Counter to what you’ve probably been thinking, I do have more to do than simply wax philosophic about what it means to be a provider of fundraising intelligence. I do sometimes go on a bit when I get passionate about a topic, and I realize that my last few blog posts have been heavy on the forty thousand feet and light on, well, the feet.
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of other places around the globe, there are more than 5,000 of us.
People who, at one time or other in our professional lives have faced bias and, at times, even open revulsion from the public or the very people we serve. Most of the time we face well-intentioned misunderstanding without even knowing it.
Imagine with me that it’s Saturday afternoon. You are flat out busy today, and tonight you have exactly two hours to prep and cook dinner for guests. One of the guests is a good friend, but the other two you don’t really know all that well. They are friends-of-friends in town for the weekend.
Is this the night that you’re going to pull out the 25-ingredient recipe for a gourmet French dinner? Julia’s cassoulet, perhaps?
This week I’m in England talking with our colleagues at The Factary in Bristol. Their offices are open-plan and I’m impressed at how collaborative they are, with each other and with their clients. I met with nearly everyone on the team to learn more about the kinds of projects they’re working on, what they each do to meet their clients’ needs and how they work together as a team. It’s really interesting to see the ways we’re the same and the ways we do things differently.
Back before I started my career in prospect research in 1987 at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was the assistant to the director of finance for the development office at the university. My responsibility was to help my boss Jean track all of the money the university received; she had to make sure it went into the right bucket and was distributed correctly.
1. Take care of your gold. Chances are that your nonprofit received a larger-than-normal number of gifts last month, and many of them came from new donors. The money that came in will help you do your important work, but the gold I’m talking about is the information that came with each gift. You’ve just started a relationship with someone new that you hope will last a lifetime, right? Here are a few things that your organization should pay attention to:
Do you keep an archive of the best things you’ve found lately? How do you keep track of them? I was thinking about that this morning as I drank a little more of my tea and added another two articles to what I call my journal. How do other folks do this? I wondered. What do they keep? How do they keep it?
Here’s what I do: once every few days or so I’ll gather the best of the articles (or websites or apps or white papers or whatever) that I’ve found and put them into a running archive in Excel. This “journal” is a complete train wreck of every type of thing…all good things that I don’t want to lose track of. Some of it is new in the world, some of it is just new to me. I have tags for easy searching and indexing, and I add a short description so that I’ll remember what I liked about the resource.
Since I’d love to see what you gather, I thought I’d get the ball rolling by showing you what I’ve found in the past year. Here are some of my favorites – from the useful, the interesting, or the just plain fun. Thanks for reading, and for sharing!
Blogs
New to me this year is John Battelle’s searchblog (http://battellemedia.com/). I’m trying to dig out from under the rock I’ve clearly been living under to get caught up with his archived posts. Research, business intelligence and techno-geeks will love Battelle’s finger-on-the-pulse view of search engines, technology, Big Data, and the host of other things he riffs on. John’s also on Twitter at @johnbattelle.
Resources/Websites
Idealware is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that provides “thoroughly researched, impartial and accessible resources about software to help nonprofits make smart software decisions.” They have free webinars and articles on a variety of topics and tons of articles including “The Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide” and “A Consumers Guide To Grants Management Systems.” Check them out at http://idealware.org. Especially handy for the small nonprofit head who doesn’t have time to research the best tools but needs good, impartial advice.
Mention – an alternative to Google alerts, Mention has both a free and fee-based service that checks news, social media and the web for your key search words. Highly recommended – we use it ourselves at HBG. https://en.mention.net/
The HBG Prospect Research Links page is new this year. My team put together our favorite prospect research resources for us to use as a group. When we realized others would probably like to use it too, we made it public. So here it is – another free resource from HBG: http://www.startme.com/page/50281/hbg-prospect-research-links
StartMe is my new home page on the web. I researched replacements for the keenly lamented iGoogle (which Google axed this year), and thought I’d never find something I liked as well. Boy, was I wrong – I like StartMe even more. Here’s why: Flexibility and customize-ability. I created a main page with links of all of the sites I go to most frequently. Then I made several tabs with pages for each of my interest areas (like fundraiser’s/researcher’s blogs, general resources, news feeds, alerts, food writers’ blogs that I follow, etc.) that I can add to at any time. You can set up RSS feeds, get news headlines, create a page of links (like we did for the HBG research links page)…the list really goes on and on. Pages can be public or private which is another really nice feature. And it’s free!
