As usual, the commercial world is probably a few years ahead of the non-profit world. The myriad of consumer and psychographic data collected from the Internet, catalogs, and retail stores — Big Data —may or may not prove invaluable to nonprofits. Some of the pioneer donor co-ops are extracting effective models from this mound of raw data (see Jeff Mello’s FYI piece about co-ops and compiled lists), but the fact remains that in the nonprofit arena, there is no variable more predictive than the fact that an individual has recently given a philanthropic gift.

Back in September, Allison Porter wrote a blog titled “In Defense of Telemarketing” – sounding the alarm on the outrageous attacks on telemarketing specifically, and the fundraising industry in general.  This month’s Agitator is running a two-part blog on the same subject as it pertains to donor acquisition, calling out those in the media and watchdog groups (among others) for complaining about the “high cost of fundraising” when they clearly do not understand the concept of donor acquisition investment.

As VP of Analytics at Avalon, I always attend industry conferences with an eye out for new ways to use data more effectively. This year’s Direct Marketing Association Washington Nonprofit conference in Washington didn’t disappoint. A couple of data strategies particularly caught my interest:

• Target Analytics has a new product for targeting philanthropic web users with web ads. Something I’ll definitely look into, as we’re always looking for innovative ways to help our clients use data to cut donor prospecting costs, while maximizing the number of new donors acquired.

We’re all about crunching numbers and evaluating returns, especially when it comes to benchmarking how our clients’ program performance stacks up against similar organizations. We recently compiled Avalon clients’ fundraising results across various industries, like arts and culture, environmental and conservation, and advocacy – check it out for a sense of how your results compare. We’ve also included a quick reference guide to help you delve into your spreadsheets, recognize meaningful stats, and plan your next outreach to donors or prospects. And as always, Avalon is available to dive into the data beyond with you!

There are many ways to describe data – and its benefit to your fundraising programs.  The word beautiful, though, hardly comes to mind.  What a shame (really!)

There are few things more valuable to a nonprofit’s fundraising potential than the integrity of its data.  For if our data isn’t clean and complete, how can we distinguish with certainty between a donor who has given 12 times over a lifetime vs one who has given only twice?  Clearly the way we recognize those two donors should differ … the way we interact with those donors … the way we solicit those donors.

Yet, I’ve recently witnessed a disturbing trend that ultimately negates the value of understanding one’s data, and therefore one’s donor file … and it’s happening during the database conversion process.

Targeted marketing … modeling … predicted response ... techniques we all talk about that are frequently used to go beyond traditional segmentation strategies.  But what do they really mean?  How do they really work?  To follow is an article I wrote recently published in the April issue of AdVents – DMAW’s monthly member newsletter – that outlines how one Avalon client used predictive modeling to maximize their net returns.

If you have any questions, I’d love to share other successful predictive modeling case studies.