How Westmont 4×'d Its Prospect Research Capacity

An elite team that already exceeded one major campaign, preparing for an even more ambitious one.

Westmont College is a liberal arts college in Santa Barbara. Its advancement team had just exceeded a $250M campaign goal, with one-third the staff a peer institution would carry. The team was preparing to launch an even more ambitious fundraising initiative.

The team was lean by design and ambitious by mandate. Six gift officers, one prospect researcher, a stewardship lead, and the lead of advancement. With 60,000+ alumni and parents, a maturing donor base, foundation reporting volume that had grown 6×, and gift officers each carrying 150 to 170 households, Westmont needed more leverage, not more effort. Risely partnered with the team to streamline research and unlock capacity, without adding headcount.

One researcher, six gift officers, and a workflow stretched to its limits.

Westmont's prospect researcher is Neil Di Maggio. He has been at the college for twenty years and supports the entire donor portfolio. He runs reporting for leadership, fields ad hoc requests from gift officers, and writes briefings for every donor coming to a Westmont event.

Each prospect briefing required roughly an hour of work: pulling wealth indicators, personal connections, philanthropic history, and giving capacity from multiple sources, then validating each identity against proprietary tools to weed out false positives. A single donor meeting cost an hour, while a 15 to 20 person event easily ran to 20 hours.

The harder constraint was the constant juggle. As Neil put it: “You've got the urgent and important, and then the really important but less urgent. Research always gets pushed back and back and back, until it becomes the urgent thing, and then you're stressed because you don't have time to do it properly.” An elite team with even more ambitious goals was running out of leverage.

The work itself changed, not just the speed of it.

Risely's agents pull live donor context from the Advancement CRM, ingest the historical correspondence and stewardship records held in Westmont's institutional files, and enrich every profile with real-time web and LinkedIn signal, surfacing every claim alongside its source. The researcher opens a structured research framework where assembly used to live, and spends his time validating, corroborating, and interpreting.

The deeper shift is in when research happens. Prospect research used to live in tension with the steady stream of urgent ad-hoc requests; it got pushed back until it became urgent itself, then done under deadline pressure. Now, when a news article surfaces about someone connected to the college, or an unexpected gift comes in, the researcher can act on the signal in the moment: run the research, scan the results, return later to validate.

" The fact that I can use it when I see a gift come in and address that right away. That's something I've always been wanting to be able to do and just never had the capacity to do as a one-person shop.

Neil Di Maggio Prospect Researcher

From hours of assembly to 4× more strategic research.

In 12 weeks, Risely generated 121 prospect briefs, work that previously bottlenecked at one person and stretched across days of assembly. The team's time is now spent differently.

The researcher's job has fundamentally changed. The hours that once went into manually assembling each profile, pulling data from scattered sources and stitching it together by hand, are largely gone. That reclaimed time now goes to strategy: deciding which prospects warrant deeper attention, surfacing patterns across the portfolio, and shaping the approach a gift officer brings into a conversation. The work that used to be manual is now automated, and the researcher's effort lives in judgment rather than assembly.