In our recent Water Cooler Chat, we talked about using IRS data to understand charitable giving among US residents. Of course, that afforded me an opportunity to make lots of graphs and charts to study this data more deeply. Here is a look at some… Read More »Graphing IRS Data: Contributions Among States
“Little by little after a while makes a big pile.” –Anonymous Over the course of a career, a professional learns a lot of new skills, new locations, new jobs, and new methods. Every time something new gets added to our learning agenda, we can either… Read More »Let’s Talk About Adding Skills and Resources in a Way that Works
In our recent Water Cooler Chat, we talked about using sentiment analysis for getting a glimpse into the minds of our constituencies. For instance, is there a way to understand our donor clusters? Do donors to the new computer lab like to give cryptocurrency, for… Read More »Using NodeXL for Donor Interest Segments
While working on my book on annual giving analytics, I read a lot from Marketing Sherpa [see an excellent article here:] This brilliant collection of intelligence on marketing introduced me to the concept of the Customer Journey, and led me to study the Donor Journey.… Read More »The Donor Journey
In the analytics arena, we love to discover and to share new tools. A recent article in DataScienceCentral was titled, “40 Techniques Used by Data Scientists.” (see: http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/40-techniques-used-by-data-scientists) That much hubbub must surely give us a tool or solution to any fundraising problem that we… Read More »In the End, a Data Scientist Still Has to Solve a Problem
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2015. When starting a data-mining project, we are often challenged by our management to “go do some data mining.” We can get stuck from there, unless the tool… Read More »Data Science AFTER Identifying the Real Need
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2015. When we get ready for a campaign, we often employ consulting firms to sit with our closest prospects and ask them how much thy think we can… Read More »Your Data Driven Feasibility Study
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2012. The world around us is talking about Big Data and how to use it – see this Wikipedia article for the description http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data. I keep talking to… Read More »Big Data? Little Data? Do I Have Data?
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2011. A lot of clients and conference attendees say this to me: “We don’t have a lot of data. How can we do donor modeling?” My answer is… Read More »What’s in a Giving Pattern?
This article was first published as “Marianne’s Mining Minute” in the APRA Upstate New York chapter’s newsletter, 2011. The answer to this question is yes: You can use reporting tools and software that you already have to do some very good basic prospecting. The terms… Read More »Can I Get Started Without Statistics Software?