Windfall Data helps nonprofits identify, understand engage affluent customers using home equity data from ATTOM Data Solutions. Windfall also utilizes property and owner characteristic data from ATTOM paired with other household-level data.
According to CEO Arup Banerjee, Windfall has helped its nonprofit customers handle a strategic fundraising challenge in recent years — a shrinking share of donations coming from corporations, forcing nonprofits to rely more on individual donations. Banerjee believes nonprofits — and his company — can learn from that experience should a recession hit.
How Home Equity Data Helps Hedge Against a Recession
“We can be used to make sure that the impact is felt at a lower or lesser degree, which is important for nonprofits that are trying to identify high net worth individuals who are still giving during a time of financial distress,” he said, noting home equity data is a key metric to help identify those high net worth individuals. “Similar to how we’ve helped nonprofits weather the storm with (shrinking) donations from corporations, we’ll help them weather (a recession).”
Banerjee contented that nonprofits tend to be recession-proof. He cited statistics showing that dollar volume of donations to nonprofits has increased every year with three exceptions, all during recessions — 1987, 2008 and 2009.
Nevertheless, Windfall has adjusted its business model to hedge against a possible recession and the belt-tightening that can occur among nonprofits during an economic downturn.
“That’s been a little bit of how we’ve adjusted our business … not just to have an annual subscription but have a longer-term contract with locked-in prices so that their budgets can accommodate that for the future,” he said. “Ensure that we have their budget in 2020, 2021 so we don’t necessarily have to go back to the finance department (for approval).”
Despite taking some steps to cushion the blow of a possible future slowdown, Banerjee noted he’s not seeing any imminent signs of slowing among Windfall’s nonprofit clients.
“It’s a little bit hard to prepare for a recession right now while things are continuing to grow at a rapid pace,” he said. “Nothing is indicating that our customers are slowing down … in making investments to acquire those new customers. … We’re more focused on helping our customers grow and expand.”
