Prospect Research: What You Don’t Know — and How It Can Hurt You

Using the IRS data, we can estimate a prospect’s capacity if we know his or her total assets in any one category listed in Table 1 because we know that Americans typically give about 3 percent to 5 percent of their net worth.

For example, if we know from our research that Mary Patron owns shares valued at $1.5 million of publicly traded XYZ Company, we can estimate her total assets to be about $5.15 million by dividing $1.5 million by 0.291.