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Why Canada Didn’t Have Automated Screening – Until Now

The following is an excerpt from iWave’s new whitepaper: The State of Canadian Wealth Screening & What Lies Ahead.  Read the full story.

Automated wealth/prospect screening, or electronic screening, of Canadian based canadian screeningprospects has never been available.  Some companies have offered an alternative version of screening or analytics that is more manual and human-driven, but this is a slow process demanding a lot of time, investment, and manpower.

These automated screenings have been unavailable for Canadian based prospects largely because of the country’s privacy laws.   Whereas real estate information is publicly available online in the US, it is not publicly available online in Canada, and therefore much harder to find or unavailable entirely.  Picture literally walking into a local municipal office in a quest for property information.   This would be unheard of in the US.

The reason real estate information is so important is because capacity ratings are a critical component of wealth and prospect screening, and the primary data point used to generate capacity ratings is real estate holdings.  Real estate holdings are used because the majority of the time, if you’re looking for information on a prospective donor, real estate is the only data point available; net worth, annual income, and stock holdings can be even more scarce.  Most researchers in the US would agree that when working with any given prospect pool, home value is the only thing you will find for about 80% of the prospects.  In Canada, that would equate to finding nothing on 80% of your prospects.

However, there are some workaround strategies available for Canadian real estate, such as estimating property value by postal code. Each Canadian postal code represents 15 households on average.  By referencing Statistics Canada Census data, companies have analyzed each postal code to provide a median property value in that region.  This is an excellent starting point, but overlaying these estimates with more than one type of prospect information such as philanthropic giving, biographical information, securities holdings, foundation affiliations, or political donations has historically been a manual, time consuming process.

Until now, no company has taken on the task of using a one-step automated process to match this postal code-level property value, and other wealth, biographical, and philanthropic records to specific individuals.

PROscreen is the first ever automated prospect screening solution that will screen both US and Canadian prospects.  For the first time, you can use an automated tool to screen a list of US and/or Canadian based prospects and highlight individuals who have the capacity and affinity to give to your cause – regardless of where they primarily live.

 


 

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