Some profiles will include donations data, which you can factor into your evaluation of that customer or client’s interests and capacity. However, there are three key types of donation data and each is pulling information from a different place.
Political Donations
There are several different sources of political donations, all of which are curated outside of WealthEngine.
Federal Election Commission Campaign
Political campaign/committee contributions are taken from financial disclosure reports filed by House, Senate, and Presidential campaigns, parties, and PACs. They run from 1993 to the present.
State Political Donations
State-level campaign contributions made to individual candidates, political party committees, and ballot measure committees. Data is collected from campaign finance reports that are filed with state disclosure offices.
Section 527 Political Donations
Donations that have been contributed to a special interest group – specifically a Section 527 organization. This is a federal designation for an organization (party, committee, association, fund, etc.) whose primary purpose is to influence the election or appointment of a candidate to public office or office in a political organization.
Philanthropic Donations
This data source, also curated outside of WealthEngine, includes a select group of major gift records traced back to the donor’s home address. The records show the gift amount, the year in which it was made, and the recipient organization.
Charitable Donations
Charitable Donations is the only data source that WealthEngine curates. It stores millions of donations, which we've drawn from donor lists published by the nation’s largest nonprofit organizations, as well as those nonprofits that have elected to participate in Wealth Engine’s ongoing crowdsourcing project by sharing their annual reports.
This database will potentially display the type, amount, and year of the gift, as well as the recipient organization’s name, location, and areas of focus. However, these types of reports never include the full address that would allow our computer system to really be certain the contribution applies to your person – rather than someone who simply looks like them. This means that when you look at Charitable Donations on a profile, you are seeing a list of donations that the system thinks might be them. For this reason, Charitable Donations will always be a Medium QOM[hyperlink], meaning that they are not factored into any of the key scores on the profile.
While the Charitable Donations data source will never be comprehensive, it does continue to grow as we add thousands of annual donations to the system every week.
- Note: Charitable Donations, Federal Election Campaign Contributions, and SSDI Death Index records are the only Medium QOM data that are automatically included in profiles. To learn more about Quality of Match (QOM), check out our How We Build Profiles Guide.