Most fundraising teams end up running three things: a CRM that holds the records, a screening tool that scores capacity, and an intelligence layer that holds the relationship. DonorSearch is one of the strongest screening tools in the sector. Gratefully is the intelligence layer. Neither one is a CRM, and neither replaces yours.
In one sentence: DonorSearch is a wealth screening and prospect research tool. Gratefully is the intelligence layer that holds what your organization already knows - they are designed to work together, not in place of each other.
Answer capsule. DonorSearch is a wealth screening and prospect research platform for nonprofits, founded in 2007 and acquired by EverTrue in September 2025. It publishes no pricing of its own. The only published rate card comes from reseller DonorPerfect, where entry plans start at $19 a month and batch screening 30,000 records costs $5,750.
DonorSearch scores who in your database has the capacity and the inclination to give at a major level. It matches your donor list against public records, philanthropic giving history, real estate, business affiliations and SEC filings, then returns a rating you can sort a portfolio by.
Its own product documentation groups the platform into three lines:
| Line | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Donor Screening | Wealth and philanthropic screening across a database it describes as over one billion data points |
| Fundraising AI | DonorSearch Ai, Enhanced CORE, ProspectView Online 2 |
| Data Management | Database services, data appending, marketing lists |
It sells into nonprofits, healthcare, higher education, arts and culture, faith-based organizations, environmental groups and independent schools.
Wealth screening is the practice of matching a donor list against external public records to estimate a person's financial capacity to give. Prospect research is the wider discipline that adds inclination and affinity to that picture. Screening is one input to research, not a synonym for it.
EverTrue acquired DonorSearch on 4 September 2025. Financial terms were not disclosed. The combined company says it supports more than 15,000 fundraising organizations. DonorSearch founder and CEO Bill Tedesco and EverTrue CEO Adam Blake both appear in the announcement, and DonorSearch confirms the ownership on its own site. The product continues under the DonorSearch name.
DonorSearch publishes no pricing. We checked on 10 August 2026: there is no pricing page on donorsearch.net, and none of the 833 URLs across its eight sitemaps covers cost, packages or quotes. Pricing is quote-based.
The one published rate card in existence belongs to DonorPerfect, which resells DonorSearch. This is what a reseller charges, not DonorSearch's direct pricing, and the file was last updated in January 2025.
| Package | Monthly | Annual | Manual searches per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| ProspectView 100 | $19 | $228 | 100 |
| ProspectView 200 | $29 | $348 | 200 |
| ProspectView 300 | $49 | $588 | 300 |
| ProspectView 400 | $59 | $708 | 400 |
| ProspectView 500 | $79 | $948 | 500 |
| ProspectView Plus, Full Search Suite | $179 | $2,148 | Unlimited, plus 500 marketing list |
Batch screening is priced separately, and it is the bigger number. The card gives fixed bundles for smaller files and a per-record rate for larger ones.
Fixed bundles
| Records screened | Cost |
|---|---|
| 5,000 | $1,250 |
| 10,000 | $2,250 |
| 15,000 | $3,250 |
| 20,000 | $4,250 |
| 25,000 | $4,850 |
| 30,000 | $5,750 |
Per-record rate, quoted by band
| Band | Per record |
|---|---|
| 5,001 to 9,999 | $0.25 |
| 10,000 to 24,999 | $0.20 |
| 25,000 to 49,999 | $0.15 |
| 50,000 to 99,999 | $0.12 |
| 100,000 to 249,999 | $0.10 |
| 250,000 and above | Custom |
The useful thing to take from these two tables when you are budgeting: the subscription is the small number and the screening is the large one. Screening a 30,000-record file costs $5,750, against $2,148 a year for the top subscription tier.
We compete with DonorSearch, so read this with that in mind. Our honest answer is that it is worth it under conditions, and the conditions are about your team rather than their product.
| Worth it when | Hard to justify when |
|---|---|
| You have at least one person whose actual job is major gifts | Screening is a project nobody owns afterwards |
| Your file is big enough that you cannot read it by hand | You have a few hundred donors a person could review directly |
| Somebody is accountable for working the ratings within a set period | The last screen is still sitting in a spreadsheet |
| You are entering a campaign with a defined prospect pipeline | You are hoping the scores will tell you what to do |
The failure we see is not a bad screen. It is a good screen nobody works. Capacity ratings are an input to a process, and if that process does not exist, the ratings sit unused and go out of date.
That is the honest reason a screening tool and Gratefully are not alternatives. DonorSearch answers who could give. It does not answer what your organization already knows about them, or what should happen next, or whether anybody did it.
I have never met a development team that regretted screening their file. I have met plenty who could not tell me what happened after the results came back. The score is not the work. The follow-up is the work, and that is the part nobody sells you.
Screening tools and intelligence layers answer different questions. This table maps which capabilities live where.
| Capability | DonorSearch | Gratefully |
|---|---|---|
| Wealth and capacity screening (external data) | ||
| Philanthropic giving history (third-party sources) | ||
| Asset, real estate, and SEC filings lookup | ||
| Internal knowledge graph (notes, emails, documents) | ||
| Natural language query across all donor context | ||
| Answers cited to the actual source record | links to source DB | |
| Relationship history preserved through staff turnover | ||
| PII redaction and audit trail on AI interactions | ||
| Works alongside your existing CRM without migration | appends to CRM records | |
| Donor data trains shared AI models | Not stated publicly | Never |
| Proactive churn risk scoring on your portfolio | Action Center | |
| Autonomous signals from emails, notes, news | external news only | |
| Hidden revenue discovery from your existing data | ||
| Setup time | Days to weeks | Under 60 minutes |
DonorSearch is one of the most established wealth screening tools in the sector, and it does its job well: it tells you, with high confidence, who in your database has the financial capacity to give at a major level. That's a real and necessary input for any serious major gifts program.
But capacity is only half of the picture. The other half - the half that actually moves a cultivation forward - is everything your organization already knows about the relationship. The conversation from last year's site visit. The email where a donor mentioned their late father. The note your former development director left about a board member's planned gift conversation. None of that lives in a wealth screening report, and most of it isn't structured enough to live in a CRM field either.
Gratefully is the AI-native intelligence layer for that internal knowledge. You keep DonorSearch as your external intelligence source. You add Gratefully as your internal one - so that when a gift officer asks 'what do we know about this donor and what should I do next?', they get an answer grounded in both capacity data and the relationship history your team has already built.
DonorSearch scores external capacity. Gratefully holds the internal relationship context that no screening report contains.
You know who in your file has capacity, and you have ratings you can sort a portfolio by. But what your organization already knows about each of those people - the site visit recap, the note about a donor's late father, the planned gift conversation that was six months in - lives in emails, notes, and the heads of the people who logged them.
Your major gifts officer runs a DonorSearch report on a prospect and sees a $250K capacity rating. Then she asks Gratefully: 'What do we already know about her?' - and gets a cited summary of the three meetings she's had with staff, the cause areas she's mentioned caring about, the names of her children that came up in a thank-you call, and the planned gift conversation that was opened (and never followed up on) eighteen months ago. She walks into the cultivation meeting with both capacity and context.
Gratefully is built to sit on top of your existing tools - no migration, no rip-and-replace. Most organizations are set up in under 60 minutes.
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