Aspire’s client needed a curated prospect list of foundations, individuals, and companies aligned with economic justice. The organization had no mailing list, no board connections, and no existing donor network to inform the search. In other words, Aspire was starting from a completely blank slate.

High-quality prospecting is essential to this mission, as it enables confident, targeted outreach and ultimately supports long-term fundraising success. Without a reliable way to identify and evaluate prospects, the team would have been forced to rely on broad searches and guesswork—an approach that is slow, inefficient, and prone to misalignment.

Before DonorAtlas, Aspire’s team relied on legacy research platforms and manual web searches to screen prospects. This fragmented approach required days, or even weeks, of manual review, often missing key philanthropic interests and contextual insights that determine fit. With no scalable screening tool, the team risked spending significant time on prospects who ultimately weren’t a match.

Without a better solution, Aspire’s four person team could not confidently evaluate prospects at scale, and the client risked receiving a list that lacked strategic focus. Aspire needed a tool that could provide comprehensive screening, fast filtering, and clear citable context to support large scale confident prospect selection.

Enter DonorAtlas. Instead of relying on broad keyword searches and manual web research, Aspire was able to quickly generate a targeted prospect pool using advanced filters for assets, giving capacity, and philanthropic alignment. For example, the team used DonorAtlas to identify individuals with past gifts over $100K and to review predicted annual giving. This made it possible to build a strategic list from the start, rather than sorting through a large volume of unqualified prospects.

DonorAtlas also surfaced family foundations and enabled the team to map potential network connections, expanding the prospect pool and uncovering relationships that would have been difficult or impossible to find using legacy tools.

The platform combined scale with depth by generating citable bios and contextual summaries from across public databases, social media accounts like LinkedIn, and relevant blog posts. These comprehensive profiles helped Aspire quickly determine whether a prospect’s policy histories conflicted with economic justice goals.

When client’s priorities shifted, such as filtering out prospects whose giving was limited to one state, the platform’s speed and flexibility also made it easy to pivot, without restarting the entire search.

DonorAtlas gave Aspire the ability to scale prospect research without adding staff or stretching capacity. The platform’s speed and depth allowed the team to build larger, more targeted prospect pools in a fraction of the time, while still maintaining the strategic precision that defines their work. This shift made it possible for the team to take on more complex prospecting projects and deliver higher-quality results faster.

Most importantly, DonorAtlas changed how Aspire approaches prospecting: instead of starting with broad searches and hoping for alignment, the team now begins every individual prospecting project with DonorAtlas, confident that they can quickly identify strong prospects and eliminate low-fit options with a faster turnaround for clients.