Every donor strategy starts with a question of physics. How much could this funder give, on the outside, in a single year? Capacity is the dimension that answers that question. It is the ceiling, the upper bound, the largest plausible number. It is not the same as net worth, and it is emphatically not the same as the gift you should ask for. But without it, every other dimension floats untethered.
How Aprize defines Capacity
Aprize Capacity is not a wealth-screen number. We measure Capacity as a funder's total annual grant expenses: the actual dollars they have moved out the door to charitable causes in a given year, drawn from public IRS records and equivalent government-agency disclosures. For institutional funders this is unambiguous: the line item exists in the filing.
The advantage of this approach is verifiability. The IRS and equivalent government agencies publish funder financial disclosures in machine-readable form, and aggregators such as Candid and ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer make the same records publicly searchable. Anyone can audit the number on a Capacity score in an Aprize report. Wealth-screen estimates derived from real-estate footprints and lifestyle proxies cannot be audited the same way, which is one reason boards have learned to discount them.
Why a ceiling matters more than a guess
The most common failure mode in major-gift work is asking too small. The second most common is asking the right amount of the wrong donor. Capacity protects against both. When you know the ceiling, you can size the ask appropriately for the donor in front of you, rather than benchmarking against the last gift they happened to make.
Capacity also protects against false equivalence. Two foundations both giving you $50,000 a year look identical in a CRM report. If one has a $200,000 annual giving Capacity and the other has $20,000,000, the strategic implications are entirely different. The first foundation is at quarter-strength to your mission. The second has rounding-error exposure to it. The first call should be a stewardship review. The second should be a serious cultivation conversation.
What Capacity is not
Capacity is not the recommended ask amount. That number depends on Affinity, Trend, and Cultivation Potential, all of which we cover separately. An All-Star classified funder at $20M Capacity might warrant a $1M ask in a given year; an Admirer at the same Capacity might warrant a much smaller qualifying gift. Capacity is the input, not the conclusion.
Capacity is also not static. Foundations restructure. Family offices receive liquidity events. Operating budgets compress and expand. Aprize has weekly and monthly cadences to update our database so this dimension reflects current giving power, not the giving power of ten years ago. Trend, the sixth dimension in the series, captures the direction of those changes.
How Capacity flows into the other six dimensions
Capacity is the foundation dimension because every other dimension depends on it. Affinity (Part 2) is computed as a share of Capacity. Ranking (Part 3) is the multiplicative product of Affinity and Capacity scaled to a comparable axis. Classification (Part 4) places donors on a two-by-two grid where one axis is Capacity. Favor (Part 5) is interpretable only against the Capacity-implied parity baseline. Trend (Part 6) tracks Capacity's year-over-year change. Proximity (Part 7) determines whose Capacity you can see directly versus whose you must infer through a giving chain.
The dimensions form a stack. Capacity is the bottom layer. Get it wrong and everything above it is built on sand.