Most fundraising teams already segment their donors. They sort by gift size, by year of last gift, by board affiliation, by alumni class. What they often do not have is a single segmentation that combines what a donor can give with what a donor is actually predisposed to give to your mission. Aprize calls that segmentation Donor Classification, and it is the fourth of seven dimensions in our Donor Insight framework.
Why classification matters
Capacity alone is famously misleading. A household worth fifty million dollars that gives entirely to the arts is not your major-gift prospect as a hospital foundation, no matter how impressive the wealth screen looks. Affinity alone is just as misleading: an obvious mission fan with no philanthropic capacity will not move your top-line. Classification crosses these two axes deliberately, so that your gift officers stop chasing the wrong half of the file.
According to Giving USA's 2025 report, foundations and corporations contributed a combined $154.21 billion to U.S. charities in 2024, roughly one-quarter of all giving. Most of that money is concentrated in a small share of institutions. Classification helps you find your share of that small share.
The five segments
Aprize Classification places every organization in your file (and every prospect we identify upstream) into one of five segments based on the interaction of Capacity (their ability to give) and Affinity (their demonstrated willingness to give to organizations like yours). Each segment has its own profile and engagement strategy — we unpack all five in depth in our companion series, The Five Donor Classifications:
- All-Stars: high capacity and high affinity. The people who could be giving you transformational gifts and probably already give to peer organizations. Cultivation, not discovery, is the constraint.
- Enthusiasts: moderate capacity, high affinity. Loyal mid-level donors whose lifetime value is consistently underestimated by capacity-only screens.
- Juggernauts: high capacity, low or unknown affinity. The big-money names every shop dreams about but rarely converts. Worth qualifying, not always worth a default major-gift solicitation.
- Core: moderate capacity and moderate affinity. The reliable backbone of annual giving and recurring revenue.
- Admirers: lower capacity and lower current affinity. Important for community legitimacy and long-tail discovery, but a poor default destination for major-gift staff time.
What classification changes about your week
The point of Classification is not the labels. It is the resource allocation those labels enable. A development director looking at a classified file can defensibly say: this many gift officers on All-Stars, this many on Juggernauts requiring qualification, this much annual-giving spend on Core, this much volunteer effort on Admirers. That is a cadence and a budget, not a vibe.
It also gives your board a vocabulary. "We have 41 All-Stars, of whom 3 are not yet assigned to a portfolio" is a sentence a board member can act on. "Our wealth screen turned up some interesting names" is not.
What Aprize Classification is not
Classification is not a wealth score. Wealth screens such as those summarized in CASE's prospect-research literature remain useful upstream inputs, but they answer "could this person write a check?" rather than "would this person write a check to you?" Classification answers the second question, which is the one that actually drives revenue.
It is also not a black box. Every Classification on an Aprize report is traceable to the underlying public-record financial signals that produced it, so your team can answer the question your board chair always asks: "How do we know?"