Books
I’d be crazy if I didn’t mention the book that I wrote with Jennifer Filla called Prospect Research for Fundraisers; the essential handbook that came out last year. Published by John Wiley & Sons as part of the Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP) Donor Series, our book covers everything frontline fundraisers and chief development officers need to know about research, relationship management and analytics (without getting too far into the nitty gritty). Click here to take a look at it and to read our five-star reviews. Critics say “A gem in its clarity” and “Filla and Brown’s [book] will transform the way you think about prospect research.”
New this fall and definitely worth reading: The Chief Development Officer; beyond fundraising, by Ronald J. Schiller. For fundraisers thinking about the corner office or for those who have already attained it, this book contains case studies, interviews and advice from scores of trustees, presidents and CDOs. Click here to take a look or to buy this easy-to-read volume. A talented CDO I know read it on a flight from Miami to Heathrow and sent out a note on landing to his coffee klatch of colleagues recommending they hurry out and buy it!
Just for Fun
Fundraiser Grrl – she’s just a hoot. I visit this blog when I need a quick hit of fundraising humor. Latest gif: “Trying to get my boss’s attention when we need to leave for a donor meeting” featuring a gif of …well, you’ve just got to see it.
And speaking of funny, check out Nonprofit Humour. It’s a website with articles and timely “news” designed to give nonprofiteers a chuckle. For example, the latest article is “Santa Claus gets poor rating from Charity Watchdog.” Ha!
Newsletters
Netted by the Webbys: I’ll confess, Netted isn’t actually new to me this year, but I like it so much I wanted to mention it anyway. Their daily email zap comes with just one short description of an app, website, product or tool that I will often either use myself or forward along to someone I know who will use it. Subscribing to Netted makes me feel like I have access to a connected group of hipsters at the cutting edge of tech sending me the hottest tools I need to know about.
And you already know about ResearchBuzz, right? If not, get over there this minute! I’ve been following Tara Calishain’s newsletter / blog-style online goldmine that tracks search engines, databases and online information collections since the mid-1990s, and even though it’s not new to me it should be on my best-of list every year. Get it on RSS feed so you don’t miss anything.
White Papers
Right on the Money: How to keep the doors of your nonprofit organization open in good times and bad, published by the Alabama Association of Nonprofits. It’s a well-written, powerful resource on sustainability with lots of good advice from industry experts. [spoiler alert – I was one of the interviewees.]
The Evolving Value of Information Management and the five essential attributes of the modern information professional. This is a must-read for researchers. (Which is not to say that others wouldn’t find it useful as well, but really, this white paper was written by researchers for researchers, and if you are one, you really should make the time). A collaboration of the Financial Times and the Special Libraries Association. Get it at http://ftcorporate.ft.com/files/2013/10/FT-SLA-Report.pdf
The “Predicting The Future” white paper series from the IBM developerWorks lab fascinated me this year. If you’re interested in predictive analytics, this series is for you. Find it at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/ba-predictive-analytics1/index.html. Geek out.
So that’s it – some of my favorite new resources discovered in the last year. What have you found? If you find something useful, chances are that others will too. Thanks, and here’s to more great discoveries in 2014!
Several people have asked me lately about the demise of Google Alerts so here’s a little background for you as well as links to selected resources for more information and better results.
In case you’ve never used Google Alerts, here’s what they are: Google has a page where you can set an alert on a search string to automatically run the search and have results sent to you on a schedule of your choosing. Until recently, this notification could come by email OR via a very handy direct pipeline called an RSS feed to a free Google Reader account.
THE BEGINNING OF THE PROBLEM
Unfortunately, and to a great deal of hue and cry, this past July Google pulled the plug on Google Reader and on the ability for users to receive Google Alerts via an RSS feed. Alerts could only be received via email.
