Age Finder (Blackbaud's or Third Party)

Bobby Steurer

Does anyone have experience with Age Finder in data enrichment services? Any intel on accuracy, amount of birthdates returned, etc?

If you're using an alternative from a third party, who are you using? How's it going?

Of our non-deceased records, we have around 7% (roughly 20K people) with an age filled in. I'm not sure if that's a good metric, but we're hopeful to perhaps capture more for potential long-term giving.

Appreciate any/all thoughts.

Faith Murray

We've used Agefinder services before. Main advice would be, use it as a guide, not a religion. In our services with reputable third parties, we compared the returned ages with the birthdates of alumni we already had on file, to get an estimate of its accuracy. We found that

• The donor's birthyear was usually correct (except in cases of confused identities such as Jr. & Sr.)
• The donor's birth month was only correct about half the time
• The donor's birth day was rarely correct

In other words, agefinder can be a great service to use for internal functions like prospecting a planned giving program or segmenting based on generational giving trends. But I would never, ever use it for outward-facing functions like sending birthday cards to donors.

Also a wise idea to track which birthdates are factual (donor-provided) and which are speculative (data appended). We only import the year into the donor's “birthdate” field, and added a “Data Append” attribute denoting date and type of info appended, so there would be no confusion over data source.

Last time we ran an append, we had a pretty good turnout, about 80-90% return on our valid address file. If you have a choice, opting for a birthdate append, rather than just an age number, improves accuracy and is usually the same price/workload. If you run an “age” append in June, half your donors may turn a year older by December.

Barbara Kunkel

Hi @Bobby Steurer, I agree with @Faith Murray results. We used Age Finder with Blackbaud at my previous employment. Because of the accuracy, we tracked Age Finder results in Attributes rather than the birthdate field. We used the birth year for our planned giving program for IRA and CGA educational materials.

Tatyana Leifman

We did the same as @Barbara Kunkel. We left the results as an attribute and use it for outreach on planned giving, IRA giving etc. We've found that at least 30% of our results were wrong. Our donor base does not have many Jr. and Sr. and yet we had some donors who began giving in the 80s as being born in the 80s. Besides planned giving outreach, I find the results also helpful in confirming that an obituary is for our donor or not.

Bobby Steurer

@Tatyana Leifman @Barbara Kunkel @Faith Murray

Thanks, all, for your great detailed responses. Very helpful.