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
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
A friend recently asked me to be the statistician on a new NFT project. And so my adventure began, and this blog post shares my experience to help you assess the wealth of prospects who have NFTs.What are NFTs? Non Fungible Tokens are, essentially, electronic… Read More »An NFT Adventure
It’s Research Pride Month! During Research Pride Month, I often chuckle at how I fell into this profession. It’s not something that we study in school like accounting. But a recent event reminded me that, when I did fall into Prospect Research, it was inevitable.… Read More »It Was Inevitable and I Love It
Any good gift officer would always want to be the one who is managing that one prospect who makes a transformational gift. And I’m assuming that’s why a lot of gift officers I speak to tend to keep prospects in their portfolios, even those that… Read More »Letting Go of Your Too Big Portfolio
In conversations at conferences and with clients I hear that, in fundraising, there appears to be a great divide between research officers and gift officers. And the divide itself is made up of capacity ratings. Do you run into these scenarios? If you have encountered… Read More »Are Capacity Ratings Rate-able?
This post was written for Prospect Research Pride Month in 2019. It is a celebration of what we do and how integral our work is in the success of our organizations. Let’s take a look at our work from a bird’s eye view instead of… Read More »Prospect Research Is More Than Studying Wealth
While driving home from Apra Prospect Development, I listened to this TED talk: https://www.npr.org/2017/01/13/509358157/is-there-a-limit-to-how-many-friends-we-can-have . The article brought my mind back to some work I’m doing on estimating the number of gift officers needed to meet a campaign goal. For analytics projects like this, I… Read More »Of William the Conqueror and Gift Officers: A Look Again at Portfolio Size
Yes, I am of the age where I want to sit around telling “In MY day…” stories. But today is still my day because I get to share this amazing profession with you. And this blog post is a rampage of appreciation over how far… Read More »We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby: A Celebration of Research Pride Month