The Jewish Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh (JCC) has spent 128 years serving its community. Today, its locations and programs reach more than 30,000 people annually and generate more than two million visits each year. Its development team? Just four people.

Organizations of this size often have a dedicated prospect researcher. The JCC does not.

Instead, prospect research falls to Sara Rhoades, Director of Development.

“I do it because it needs to be done,” Sara says. “We’d love a full-time researcher. We don’t have one, so we had to figure it out. And research isn’t optional for us. It fuels our moves management, and it’s how more money comes in the door.”

Before DonorAtlas, research consumed roughly 20% of Sara’s workweek—about one full day spent searching online, cross-referencing records, and verifying that the person behind a gift was who the team thought they were.

For a lean development team, that was time taken away from donor engagement, relationship building, and fundraising strategy.

Critical Needs Day is a one-day Pittsburgh giving event in which donations are matched by the Pittsburgh Foundation. This year, 135 individuals made gifts to the JCC in a single day.

“That’s a wonderful problem to have, but it came with a challenge,” Sara says. “I needed to understand who all of these new donors were. Then I needed to segment and prioritize them, so we could raise more now and build relationships for future gifts.”

The first hurdle was identity verification. Manually researching a single donor took about 20 minutes, with some cases requiring 30 minutes or more. At that pace, verifying 135 donors would take approximately 45 hours—more than five full workdays.

For a four-person development team without a dedicated researcher, that was a significant investment of time just to establish who had given.

And identity was only the beginning. The team also needed to understand each donor’s philanthropic interests, giving capacity, and connections to the JCC to determine where additional outreach could make the biggest difference.

Rather than researching each donor individually, Sara uploaded the list to DonorAtlas using only the information collected at the time of the gift: first name, last name, and a mailing address or ZIP code.

Verified profiles came back in seconds.

But the real change wasn’t simply speed. It was the ability to move from identifying donors to deciding what to do next.

With profiles in hand, Sara evaluated the list through four lenses, establishing a repeatable approach to screening and prioritizing new donors.

1. Past philanthropyGiving history can offer clues about a donor’s philanthropic interests and potential for future support. Sara considers previous charitable contributions alongside indicators of engagement, such as board service and memberships, to identify people whose interests and giving patterns may align with the JCC’s mission.

2. Liquidity and net worthWealth indicators help Sara assess both near-term giving potential and longer-term opportunities. Liquidity can help identify donors with the resources to make a gift now, while net worth offers a broader view of potential for future major gifts or planned giving. Sara considers these indicators alongside documented philanthropy, including gifts made through private vehicles or jointly with a spouse.

3. RelationshipsA donor’s existing connections can provide a meaningful starting point for engagement. Sara looks for links to people already involved with the JCC, including board members and major donors. The process surfaced previously unknown connections involving 10 Critical Needs Day donors, giving the team new avenues for relationship building.

4. Verified contact informationSome donors had made gifts without providing a phone number or email address. DonorAtlas helped fill approximately five of these gaps, giving the team additional ways to follow up and establish a connection.

Of the 135 donors, approximately 50 made Sara’s priority list. Every donor received a thank-you, but the research helped the team distinguish between acknowledging a gift and identifying relationships that warranted further development.

“The data tells me who to look at, so my time in the day can go to actually being with donors,” Sara says.

A common name, a recent move, a maiden name, or inconsistent records across property databases, SEC filings, IRS Form 990s, and FEC data can make it difficult to distinguish one person from another. Even a seemingly strong match can point to the wrong individual, leading to inaccurate assumptions and misdirected fundraising efforts.

DonorAtlas helped connect the dots by bringing together information from multiple sources to build a more complete picture of a prospect. By making it easier to identify individuals, reconcile records, and surface relevant financial and philanthropic information, the platform helped Sara and her team make more informed decisions about who to prioritize and how to engage them.

With DonorAtlas, Sara’s workflow is straightforward: look up a donor, submit an enhancement, and sync the resulting information to Salesforce, where the broader team can put it to work.

But the real impact comes from what Sara and her team can accomplish with the time they get back.

“I can get the information I need much more quickly and spend more of my time actually using it,” she says.

“Our team is good at fundraising,” Sara adds. “What we needed was a way to know where to spend our time: on prospect development, moves management, and the conversations that take a donor from $50 to $10,000.”

For the JCC, Critical Needs Day was more than a single fundraising event. It was an opportunity to identify donors whose capacity and connection to the organization could translate into greater support over time.

In the JCC’s experience, donors who give $100 or more—and particularly those who give $500 or more—often increase their contributions over time. Some progress to gifts in the $2,500 to $10,000 range within approximately five years.

Identifying these donors early gives the development team an opportunity to build relationships and nurture future giving potential, rather than waiting for a donor’s giving history to tell the full story.

The same approach extends well beyond a single giving day.

Ahead of its Big Night event, Sara screened approximately 8,100 names to identify prospects with existing connections to the JCC community: 5,700 from Squirrel Hill and 2,400 from South Hills.

Manually researching all 8,100 individuals at an estimated 20 minutes per name would take approximately 2,700 hours—the equivalent of nearly 68 full-time workweeks, or more than a year of work for one person.

For a four-person development team already balancing fundraising, donor relations, and campaign priorities, that workload would be difficult to absorb. DonorAtlas made it possible to screen a much larger pool of potential supporters while freeing the team to focus on interpreting the findings, prioritizing prospects, and building relationships.