People who are friends or acquaintances of your trustees, your Chief Executive, your heads of department, your fellow members of staff or your volunteers, all have (at least, potentially) an affinity with your cause. And some of them may be wealthy.

To find them you can do two things:

1. Approach your trustees, etc. and simply ask them for the names of their wealthy contacts. Easy peasy, right?

Well...not so easy.

First, you've got to get the buggers to own up to their wealthy contacts, something which they may be loathe to do, and irritatingly so.

To get around this, you have to persevere (or ask your head or Chief Exec to persevere) in getting them to own up to who they know. Some contacts are very difficult to uncover - friendships made through a private club or dinner party - and so getting hold of such information, and straight from the horses mouth, can be invaluable.

One course of action which I have used previously to find out who trustees know, and quite successfully, is to provide your trustees with a list of prospects you have obtained from elsewhere (e.g. from your database, the Sunday Times Rich List, CEOs of FTSE 100 companies, etc.) and then ask them whether or not they know any of them, and how well.

So, you can construct a spreadsheet with 4 columns: the prospect's name, a brief description of who they are (if it is not obvious), a column entitled I know this person well, followed by I am acquainted with this person. All the trustee then needs to do is to tick the relevant box, or leave them both blank, and hey presto! You're away.

Oh, and by the way, if you do use the ST Rich List, or FTSE 100 CEOs, etc. do not be suprised if you get a lot of blank boxes. Unless you have one hell of a board of trustees, they are unlikely to know that many people on the list.

2. Compose profiles of each of your trustees, your Chief Exec, etc. and do a bit of good old fashioned research to find out who they know with any money or influence.