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Major Donor Prospect Research Brief

Example prompt: "I'm meeting with a potential major donor next week. Search the web for any public information about Jane Smith, including past charitable giving, recent news mentions, and her professional background. Pull anything relevant from her LinkedIn and recent press. Draft a one-page prospect brief covering capacity indicators, philanthropic interests, and suggested talking points. Save it to our Notion prospects database and email me the link."

The Problem

Before a major donor meeting, fundraisers need a clear picture of who they are speaking with — past giving patterns, professional background, philanthropic interests, and any recent news that might shape the conversation. Pulling this together manually means jumping between LinkedIn, news searches, public charity databases, and the donor's own website, then assembling notes into a usable brief. For a development officer juggling several prospects in a week, this preparation either gets rushed or eats into the time better spent on cultivation itself.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that takes a prospect's name (and optionally their company or city) and produces a structured one-page brief. Web search and URL extraction steps gather information from public sources — recent news, professional bios, mentions of past charitable giving, board roles. A code step then applies data-minimisation rules: it strips any sensitive identifiers that have no legitimate fundraising purpose (date of birth where unnecessary, home address, financial account numbers, anything resembling a national insurance or social security number), records the URL and retrieval date for every source, and tags the brief with a UK GDPR lawful basis (typically "legitimate interests") plus an automatic review/deletion date in line with your retention policy. An LLM step then organises the cleared findings into the three classic prospect-research dimensions: capacity indicators (signs of giving ability), philanthropic interests (causes they have supported publicly), and affinity signals (links to your organisation, peers, or mission). Each claim in the brief carries an inline citation with its source URL and the date it was retrieved. The brief is saved to your Notion prospects database (or a Google Doc) with provenance metadata and a retention timestamp; a link is emailed to the fundraiser. Glass Box preview shows you the draft brief, every source it relied on, and the data-minimisation log, so you can verify before it lands in your prospect record.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (manual): A fundraiser submits a prospect name through a Google Form or Slack command.
  2. Step 1 (web_search): Search for the prospect's name across recent news, professional profiles, and public charitable giving mentions. Capture each result's URL and retrieval timestamp.
  3. Step 2 (url_extract): Pull detailed content from the most relevant pages — bio pages, press releases, board listings — with the source URL and date attached to each extracted block.
  4. Step 3 (code): Apply data-minimisation rules — strip sensitive identifiers (national insurance / social security numbers, financial account numbers, home addresses, unnecessary dates of birth), record provenance (URL + retrieval date) against every retained claim, tag the brief with a UK GDPR lawful basis ("legitimate interests" by default) and an automatic review/deletion date per your retention policy, and emit a log entry summarising what was redacted and why.
  5. Step 4 (LLM): Organise the cleared findings into three sections — capacity indicators, philanthropic interests, affinity signals — and draft three suggested talking points. Each claim must carry its inline source citation.
  6. Step 5 (conditional): If the data-minimisation step removed all material findings, or the public record is otherwise thin, flag the brief as "limited public record" or "data-excluded" so the fundraiser knows whether the gap is real or the result of redaction.
  7. Step 6 (integration): Save the brief as a new entry in the Notion prospects database with all source links, provenance metadata, lawful-basis tag, and retention/deletion date attached.
  8. Step 7 (integration): Email the fundraiser a link to the saved brief via Gmail.

Integrations Used

  • Notion — destination for the structured prospect brief and source links
  • Google Forms — intake form for prospect name and meeting context
  • Gmail — delivers the link to the completed brief
  • Slack — optional alternative trigger for fundraisers who prefer a slash command

Who This Is For

Major gifts officers and development directors at nonprofits with an active major-donor pipeline who want consistent prospect briefs before every cultivation meeting, without spending two hours per meeting on manual research.

Time & Cost Saved

Manually researching a prospect and writing up a brief takes roughly 90 minutes to two hours of focused work. A development officer running 4-6 prospect meetings a week can lose an entire day to research alone. This workflow produces a first-draft brief in minutes from public sources, leaving the fundraiser to verify and add internal context. Importantly, the workflow uses public information only — it is not a substitute for paid wealth-screening services, but it makes every meeting better-prepared as a baseline.