Start With a Spreadsheet and a Survey: Advice From Experts

Start small

A lot of nonprofits don’t understand basic information about their fundraising, such as mean gift size or the percentage of donors who contribute annually, says Darrow Zeidenstein, vice president for resource development at Rice University.

Organizations that want to jump into analytics can start by using a simple spreadsheet to get to know their numbers and move on from there, he says: “You don’t need whiz-bang statistical packages to do some really powerful things.”

Look for differences

Organizations should record more than just donations in their fundraising databases, says Josh Birkholz, author of Fundraising Analytics: Using Data to Guide Strategy. He recommends that nonprofits track which events their supporters attend, whether they volunteer or serve on committees, and maybe even whether they give to other charities.

“In modeling, you want to find what’s different about a select group so that you can find more of them,” he says.

Mr. Birkholz’s suggestion for nonprofits just starting with analytics: Conduct a survey of the group’s top 100 donors and a random sample of 100 other supporters, and then line up the responses in a spreadsheet to look for what sets the best donors apart.

Identify loyal donors

The traits and behaviors that predict who is most likely to give a large gift varies from organization to organization, with one notable exception, says Sarah Williams, lead analyst and consultant at Marts & Lundy, a fundraising consulting company.

“One of the characteristics that basically is a huge, flashing light is that they have consistently been giving,” she says. “It could be $25 a year, but if they’ve been doing that for 10 years, then that’s a flashing light that this person is attached and more likely to give.”

Presentation matters

Great number-crunching isn’t enough, says Lisa Howley, director of relationship management at the Johns Hopkins Institutions. Analysts, she says, need to figure out the best way to convey their findings so other employees in the organization can understand and act on them.

When Ms. Howley’s office first offered a service to help departments analyze their gift officers’ portfolios, the approach entailed using simple tables to organize donor prospects based on what size gifts the research suggested they were able to make and their inclination to give.

When the service was slow to take off, Ms. Howley revised the format so that various colors were added to the tables to indicate different levels of priority in the donor portfolios. “All of a sudden,” she says, “it started to get a ton of attention.”