Making The Most Of Your Data

I talk a lot in this forum about recent conversations with clients, and I’ll share another with you today. It’s about one of my favorite topics—making the most of your data.

Here’s some background…

Annual giving has carried fundraising efforts for one of my clients very successfully, and it will continue to be a dynamic component of their overall program.  But it needs to be just that—a component—and not their whole strategy.

Major giving has been hard for them to get off the ground.  Sure, significant needs would come up and a few donors would step in and help fund the resolution, but that was as far as they seemed to get.  Everyone knew it was time for a change, and they came to us for insight. We did some custom modeling for them, and I was assigned to help them develop a plan for using their data well.

This situation was so familiar.

I was a boots-on-the-ground development officer for more than a decade before coming to Target Analytics, and I also looked to TA for help on more than one occasion—once for the same challenge my clients were overcoming.  I have not-so-distant memories of looking for ways to meet all kinds goals simultaneously and wondering how it would all get done.

As a client I had a “lightbulb moment” when working with my organization’s data.  I was using our analytics to identify donors for gifts and enjoying success—which was great.  But that wasn’t its full potential!  I hadn’t considered how it could help with other challenges.  Suddenly, the data was so much more than a tool for solicitations.

Some examples from my experience…

• It gave us some insight into the potential in our database to consider alongside our staff bandwidth.  Were we spending our valuable time in the right places?
• We built a strategic cultivation and stewardship plan that spoke to our potential rather than where we’d been—a big missing link to give our donors a better experience. 
• There was a data-driven reason to tweak how resources had (always) been allocated.  We knew some strategies had grown stale, and our collective gut told us we were missing opportunity in other places.  The data helped is make decisions about what changes to make.

My colleagues and I set realistic expectations, picked a few steps to start a more formalized plan, and called it a starting place.  I am a believer that a good plan creates time rather than consumes it, and life got easier once the team had a clearer path (or two…or three) toward success. 

The clients who got me thinking about this experience are excited about similar ideas, and I share all this to encourage you to think broadly about the ways your data can help you—or if you want to explore ways Target Analytics can add to the process.

How have you used data creatively?  Add your own stories and ideas in the comments section for the good of the group.