RFM Segmentation

Kelly Turner

Guidance on how to use the RFM Segmentation feature within tasks? I am trying to create a list of donors who gave over a certain amount in a calendar year. The description appears to be what I am looking for but can't determine how to use this task feature.

Erik Leaver

Hi Kelly,


There are a few was you could go about finding this information. The Donation RFM Segmentation task calculates the percentile in which a contact ranks with regard to when the last time they donated money (Recency), how frequently they donated it (Frequency), and how much they donated (Monetary Value). So I don't think this is what you are looking for.


Two alternatives would be to use a query and use the field type "Transaction Information" and "year-to-date" total amount to create the segment. This is likely your best approach. You could use the "Website Engagement Segmentation" task. There you can create a Weight for Donations and specify the timeframe (for example, a weight of 1 for each donation and set the timeframe to 365 days). You could then use this in a query that would also evaluate the giving amount threshold. This would be the approach to use if you needed the last 365 days (or whatever specific time range) instead of "previous year", "year-to-date" or "lifetime amount" which are the only options with the "Transaction Information" field.


Hope this helps!

Kelly Turner

Thanks! I used the query function. However, as for the RFM task, how are each calculated? I ran the task and received scores on records but having a hard time interpreting them. A donor who gave a vastly different amount than another has a 99 score for Monetary PCTL than the other donor who had a 100 score. One gave 1000 in past year and the other gave over 5000. Just trying to under the math behind the percentiles.

Erik Leaver

The RFM task calculates “percentile scores” for each of the 3 data points for donations – the last time they donated (recency), how frequently they donated (frequency), and how much they donated (monetary value). A percentile score assigns each individual a rating between 0 and 100 based on the percentage of other scores that are lower than the individual’s score.


So if there are 100 donors (for example), the donor with the highest amount has 100% of the remaining scores below theirs and gets a 100 assigned to their Monetary Value Percentile, the next highest donor has 99% of the remaining scores below theirs and gets a 99 assigned to their Monetary Value Percentile, and so on.


In your example, it is possible for a $5000 donor to be your top monetary value donor and score 100% and then have a $1000 donor be the second highest donor and be in the 99%.