How Can You Get More From Your Data?

Big Data.  Artificial Intelligence.  Analytics.  Outcomes.  Several years ago, these words wouldn’t have crossed my mind or entered my vocabulary, and certainly not together, but times have changed.  Today, we live in a world surrounded by data and analytics.  I log onto Facebook and I see an advertisement for the exact same pair of shoes I bought this morning.  I do a quick Google search for an address or phone number and notice ads for products aimed toward my age group, my demographic, my station in life.  But how?  How do they know who I am?  What I am interested in?  Data.  Artificial Intelligence.  Analytics.  Outcomes. 
 
Nonprofits today have an enormous opportunity to leverage data and analytics for segmentation, to do prospect research, to uncover hidden major gifts, to drive outcomes but how?  Where should you start?  How can you keep your data clean?  What metrics are most important? How can you ensure you're achieving your desired outcomes?
 
Late last month, Steve MacLaughlin, VP of Data & Analytics at Blackbaud and best-selling author of Data Driven Nonprofits, led an engaging webinar answering these very questions and more.  Did you know the average nonprofit database includes outdated addresses for about 7% of its donors?  Or that there is $21,899,609 in potential wasted costs due to poor address quality across nonprofits?  The data tells an even uglier story when it comes to phone data, email data or even basic demographic data.  But this doesn’t have to be the case, and many of you likely have tools built into your Raiser's Edge NXT package that will help you begin to solve these very problems.  According to Steve, nonprofits should focus on address quality, email validation, lost constituents and deceased donor suppression as a means to begin their data driven outcome journey.  From there, the world is really your oyster - data appends, artificial intelligence, segmentation, oh my!
 
Whether you're a seasoned pro on this topic or just beginning to think about the use of data to drive outcomes at your nonprofit, this webinar is a great place to start.  Steve leads us through 30 minutes of presentation, followed by an engaging Q&A session (including Steve's thoughts on which metrics are most important for nonprofits to track and measure).  Find the recording and slide deck here.  And if the webinar piques your interest, there are more resources where that came from!  Find more information on Steve's book Data Driven Nonprofits and check out the Analytics Toolkit in the Blackbaud Institute.  Happy data mining!