Lapsed or Dormant? Leveraging Statistical Analysis in Fundraising

But while the paper offers accurate forecasts and useful insights about how to understand the underlying “drivers” of donation propensities, it stops short of offering any specific advice about which donors to target and when/how to do so. This is where a new paper by David A. Schweidel and George Knox, "Incorporating Strategic Direct Marketing Activity into 'Buy 'Til You Die' Models," comes in. Building on the same basic modeling platform used by Fader et al, this paper goes further to explore the impact of fundraising efforts on short-term and long-term donation activity. It explicitly captures the “dual causality” that often exists between donations and solicitation efforts — in other words, solicitation efforts clearly drive donation behavior, but past donations also impact solicitation strategies.