If a funder treated every peer recipient identically, what would your share of their giving be? That equally divided share is Parity, and it is the baseline that makes Favor and most other share-of-wallet analysis interpretable.
What parity actually means
Parity is a normalization, not a target. For any funder, parity asks: given the population of organizations they could plausibly fund, and the way they actually distribute their dollars across that population, what would each peer receive under a strictly proportional allocation?
Parity gives you a unit that is comparable across funders. A $50,000 gift from a small family foundation could represent dramatic over-parity preference, while the same gift from a multibillion-dollar foundation could represent a below-parity share. Without a parity baseline, both look like "wins" on a development scoreboard.
Why a peer-set definition matters
Parity is only as good as the peer set against which it is computed. A simple analysis might compare your university's gift from a foundation to that foundation's median gift to all recipients, including organizations in entirely unrelated sectors. That comparison can be informative but should also be weighed against the funder's stated or demonstrated priorities to your specific sector.
Parity is the unit, Favor is the signal
Once parity is established, every other share-of-wallet metric in our framework becomes legible. Favor is your actual share compared to parity. Cultivation Potential is the gap between parity and your current below-parity share. Neither of these are interpretable without a credible parity baseline underneath them.
What parity is not
Parity is not a moral statement. The point is not that funders should distribute their dollars equally across peers; that would be a strange and probably bad fundraising universe. The point is that parity gives us a neutral reference line so that "a lot" and "a little" mean something quantifiable, and so that gift officers can talk about funder behavior without resorting to anecdote.
It is also not static. Parity shifts as a funder's portfolio grows, contracts, or changes its program areas. Aprize recomputes parity on each refresh of the underlying public-record data, so the baseline you are interpreting against is the one that reflects the funder's most recent year of behavior, not the snapshot from when your CRM was last enriched.