Data Mining

Nick Ellinger has been busy. As vice president of strategic development for Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), Ellinger was tasked with unifying MADD's network of databases—including 20 in its home office and hundreds more in the field, with record systems running the gamut from custom databases to Access to Excel to pen-on-paper. It was a monumental task, one that's still underway, but with Ellinger's guidance, MADD has begun the critical task of achieving a true omnichannel marketing strategy.

According to Lisa Scott, data can be as dangerous as it is a success factor if you are not careful. She is absolutely spot-on and reminds us that transparency isn't just for commercial companies anymore. You all know from my other blogs how important I believe data is to our success in the nonprofit industry. But, it is not enough to just say “data"—it’s about data strategies, business rules, organizational priorities and much more when you think through your data.

Join us to explore how to get your data organized, centralized and accessible to fundraisers and other personnel for effective use.

With all the modern channels to potential donors, learn the myriad of ways you can grow your list and engage new supporters.

Urologists noticed a bump in vasectomies at the start of March Madness, and they took action. Vas Madness was born. Urologists got a bit of data — wow, we do a lot of vasectomies during March Madness — and took advantage of the landscape represented by that data. Nonprofit income departments can do that too, if we don't get in our own way.

To get a handle on what’s in store for 2015, NonProfit PRO rounded up some of the nonprofit industry’s finest, who were kind enough to share their nonprofit trends for 2015. Here are four trends on data and reporting.

Data has long been at the heart of direct marketing. In the nonprofit world, data allowed us to rent lists of people who had shown a propensity toward giving to causes similar to ours. On the cultivation side, data permitted us to choose which donors to mail based upon previous history and tailor messages to their interests. This smart use of data let us provide donors what they wanted rather than cluttering up their mailboxes with irrelevant offers. And it allowed nonprofits to raise more dollars at a lower cost to more efficiently and effectively feed hungry children, cure life-threatening cancer and support our wounded veterans.

At a recent Wake Up Your Fundraising Breakfast Panel presented by FundRaising Success and sponsors Blackbaud and Listen Up Espanol, three fundraising professionals joined me in a discussion on maximizing your return on "big data" to enhance fundraising and relationships with donors.

This session helps you sort through data issues and offers ideas to avoid the typical traps, such as collecting it and then wasting it.

To support a successful, donor-focused, relationship-based fundraising strategy, organizations should collect and analyze information on donors, prospects, past campaigns, public perception, peer organizations and best practices to create a broad and robust data framework from which to work.