Coupled with all of this was evidence that Google Alerts were not working as well as they had been in the past. Noted search engine expert Danny Sullivan reported that his alerts were significantly reduced and he wondered (as many others did) if this signaled the demise of Google Alerts as well.
However, in September of this year it was reported by a few who noticed that Google Alerts were again available via RSS feed – not that Google made a splashy big deal of it. Quite the contrary.
SO WHAT’S THE DEAL?
We really don’t know if Google Alerts are going away, or if they are going to remain but be unsupported, or if they will eventually be phased out like Reader. It certainly appears to experts that alerts are not being supported by Google now as they were in the past. Notifications are now available again as RSS feeds, but that is small consolation if the information you receive is sparse compared to the amount of information that is truly available within the search engine’s database.
ARE THERE ALTERNATIVES?
We certainly haven’t stopped using Google Alerts here at HBG, but we are using alternatives, both free and fee-based. Two of them are Lexis Nexis and Mention, but there are many for you to choose from. My feeling is: even if Google Alerts give good results, there’s no harm in being sure you’re getting the full scope of what’s available within your budget.
Are you using Google Alerts or an alternative (or both?). Do you have recommendations?
Reading list: (articles in order of appearance in post)
Warren, Christina – Mashable: Are Google Alerts Dying? 22 March 2013
Sullivan, Danny – Search Engine Land: Dear Google Alerts: Why Aren’t You Working? 15 February 2013
Protalinski, Emil – The Next Web: Google Alerts regains RSS delivery option it lost after Google Reader’s demise. 11 September 2013
Dembak, Yoav – VB Social: 7 Apps to Help You Replace Google Alerts. 13 May 2013
What are the best representations of information that you’ve ever seen? For most people, they’re the ones that are the simplest to understand. The ones that display information clearly and move people to action. Or inaction:
Even in a different language, if we understand the context, the message is still clear.
That’s what good data visualization does. It takes information and lays it out in the simplest of terms to get across what needs to be communicated.
KISS
There’s no getting around the fact that data analytics is intimidating for most of us, and that it produces a lot of really interesting factoids that can move people to action. But when you’re trying to get across complex information, there are still ways to keep messaging simple. In fact, the more complex the information, the more imperative it is to KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Or, in the words of Joey Cherdarchuk, director of operations at DarkHorse Analytics, Data Looks Better Naked.
THE MASTER AT WORK
If you haven’t seen Hans Rosling’s fascinating TED Talks using his free software GapMinder or watched his fascinating holographic data visualization on YouTube, you really should take the time to be impressed. And inspired.
Even if you’re not a data analytics person, watching Dr. Rosling will help you think about presenting information better, whether you’re a frontline fundraiser, researcher, social media guru, consultant or …just about anyone. Okay, go watch those two videos and then come back and we’ll talk more about available resources for visualizing data.
RESOURCES
Now that you’re inspired to do something different, let’s talk about what’s available for manipulating and showing off the great conclusions (or continuing questions) that your data is begging you to share.
Enter the graph, the moving chart, the GIF, the mini movie, the podcast, and the interactive illustration, to name a few, all made possible by recent entries into the market from companies including (in alpha order) Advizor Solutions, a flexible visualization tool that is especially good for looking at annual giving results and gift officer portfolio performance; Factary, whose product Atom allows you to visualize relationships between people, organizations and entities; Rapid Insight, a modeling and illustration package; and Tableau Software, an interactive visualization tool that allows for on-the-fly graphic shifting and drill-down-into-the-data capability.
What’s free?
NodeXL, which adheres to Excel like an elbow-length glove to allow you to manipulate and visualize relationships and social media interactions. Hans Rosling’s Big Data manipulator, GapMinder, which he uses in the aforementioned videos, is also completely free to download. And there are lots of others.
Where are some examples of visualizations?
Here is a terrific collection of resources from Andy Kirk, a UK-based freelance data visualization design consultant. And Mike Bostock of The New York Times has pulled together a great compilation of compelling visualization tools.
