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Lifestyle Search: 3 Ways To Use iWave’s Newest Search Feature

Psst, you heard it here first. Next week we’re launching a new way to search and prospect, the Lifestyle search. This new feature will save time and help you identify prospective donors based on the causes they support and the interests they are affiliated with. With us helping you prospect, you’ll gain more prospective donors with a proven inclination to your cause and have more time to spend building relationships with those donors.

This new feature could not have come at a better time for organizations focusing on their fundraising health. As The Giving Institute pointed out in their Annual Report of Philanthropy, philanthropic giving hit its highest level in 2017. This increase in donations, however, came from fewer donors than in previous years. Because more donations are coming from fewer donors, it’s extremely important to find and understand donors who are connected to your mission and passionate about your initiatives.

With the new Lifestyle search, iWave enables nonprofit organization’s to get creative when looking for prospective donors. We understand that your database may be running low on individuals who can contribute to your organization and that looking for peer referrals can be a fruitless task. Cue the Lifestyle search.. You’ll save time jumping from database to database and we’ll help you find prospective donors based on their previous giving history, personal interests, and lifestyle characteristics.

To help you better understand how to use the Lifestyle search, check out the use cases below.

Identifying Prospective Donors By Cause

Imagine you’re a local animal shelter with a focus solely on your city of 1,000 residents. Due to factors outside of your control, you’re finding it harder and harder to grow your prospect database. To avoid this roadblock, employ the power of the Lifestyle search. Input the cause that you are prospecting for, in this case, ‘Animal Related’ with a focus on ‘Animal Protection and Welfare’. Now enter your state and select your city from the dropdown menu. Voila! A list of individuals in your area who have a proven affinity to your cause.

Finding Appropriate Individuals to Invite to An Upcoming Event

We’ve all been there.  You have a major fundraising event coming up but you’re not sure who to invite. You guessed it. It’s time to leverage the power of the Lifestyle search. For example, if you’re planning a wine and cheese night, the Lifestyle search will introduce a potential list of attendees interested specifically in wine. This creates a much more targeted and personalized approach to engaging your prospective donors. To give it a try, within the Lifestyle search, select the interest ‘Food and Drink’, select your state and if applicable, city and press search. If you want to broaden your results, you could also select ‘Wine and Gourmet’ under characteristics.  

Another way you could use this search function is for validating and verifying potential event ideas. Maybe there is interest in hosting an art auction. After a quick scan of potential attendees using the Lifestyle search, it is possible that few have an interest in art or art collecting. This allows time to pivot and replan an event geared towards the interests of your target audience.

Finding Volunteers

Volunteers are the lifeblood of any nonprofit organization. Did you know that iWave’s VeriGift charitable donations database also tracks the gift of time through volunteering? As we mentioned in the iWave Primer, past giving information is an excellent opportunity for learning about a prospect’s interests, and how they could fit as a potential volunteer or board member.

To try this out, open up the Lifestyle search and chose an interest aligned with your organization’s cause. For this example, let’s say a religious-based organization is looking for volunteers. With Lifestyle search, they are easily able to select ‘Religious & Inspirational’ as a prospect interest. From here, the nonprofit is able to quickly scan through individuals who have an interest aligned with their organization and previous experience volunteering.

Using the Lifestyle search, the volunteer-procurement process can be expedited by understanding exactly where an individual’s interest lies, and if a good fit exists between them and the nonprofit.  

Along with screening and building profiles, iWave also acts as a strategic tool for nonprofits. Using iWave, they can decode real estate information or find board members. Lifestyle search will open up even more opportunities to get strategic with iWave.

Pretty neat right? Well, this is just the beginning!  The introduction of the Lifestyle search is just the tip of the iceberg.  Stay tuned in the coming months for the next phases of this new feature and more ways iWave will help serve up that next great major gift donor you’ve been looking for.  

Ready to get started?

For current iWave users, start using the Lifestyle search by logging in here. For non-iWave users, click here to get a personalized demonstration.

And don’t forget, everything we do at iWave is rooted in spoken and unspoken feedback from our valued users.  So when you’re trying out the Lifestyle search, don’t forget to submit feedback here or to feedback@iwave.com.

About the author: Patrick Bryden is iWave’s Marketing Manager.  From creating pitch decks for Nike and Mattel to starting his own water bottle company, Patrick brings over five years of marketing experience to iWave. With a strong interest in creative problem solving and finding efficiencies in everyday processes, Patrick’s never met a challenge he hasn’t liked.

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