Achieving Success With Your Target Analytics Project
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Recently I was working with a Fundraising Essentials client who is on a multi-year subscription of this service. Fundraising Essentials is Target Analytics' basic statistical modeling service to help identify annual and major gift prospects, what the specific potential next ask amount is for each prospect, and their overall identified public assets dollar range is.
It was such a pleasure presenting their results, as I could see double-digit increases percentage-wise across all areas of their fundraising (donor participation, revenue, and average gift sizes), in particular in the past two years. So at the right point during our consulting session, I asked them for their perspective on the reasons why they have had such success not only overall, but within each scoring population for both annual and major gifts. In the back of my mind, I wanted to hear that they applied their Fundraising Essentials project scores over the past few years, as I knew they were not in a campaign and thus this can tend to skew results with this type of initiative. They simply said two things:
When people ask me (clients or just friends and family) if predictive analytics work, my answer is always the same – “Yes it does, with the caveat that our clients have to do something with these analytics.” If you do not do anything with your analytics, then they simply take up space in your database and add something of interest to your reports and queries. The bottom line: You can see success with your analytics, but it takes both the time and initiative to devise strategies with your results as well as act upon your agreed-to plan. Having this top of mind when going forward with your analytics project will make the difference. Spend time documenting your team’s agreed upon next steps and devise a timeline for accomplishing these steps. Be sure to share this plan with the entire team and revisit it during specific meetings to ensure you are employing it.
The beauty of this nonprofit is that the analytics showed tremendous potential. They also applied what they could initially with very limited staff and did so in earnest. As a result they were able to hire more staff and continue to grow their fundraising exponentially.
If you are a smaller nonprofit, or simply haven’t done an analytics project like this in the past and would like to grow your organization's fundraising programs and initiatives, contact Target Analytics to discuss your development goals and see if Fundraising Essentials or some other service will help address your needs.
It was such a pleasure presenting their results, as I could see double-digit increases percentage-wise across all areas of their fundraising (donor participation, revenue, and average gift sizes), in particular in the past two years. So at the right point during our consulting session, I asked them for their perspective on the reasons why they have had such success not only overall, but within each scoring population for both annual and major gifts. In the back of my mind, I wanted to hear that they applied their Fundraising Essentials project scores over the past few years, as I knew they were not in a campaign and thus this can tend to skew results with this type of initiative. They simply said two things:
- They took specific next steps in utilizing their Fundraising Essentials results actively across all programming in the past few years, and…
- Because their fundraising dollars grew, they were able to hire more staff to continue utilizing the data more robustly than ever before
When people ask me (clients or just friends and family) if predictive analytics work, my answer is always the same – “Yes it does, with the caveat that our clients have to do something with these analytics.” If you do not do anything with your analytics, then they simply take up space in your database and add something of interest to your reports and queries. The bottom line: You can see success with your analytics, but it takes both the time and initiative to devise strategies with your results as well as act upon your agreed-to plan. Having this top of mind when going forward with your analytics project will make the difference. Spend time documenting your team’s agreed upon next steps and devise a timeline for accomplishing these steps. Be sure to share this plan with the entire team and revisit it during specific meetings to ensure you are employing it.
The beauty of this nonprofit is that the analytics showed tremendous potential. They also applied what they could initially with very limited staff and did so in earnest. As a result they were able to hire more staff and continue to grow their fundraising exponentially.
If you are a smaller nonprofit, or simply haven’t done an analytics project like this in the past and would like to grow your organization's fundraising programs and initiatives, contact Target Analytics to discuss your development goals and see if Fundraising Essentials or some other service will help address your needs.
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05/31/2017 1:41pm EDT
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