Finally, we’d like to leave you with a quote by David Schmitt, head of Performance Strategy and Planning Analytics in the finance division at the Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG). Schmitt’s team is responsible for communicating information about IHG’s financial performance in a way that is entertaining, compelling and clear. You wouldn’t think that corporate financials would lend themselves to music videos, but that’s one of the tools Schmitt’s group has used to visualized data. For him, “data isn’t the point; numbers aren’t the point—it’s about the idea.”
It looks like our Excel pie chart days are probably over, thank goodness. We’d love to hear about any tools, resources or sites that you’ve found to help you visualize data, too! Please share them here in Comments, so that all of us can check them out.
Chances are good if you are in the fundraising field that you have heard the term “fundraising analytics.” You’ve probably also heard the terms “data mining,” “donor modeling,” “reporting” and “prospect identification,” too. Do these terms mean the same thing? What are the differences among them?
I asked Marianne Pelletier, who leads the HBG Analytics team, to help me put together a series of short articles designed to make sense of these terms. In each, she will describe the method and give examples of how they can be used. To continue our series, we describe the questions that Donor Modeling can answer.
Let’s begin with a case study:
A museum is in the planning stage to launch a major fundraising campaign. Their last campaign was over 5 years ago, and while they had a number of significant gifts, the coming campaign will require many more major gifts in order to be successful. After developing a table of gifts for the campaign, it quickly becomes apparent that there are huge gaps that need to be filled with prospects at every level. Significant prospect identification needs to happen.
To score the museum’s database and identify the top prospects, the museum decides to use a technique called predictive modeling, also referred to commonly as donor modeling.
What is donor modeling?
Donor modeling uses statistics tools to score a group of records using a variety of methods, including regression analysis, clustering, decision trees, neural networks and support vector machines (SVMs) amongst lots of others. Let’s take a look at just one of them, regression analysis.
Regression analysis uses calculus to find the slope of a line, which helps us visualize trends in the data. For example, we could see (based on a number of factors) which groups of people in the museum’s database have the most capacity to give as well as affinity, or connection to, the museum.
Here’s a standard matrix that is often built for major gifts programs. After downloading records and using regression analysis to score the group studied, prospects would be shown along the slope of the red line based on their relative affinity with the museum and their capacity to make a major gift.
Affinity, or “how much they love the museum” might be measured by the number of times someone attended events, or donated in consecutive years, or bought tickets to special exhibits, amongst other things. Capacity, or “how much they can give” might be found through primary or secondary research, such as a visit, prospect research or an electronic screening.
A graphic describing the relative level of a group of prospects’ affinity using a number of hearts (ranked on a scale of 1 to 3) and the relative level of their gift capacity (ranked 1 to 3) by dollar signs might look something like this:
In this example, the top-right box represents those with greatest capacity and affinity for the organization, and the bottom-left box shows those with the least.
If you were the chief development officer at the museum, whom would you want to approach first? Your answer is likely to be those in the top right group. Unfortunately most of the time that group is also the smallest population among the scored groups, and are usually the donors you know fairly well.
Whom to select next, then? Often, two of the largest groups, represented by the larger boxes, are the $$$ ♥♥ and the $$♥♥♥ groups. And of those, it might be hard to decide which to choose.
So, your next donor modeling study might be to look at the museum’s past track record with each of these two groups. What is your level of success in cultivating each group? What motivates them to become major gift donors?
Donor modeling helps answer those questions. The characteristics of top level donors are compared to various segments of the pool, and their scores help bubble up the best future prospects.
What else can you use donor modeling for?
Although it’s most often used to identify major gifts prospects, donor modeling can also rank groups like these:
Donor modeling can even help determine the best ways to acquire new members for a member recruitment campaign. It’s a powerful tool to help your organization identify new donors, whether you’re in a campaign, thinking about a campaign, or just looking for new donor prospects.
What do you need to know?
Our series on the ABCs of fundraising analytics continues next Thursday, September 19 with a look at data visualization.
Do you have questions about donor modeling or would you like to see it at work at your organization? Contact us at info [at] helenbrowngroup [dot] com for more information.
