"Modeling best practices

Faith Murray

Does anyone have any tips/proven processes for how to model their database?


I've been really interested in "Donor Journey" mapping, and we'd like to customize our direct mail recipients and major gift asks based on donor profiling of giving habits and interests, as well as use that info in future major gift/planned gift prospecting. My thoughts right now center around analyzing whether long-time donors habitually give one large gift or numerous small gifts each year, etc. and to what fund - but I know that's just the tip of the iceberg.


A few years ago, someone on the Community shared a fantastic RFM formula for calculating in-house, and I'd love to hear some feedback on this now. Alternatively, if you can recommend a good class (that focuses on fundraising applications rather than IT coding skills) that would be awesome.

Leah Heit

This is a great question, and I'd also love to know the answer. Do you happen to have a link to the post with the RFM formula?

Tom Klimchak

I've also been digging into some "donor journey" type experiments and looking at Data Analysis a little thoroughly than I have in the past. I just earned the "Google Data Analytics Career Certificate" last month and while a lot of it was general review, it also opened my mind to a lot of neat possibilities.


A few years ago I was heavily influenced by Kevin MacDonnell and Peter B Wylie's book "Score! Data-Drive Success for your Advancement Team." It basically steps through how you can use models like RFM or other scenarios to give your prospects ratings (or scores) that then help you focus in on the people you should (and maybe shouldn't) be soliciting. My explanation is a little simplistic, but it's a good book... Peter Wylie has actually written a number of very good books on overall subject of finding prospects... they're readable and approachable and not too techy. Kevin also runs (ran?) a blog at cooldata.org.


I took some of those concepts and used a tool call ScoreOmatic (from Omatic Software) in RE to create custom "scores" for our prospects now based on our own findings. It's a relatively inexpensive tool and works pretty well, though I wish more people would use it. I'm constantly afraid of it being discontinued by Omatic software ☹


We created a few different RFM models/scores.. then we created some scores for specific projects and even on for planned giving. We tend to base our scores on general knowledge about giving or what we "feel" would work best, though ScoreOmatic has some methods to measure your effectiveness... Good luck!