How DonorAtlas estimates wealth
Every donor profile has an estimated net worth range, a liquidity estimate, and income and asset tables. This article explains how to read each one and where the numbers come from.
Every donor profile has an estimated net worth range, a liquidity estimate, and income and asset tables. This article explains how to read each one and where the numbers come from.
DonorAtlas researches each donor the way a professional prospect researcher would — reading public filings, property records, and news — and turns what it finds into three things on the profile: an estimated net worth range, a liquidity estimate, and detailed income and asset tables. This page explains how to read all three.
Nobody outside a donor's accountant knows their exact net worth, and we don't pretend to. Some parts of the public record are exact — the SEC requires insiders to report exactly how many shares of a public company they hold — but other parts, like the value of a stake in a private fund, can only be estimated.
So every estimate is a range: the low and high ends are what the evidence supports, and the best guess marks the most likely value in between. The better the public record, the tighter the range. SEC-reported stock gives a narrow range, while wealth spread across private partnerships and family businesses gives a wide one. New filings and sales narrow the range over time.
Use the range to size your ask. Treat the low end as a conservative floor, and plan around the best guess. A wide range means the wealth is hard to see from public records.
Below is the Net Worth section from a real profile, with sample data for Eric Schmidt. It's fully interactive — hover any bar to read its numbers. Let's walk through it piece by piece:
On a real profile, you'll see these numbers in two places. The Estimated Net Worth metric at the top of the profile shows the range at a glance, and the full Net Worth section further down has the liquidity estimate and the complete income and asset tables.
Liquidity should shape both the size and the shape of your ask. A donor with high net worth but low liquidity may not manage a large cash gift this year — but may be a great fit for a gift of appreciated stock, a multi-year pledge, or a planned gift. And when a liquidity event happens — an IPO, a company sale — paper wealth becomes cash all at once. That's the single best moment to make a major ask, and DonorAtlas calls it out prominently when it finds one.
Income is money arriving year after year — salary, bonuses, fund profits, business distributions. It tells you what a donor could give every year without touching their wealth, so it's the table to check for annual funds and recurring gifts.
Assets are the wealth a donor has already built up — company shares, real estate, fund stakes. They tell you what a donor could give once, so they're the table to check for major gifts, stock gifts, and planned giving.
The same fortune can show up in both tables at different times. While a founder holds their shares, the stake sits in Assets. If they sell some in an IPO, the cash from that sale appears in Income as realized proceeds, and the shares they kept stay in Assets. Each dollar appears in only one place, so the two tables never double-count.
Every estimate is built from public documents. The main sources:
Every estimate links back to the documents it came from: expand any row in the income or asset tables to see the sources before you rely on a number. The key takeaway sentence from the walkthrough is a one-line summary our AI models write from that same evidence.
Some donors hold most of their wealth privately, with no public filings or property records. Their tables will be sparser and their ranges wider — DonorAtlas reports what the public record supports, so you know how much to trust each estimate.
Next up is the income table: every income type we estimate — fund compensation, executive pay, IPO proceeds, and more.