An Introduction to NOZA

Editor's Note: This article was published in July 2008 and was updated to included more recent statistics in October 2009.

According to the Giving USA Foundation’s 2009 report, $307 billion was donated to U.S. nonprofits in 2008. 82.6 percent came from individual donors and bequests, 12.6 percent came from foundations, and 5.1 percent came from corporations. These numbers may provide some insights into what types of financial support nonprofits should spend their time and resources soliciting.

NOZA founder and CEO Craig Harris says that when he worked as a consultant to nonprofit organizations, he realized that most of his clients devoted substantial time and resources to grantseeking, but had little or no infrastructure in place to seek out and nurture relationships with new individual donors. They were devoting the vast majority of their fundraising budgets to 12.3 percent of their donations.

Harris noted that an array of databases and tools was available for grantseeking and grantwriting, but there were no similar tools on the market for researching individual and corporate donations. When clients asked Harris how to measure a prospective donor’s potential, he answered, “Spend hours and hours on Google.”

Harris’ new solution is NOZA, a Web-based database of charitable giving intended as a prospect-research tool for nonprofit organizations.

How Does NOZA Work?

All of NOZA’s information comes from publicly available Web sources or from Web sources that were publicly available at one time. NOZA’s computers search the Web sites of nonprofit organizations for names of donors and donation amounts. Donor information can take several forms on nonprofit Web sites: some sites feature lists of donations categorized by amount; others thank donors in quarterly newsletters or annual reports. For each gift, NOZA creates a record that includes the donor name, donation type, year, donation amount (or range), and information about the recipient organization. As of September 1, 2009, there are over 42 million records in the NOZA database, with approximately 500,000 new records added monthly.

Eligible nonprofits and public libraries in the United States can request NOZA subscriptions in donated and discounted bundles at TechSoup Stock, including those for use in a public library or community technology center setting.

There are two primary ways to search NOZA, Search by Name and Search by Cause. When you search by donor name, you can additionally limit the search by recipient location and donation year. Each search result includes the name, location, year, recipient name, donation category, donation amount, cause, and a link to the location where the information was found.

In the Search by Cause mode, you can search by two or more of the following criteria: cause, recipient location, donation amount, keyword, recipient ZIP code range, donation category, and donation year. You can save your results in folders, and you can export from the folders into a spreadsheet whenever you want.

Who Can Use NOZA?

According to Harris, most nonprofits fall into one of two categories, and each type presents unique fundraising challenges. New and smaller organizations often find themselves unable to find an audience that will be sympathetic to their goals and able to make donations. Larger, more established organizations might have hundreds or thousands of constituents making small annual gifts but no way to discern which donors could be amenable to more substantial contributions.

NOZA includes search tools uniquely suited to organizations in each category. If your organization is trying to spread your message to new constituents, then you can use the Search by Cause mode to find individuals and corporations already donating to organizations in the same geographic region with similar goals. Conversely, if you already have a long list of donors, you can use the Search by Name mode to find out where else the people on your list are making donations, and how large of donations they’re making. A contact with a large budget and a history of supporting similarly focused organizations could be a potential long-term ally.

Free Resources from NOZA

In addition to its corporate and individual donor listings, NOZA maintains a database of grants and donations from charitable foundations. These records are completely free. You will need to set up a free account at NOZA to search the foundation data, but this also enables you to save and manage your results within your free account folders.

NOZA recently unveiled a companion to the foundation search, a free 990-PF database containing over 600,000 990-PF tax returns from over 40,000 private foundations. Users can search for and sort listings by a variety of criteria and download the tax returns in PDF format.

NOZA’s grantseeking tools can excellently complement a GrantStation membership. While NOZA’s foundation search and 990-PF database provide raw data about foundations’ past gifts, GrantStation can contextualize that data with information about foundations’ current philanthropic policies and goals. Combined, the two services can provide you with a thorough understanding of a foundation’s giving history and future.

Why would NOZA provide two such powerful tools for finding foundation grants at no cost? Harris believes that foundation data should be available to the nonprofit community in a free and user-friendly format, but he also stressed that providing this information for free sends a strong message to organizations: the majority of your fundraising efforts should be directed to individuals, not foundations. “We de-emphasize the foundation data in our own business model as a reinforcement of this message that we want to get out there: foundation giving is very important and it has a place in every nonprofit’s fundraising plan, but the scope of the investment into foundation giving needs to be proportionate to where the money comes from nationally.”

Tips for Getting the Most from NOZA

NOZA prides itself in its free technical support as well as its online documentation. NOZA’s Prospect Research Workbook features information about how to use NOZA effectively as well as general information about prospect research and fundraising methods. NOZA’s blog features news and tips not only about NOZA, but also about many other fundraising tools.

Harris often implores users to “cast a wide net” when searching for prospective donors. Searching for people in your ZIP code who have donated $500,000 or more to your cause may yield a disappointing number of results. More importantly, the donor in a neighboring city who donated only $2000 to a similar cause may be the right donor, the donor whose budget and interests are uniquely suited to your organization’s needs and goals.

Most importantly, remember that NOZA is only a database, not a magic bullet for finding multi-million dollar donations. NOZA may help you find potential supporters, but turning those potential supporters into actual friends of your organization is your job. Even with tools like NOZA, first-time cold calls never result in million-dollar donations. “Million-dollar donations are the result of years and years of cultivation and strengthening relationships,” Harris said. “You have to develop a relationship.”

NOZA Subscriptions at TechSoup Stock

If you’re interested in NOZA but unsure if you’re ready to make a commitment, a one week subscription is a great way to try the service and see if it will fit into your organization’s fundraising strategy. The donated subscription is available to any 501(c)(3) nonprofit or public library.

If the donated subscription proves to be useful, several discounted bundles are available for organizations with budgets of $1 million or less.

NOZA Webinar

For a hands-on demonstration of how nonprofit organizations are using NOZA, check out the recent TechSoup Talks! Webinar on NOZA.