February 19, 2004 | Read Time: 1 minute
Data Mining for Fund Raisers: How to Use Simple Statistics to Find Gold in Your Donor Database (Even if You Hate Statistics)
by Peter B. Wylie
Statistics can help nonprofit organizations save money on fundraising mailings and telephone calls, improve rates of response to annual appeals, and identify people who may become major donors, writes Peter B. Wylie, a fundraising consultant at Margolis-Wylie Associates, in Washington.
One of the keys to using statistics in fund raising, says Mr. Wylie, is developing a rating system to evaluate potential donors. He advises fund raisers to pull pieces of demographic information from their databases—such as donors’ age and marital status—that might be linked to support for their group. Drawing from his experience with university databases, he suggests categories that are often highly correlated with giving, such as whether an alumnus lists a business phone number or an e-mail address. Mr. Wylie describes simple statistical tests that can show how those attributes relate to past giving patterns. Using attributes that strongly correlate with contributing, fund raisers can develop scoring systems specific to their organizations.
Mr. Wylie says that once a group has assigned a score to each person in its database, it can decide on whom to focus appeals. If, for example, an organization does not have enough money to send mailings to everyone in its database, it can limit mailings to donors with high scores.
Publisher: Council for Advancement and Support of Education, 1307 New York Avenue, N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-4701; (202) 328-2273; fax (202) 387-4973; http://www.case.org; 90 pages; $36.95 for members; $48.95 for nonmembers; I.S.B.N. 0-89964-380-9.
