Due diligence is an essential element of any fundraising effort. Due diligence validates the identity of an individual or business and provides information about their previous and current relationships and permits investors to assess your business before deciding whether to invest in you.
If you’re a business looking for investment or hoping to team with a philanthropic group conducting thorough and transparent due diligence is essential to your success. Due diligence can be carried out early in the process to identify and eliminate poor partners.
If a donor’s past has been shattered by controversial actions or associations which have been criticized, this could be a major factor. You can conduct due diligence early in the process to determine whether a relationship is aligned with your organization’s mission or values.
A great due diligence process is swift, thorough, and well-organized. It should be able take massive amounts of public data such as news media websites or social networks, or even grey literature, and then provide digestible reports which can be shared easily across teams. It should also be able to automatically search through millions of documents and provide a clear, structured overview of your business that is easy to read and share.