'Big Data' Is Actually About the Small Data

The term “Big Data” gets tossed around an awful lot these days, no matter if you’re talking the business sector or nonprofit fundraising sector. But “big data is really about the small data,” David Acup, managing director of interactive marketing and membership at the Environmental Defense Fund.

Acup was a panelist at a FundRaising Success Wake Up Your Fundraising Breakfast Panel held in Washington, D.C., last month. His fellow panelists included:

• Kristin McCurry, principal at MINDset Direct;
• Richard Reider, gift-planning program manager at the American Red Cross; and
• Zhabiz Chu, director of development operations and donor services at the AARP Foundation.

I got to host the discussion on “Maximizing Your Return on Big Data,” with about 60 nonprofit professionals in attendance taking part, as well.

All four panelists described how their organizations — or the organizations they work with — manage data and utilize it for fundraising. It was a lively discussion that ran the gamut on data. Here are some helpful tips for fundraisers from any type of nonprofit organization, with any size budget, that the panelists provided:

David Acup

• Use case scenarios to drive your strategy. What do you want the data to do, and how do you do that?
• Read “Big Data Marketing” by Lisa Arthur.
• Have regular meetings between departments and especially development to go over data.
• The only way to understand what data affects fundraising is to test, test, test.
• Focus on lifetime-value data to get a better picture of long-term fundraising effects.
• Survey your donors.

Zhabiz Chu

• You don’t necessarily need one database system to be effective. Just make sure to use overlays and provide access to any data anyone in the organization may need.
• Create a glossary of terms around data so everyone understands what the data actually means. “It’s so easy to lose trust if data is wrong or misinterpreted,” Chu said. “You have to translate the data so fundraisers understand, because fundraisers don’t have the time to spend to translate it.”
• Survey your donors.

Kristin McCurry

• “Accessing data and understanding data are two different things,” McCurry said. “Make it an operational mandate to provide a ‘decoder ring’ so fundraisers understand data.”
• Get everyone in the organization to understand that data is the answer, and have them become advocates of utilizing data.
• Survey your donors.

Richard Reider

• Focus on data hygiene — make sure your data is clean.
• Capturing more data is always better because knowing those small nuances can make a difference with donors.
• Survey your donors.