hundreds of public and private databases. These sites can return information on home ownership, stock holdings and recent sales, donations to non-profits and political campaigns, board memberships and personal biography. They range in price from the very reasonable NozaSearch, which charges a very small fee for each name searched, to sites that charge an annual fee such as WealthEngine or WealthPoint, which can cost several hundreds to well over a thousand dollars per year depending on features and use. These sites are invaluable –a critical necessity for major gifts fund raising. They give you the information needed to qualify a prospect and to tailor your solicitation, but, with the exception of NozaSearch, they can be quite expensive and you pay regardless of how much you use them.

Please join Patrick O'Heffernan the conversation and let us know of your favorite source that we missed.