Know Where You Are Going When I was a kid, my dad loved to get us all in the car on a beautiful summer day and go for a drive. This was back in the days before cell phones, so there was no GPS to… Read More »Mapping Out Your Fiscal Year Begins with Preparing Your Portfolios
Will you be celebrating your fundraising success with fireworks? In this Water Cooler Chat, Greg Duke will share methods for developing reports that pinpoint where your fundraising successes and opportunities lie to better prepare you for your next campaign.
Year-end fundraising is always a frenzy. In this Water Cooler Chat, our special guest Maya Gasuk, Managing Partner at West Wind Consulting, shares some best practices for making sure that your year-end annual giving program.
By Dr. Greg Duke During our Water Cooler Chat, I presented some powerful Excel techniques— Watch the replay video for tips on: Ranking prospects using =RANK.EQ(), Adding up gifts to a specific campaign or fund using =SUMIFs and related “ifs” functions, Bringing in fresh data from… Read More »More Excel Tricks for Fundraisers
In our February Water Cooler Chat, we were asked if it were possible to do a word cloud from contact reports using Excel because it’s a tool that is familiar and used often.Although it is possible, the process is clunky. Since Excel wasn’t built to… Read More »How to Create Word Clouds from Your Contact Reports Using Excel
In the world of nonprofit data management, we work really hard to smart code all of our interactions with our audience so that we can successfully report on them. However, we work in a relationship industry and that often requires detailed explanation, which, translated to… Read More »Text Mining Is No Longer Intimidating
Every moment of down time in fundraising is a gift. We often try to make up for low budgets by spending more time. However, at some point, we have to reduce the time that we spend on tasks in order to meet the increasing demands… Read More »7 Tips to Make the Rest of Your Fundraising Year Easier
It’s October so your annual campaign is already in gear. However, after the rush of printing and stuffing, or segmenting and emailing, you may have a short time to review your strategy. Here are some thoughts that I have after having run a successful annual… Read More »Thoughts on Annual Campaign Kickoffs
I have, in earlier years, shown my raw statistical results with my clients, hoping to share the joy of getting a beautiful statistics result. Their reaction was to look up from my PowerPoint and blink at me. My own cardiologist once showed me a series… Read More »Translating Results to English: How to Share Your Graphs and Charts
In our recent Water Cooler Chat, Greg Duke, Partner for Database Services, shared the Monte Carlo technique – a way of understanding what the likely range of results would be for a given scenario. In our blog post today, we expand on the concept of… Read More »Three Uses of Monte Carlo Analysis in Fundraising