Don't Scare me With Donor Data

In today's episode, I sat down with Kate Bahen, Managing Director of Charity Intelligence Canada.  Charity Intelligence exists to carry out deep research profiles on Canadian charities to help donors make better decisions with their donation dollars.  To that end, part of what they do is release lists of Canadian charities, ranked based on 5 separate dimensions.  Kate and her organization have been fairly controversial in the non-profit industry here in Canada, so I figured it might be beneficial for people to get a deeper perspective on what they do.

In this episode I sat down to chat with Theresa Lee, Principal Consultant at Responsive Fundraising.  I wanted to get a sense from her as to what she's noticed about how COVID has changed the game for the organizations that she serves and what has perhaps stayed the same.  Among other things, we spoke about social media scraping and event vs. relationship-based fundraising.  Most importantly, we had some good laughs and I hope you'll agree that the conversation was educational.

I sat down to speak with Ryan Woroniecki, VP of Strategic Partnerships at DonorSearch.  We spoke about the considerable fundraising value of getting 3rd party prospect research data appended to an organization's donor records.  I've used DonorSearch in the past to help US clients of mine, and was definitely impressed with how useful it's been, not only based on the info it provides, but with the opportunities that it opens up for data science products I've been able to build with it.

In this episode, I spoke with Celeste Bannon Waterman, Partner/Lead of Research & Analytics at KCI.  The topic was a document she sent me that details the 4 stages a non-profit can go through as it becomes more and more sophisticated in terms of data infrastructure, analytics, and data science.  I found the conversation to be very philosophical, interesting, and enlightening.  Then again, I'm probably biased because she was my old boss when I worked at KCI!

Have a look below for a link to the document, called the "Data Platform".

I spoke with Ben Miller, Chief Analytic Officer @ EveryAction's DonorTrends.  He told me about his analysis of fundraising during the Great Recession of 2008, using the world's largest dataset on charitable giving, called the "Growth in Giving" dataset.  Ben had some very practical suggestions that non-profits could follow to help them weather the economic downturn.

See the below links for some additional info he wanted me to include:

In this episode I had the honour of speaking with my friend Dave Saraiva, of Lifeline Design, about the CRM his company created.  It's an illuminating look at the inner workings of non-profits, and how they can be vastly improved, or adversely affected depending on their experience with this very key software that manages their own donor data.

I speak with Marianne Pelletier (of Staupell Analytics Group) about major gift prospect modeling. It's a process with so many technical and interpersonal steps, so I'm interested to hear how she manages it.