Focus On: Database Analysis: A Closer Look at Models

Not surprisingly, the backbone of most renewal models includes some variation of recency, frequency and gift amount. However, leveraging a donor’s complete relationship with an organization provides a broader, more stable foundation on which to make objective marketing decisions. In addition to recency, frequency and gift amount, a predictive model is able to consider hundreds of other potential drivers of response and gift size, such as consistency of giving, lifetime value, upgrade/downgrade, preferred month of giving, breadth of support, involvement, tenure, direct mail responsiveness and demographics to create a more meaningful and actionable profile of each donor. Nonprofit organizations have been capturing data about their donors for years, but the real value of that data is not realized until it has been transformed into actionable information.