I work for a small, niche nonprofit. We don’t have a lot of budget for stuff like wealth screenings, which is where you send a whackload of names and addresses off to a database and for a fee the database tells you how much money each person is capable of giving you. Fortunately, some experience from my last job means I’m capable of building my own wealth screener tool, and I did, in Excel. It’s not super advanced, it basically just depends on real estate, but nine times in ten you’re basing wealth on real estate anyway because often salary information is difficult to come by.
The upshot of all of this is that I feed a home value into cell A and a series of calculations spits out their five-year gift capacity into cell B and their single gift capacity into cell C. Then, because these eventually have to be entered into a text heavy area of the database (I know, I know, but I work with what I have) cell D includes the value from C automatically in standardized verbage: “Gift capacity rating of [C] based on wealth screening on [current date].”
Now, this means that on Fridays I do a lot of dumping home values into the spreadsheet, one after another, and any home I can’t find or that is obviously incorrect/incomplete I mark and come back to. When that happens, in the home value cell I just type “apartment” or “recheck” or some similar note to remind me to look at it later, and cells B-D all start screaming #VALUE! like they do when you put text in a number box they’re dependent on.
I kind of love when the whole row lights up #VALUE!. Thank you, Excel. I do feel valued. Hashtag value!
