Affluence Insight Discussion

Published

So Affluence Insight will be celebrating it's 18 month public launch in August. I don't know about the rest of you but I have found this data exciting to work with and the almost endless possibilities of using the data and creating dynamic queries. I would like to focus the discussion on two primary areas for now.
1. How has this data been useful for you? And to follow-up with that is how have you used it? Meaning have you used it for major gift work only or are you using it for all areas of prospect development?

2. Have you been importing the Affluence data into your CRM? If so are you only importing in Wealth Segmentation scores (A1, A2, A3 etc...) or are you importing in all the scores? I recently encountered a couple of clients who were concerned about the Wealth Attribute fields - Income, Net Worth, Invested Assets and Discretionary Income. We know these are estimated dollar amounts but some individuals were worried that other members of the development team will go rogue with the data.

I know personally I would love to hear your thoughts on these items but I know other users would find it helpful. Let's create a great dialogue based on the above and of course if there are other items around this please feel to free add those questions into the mix. From this we can create some best practices.

News ARCHIVED | Blackbaud Target Analytics® Tips and Tricks 07/19/2018 9:45am EDT

Added by Michael Quevli

2 Comments

Barbara Hutson Jul '18

We received our first results in June. We were told it would take 90 min - 2 hours to import. That was not correct. We had over 500,000 separate data points returned on about 97,000 records. We are hosted, so the file was too big, and needed to be split into five files, and each file took several days to import with a dedicated computer running 24 hours on this import alone. We would start the import, it would run for 2-6 hours, it would time out, and then we had to do a query of the data to see how far the import went, and start the import over with the rest of the data. It took our Director of Advancement Services several weeks to import all of the data.
That said, it is very interesting and valuable information. We queried the data, and found that our mid-level to major donors in the past few years have all been solid B's. A few A-3s, but mostly Bs. This will help us model the non-givers in our database, and segment those for our annual giving, and review and screen to find major giving donors.
The data seems to be better than a wealthy zip code ranking, which I am used to running, with similar estimates of wealth and investments. Individually it is not completely accurate, but as a whole across a group it gives insights and points us in the right direction. We found that the wealth and income estimates vary by where you live, and not by what your position you hold,

Joshua Bekerman bCLO bCRE Jul '18

1. We just received our first results file yesterday so we haven't done anything with it yet.
2. We were originally planning to import all of the scores into Raiser's Edge Ratings until we started to review the results file and realized it included scores for some of our employees, including Income. (Going forward we will not include employees in our submission file.) We are very concerned about this since some of the "estimated" Income scores we reviewed were spot on, including my own. We do not want this information accessible to everyone that uses RE so we looked into security options. Security for Ratings is all or nothing, so that's not an option since we have other modeling scores and ratings in there that RE users need to see. We are considering importing the Income scores (and maybe others) into the Financial Information section of the Proposal tab. We can set the security so only our prospect research team can see it and other RE users do not need access to that or any other information in that section. Also it seems to make more sense to put Income, New Worth, Discretionary Spending and Investments in the Financial Info section since, well, this is financial information and not really "ratings." So the only rating we would import into Ratings is the Wealth Segmentation.

Has anyone else imported it this way? Pros and cons?
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I don't want to go off track on 1 and 2 so just a note for future discussion and hopefully Michael's next blog post :)
3. Who do you include in your file submissions after your initial file? Do you resubmit everyone plus new constituents/donors, or just new constituents/donors? If you resubmit everyone, do you keep the old ratings and import all of the new ratings, even if they have not changed?