As any researcher knows, finding the charitable giving of individual donors is like finding a needle in a haystack. Finding gifts required time eating internet searches, using the Charitable Database Online, which isn’t very comprehensive for some parts of the county and combing through news sources. But a few months ago, I received a call from a new company, NOZA, who asked me to look at their new charitable giving database.
Craig from NOZA stated that they had developed the world’s largest searchable database of charitable donations available for use by non-profit organizations. The database covered individual, corporate and foundation giving.
I’ve had the opportunity to preview NOZA’s subscription search service over the past view months and it will be publicly available on July 15th. I don’t usually review for-fee products, but I would encourage people to check it out, as I‘ve been quite impressed.
NOZA is a bit different from other charitable giving databases in that it uses specialized spiders to search the Web for charitable giving. In addition, the search provides links to annual reports so you can verify the information. Currently, the database has more than 10 million gifts, and covers close to 9,000 organizations. Gift information spans from 2000 to the present and NOZA continually adds new gifts.
The NOZA search interface is both flexible and easy to use. You can search by individual name (NOZA actually lets you search for free before purchasing), and you can narrow the search by city or gift year. The search interface allows Boolean searching, which is very helpful when you are looking for John Q. Smith.
NOZA also has a great search function called Create-A-List that comes in handy for finding new prospects. Create-A-List allows a user to search for gifts in a variety of ways: gifts to a particular type of organization (arts, social services, higher education), or in a particular geographic area (including searching by a range of zip codes which is great for us in urban areas that stretch over several cities, like Phoenix, Seattle, or Portland), or gifts for a particular purpose (annual gifts, campaign, or operating funds).
As an example, I ran a search for donors to arts organizations in Los Angeles, who had given over $100,000 and received 212 records back. Some of these were corporations/foundations, but you can play around with it to build potential individual donor/peer screening lists. The user can exclude foundations, but I would like to be able to exclude corporations too.
You can read the results on the screen, or even better, download them in Excel spreadsheet form!
According to the company’s promotional material, NOZA’s database will be available through Blackbaud Analytics, Target America, and Pro Platinum, as well as by individual subscription.
The pricing for NOZA is quite reasonable. You can start a subscription for $10, which will allow you to see 100 records. NOZA allows anyone to search free, even without a subscription, so you can figure out whether your donors are in their database or not for nothing.
NOZA doesn’t have as complete coverage in some areas as I would like, but they are continually adding gifts. Because NOZA has clearly stated that they only index annual reports and donor lists that are available through the web, I still found myself searching for individual gifts the “old fashioned way”, but NOZA does save a great deal of time and energy.
It is important to note that a record is equal to one gift (not one individual) and that gifts are only searchable by organization city, not by donor address. In addition, many of the gifts are annual fund gifts, however if a person has a large number of gifts you can sort them in Excel by gift amount.
Despite these caveats, NOZA has quickly become the first resource I use for finding charitable gifts. It’s an impressive new tool and affordable on even the skinniest of shoestring budgets.
NOZA Search will be available July 15th at http://www.nozasearch.com