How to prepare for a major donor meeting
You have a meeting on the calendar and forty-five minutes to get ready. Here is what a prospect researcher would do with that time.
You have a major gift meeting on the calendar. It might be next week, it might be in two hours. You have Googled the prospect, you have skimmed their LinkedIn, you have maybe pulled up their last gift in your CRM. You are still not sure you are walking in with what you need.
This is the playbook a working prospect researcher would hand you for the next forty-five minutes. It assumes you have nothing — no screening tool, no researcher on staff, just a name, an employer, and an internet connection.
A real meeting prep covers five things, in this order: who the prospect is as a person, what they have given before and to whom, what they are realistically capable of giving, who else is competing for that gift, and what you are actually going to talk about in the room. Most underprepared meetings fail because the fundraiser only did the first two and walked in without a working theory of the ask.
What you are actually trying to find out
A meeting prep is not a biography. It is a working theory of one specific question: what should I ask this person for, and how should I ask? Everything you do in the next forty-five minutes serves that question. If a piece of information does not change your answer to it, leave it out of your notes.
There are five things that will change the answer.
Who they are as a person
Career arc, family situation, what they care about, how they make decisions. This is the part most fundraisers think they are good at and most actually do superficially. The point is not to have a list of biographical facts. The point is to have a working sense of how this person moves through the world. Are they someone who decides quickly, or someone who needs a committee? Are they driven by recognition or by privacy? Have they had a recent life event — a sale, a retirement, a loss — that is reshaping how they think about money right now?
What they have given, and to whom
Public giving leaves a trail. Annual reports, donor walls, named gifts, foundation 990s, university honor rolls, hospital recognition lists. Spend ten minutes searching their name with the words donor, foundation, and gave. You are looking for the shape of their giving, not just the amounts. Do they give a lot of small gifts or a few big ones? Do they give to one cause or across many? Do they prefer institutions they are personally connected to, or do they fund issues at a distance?
What they are capable of giving
This is the part most fundraisers get wrong by being too cautious. Capacity is not a guess based on a job title. It is a calculation grounded in observable signals: real estate value (look it up on Zillow or Redfin and county assessor sites), public compensation if they are an executive at a public company (proxy statements on SEC EDGAR), foundation assets if they have one (990s on ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer), and — most importantly — the largest gift they have already made publicly.
The biggest mistake here is treating a known gift as a ceiling. If someone funded a $2M endowed scholarship at their alma mater, that is not their maximum. That is their baseline — the thing they were willing to do for an institution that mattered to them. Their capacity for your organization is at least that much, and probably more if you are asking for something they care about more.
Who else is competing for the gift
This is the intelligence most fundraisers skip and most regret skipping. If your prospect just made a $1M commitment to a hospital capital campaign last quarter, you need to know that before you walk in asking for a major gift to your own building. You are not going to compete with a fresh commitment. You are going to ask for something different — a planned gift, a smaller cash gift, a commitment for a future year — and you are going to be glad you knew before the meeting instead of after.
You find this the same way you find their giving history. Search their name plus donor, plus gave, plus commitment, plus campaign. Read the last twelve months of results carefully.
What you are actually going to talk about
A donor meeting is a conversation, not a presentation. You should walk in with three to five specific things you can credibly bring up: a recent thing they did that you can congratulate them on, a connection between their interests and your work, a question that gets them talking about something they care about, a specific moment from their giving history you can refer to with knowledge. The goal is not to recite what you know. The goal is to demonstrate, in the first five minutes, that you took them seriously enough to do the work.
The forty-five-minute version
If you have forty-five minutes, here is how to spend them.
Five minutes on LinkedIn. Current role, career arc, who they are connected to in your existing donor base, anything they have posted in the last six months that signals what is on their mind.
Ten minutes on giving history. Search engines, donor walls, foundation 990s, annual reports of organizations you suspect they support. Write down every gift you can verify with a source.
Ten minutes on capacity signals. Real estate, public compensation, foundation assets, the largest verifiable gift. Do the rough math: what is the implied wealth, and what does their giving pattern suggest about how much of it they direct to philanthropy each year?
Ten minutes on competing priorities. Recent gifts, recent campaigns they may have committed to, board roles they have taken on. You are looking for anything that would change the timing or shape of what you ask for.
Ten minutes on the meeting itself. Three things you can bring up, one question to open with, one specific number range you are prepared to discuss if the conversation goes there.
That is the working prep. It is not enough to be confident. It is enough to be credible.
Where this gets hard
The playbook above works on prospects whose wealth is visible: public-company executives, people with named gifts you can find, people whose foundations file 990s. It works less well on three categories that show up in every major gift portfolio.
Private business owners, whose wealth is locked inside a company that does not file public statements. You can find revenue estimates and ownership records, but turning those into a credible capacity number requires industry-specific judgment most fundraisers do not have.
Inherited wealth, where the prospect may have no public footprint at all but sits on family money. The relevant signals are family foundations, trust filings, and patterns of giving across multiple generations — none of which surface from a name search.
Private equity and finance executives, whose compensation is structured in ways (carry, deferred comp, fund interests) that public filings do not capture. The visible numbers radically understate the real numbers.
For these prospects, the forty-five-minute method gives you a thin brief that probably underestimates capacity by an order of magnitude. This is the part of the job where having a real researcher — or a tool built by one — actually matters.
The brief a researcher would hand you, before your next meeting
Oriel is what you use when you do not have forty-five minutes, or when the prospect is one of the hard cases above, or when you have done the work yourself and want to check whether you missed anything.
You give us a name and an employer. Minutes later, we send you a brief that covers everything in this playbook — personal portrait, giving history, capacity rating with the math shown, competing priorities, conversation hooks, and discovery questions for the meeting. Every factual claim links to a source you can verify. The brief is written the way a working researcher would write it for a colleague: committed, specific, and ready to walk into a meeting with.
Oriel was built by a prospect researcher with years of experience leading research teams at major institutions. The methodology in this playbook is the same methodology Oriel runs on every brief — automated, sourced, and faster than you can do it yourself.
A freelance researcher producing the same deliverable would charge between three hundred and eight hundred dollars and take days. Your first five briefs are free.
No card required. Use them on real prospects you have meetings with.