Four Reasons Why Non-Profits Need to Use Predictive Analytics to Forecast their Donors Giving Cycle
PDISM Scores for Non-Profit Fundraising
Advances in Data Science and Computing capabilities allow us to gain insights into prospective donors that were not possible even a few years back. The prevailing practice in fundraising analytics even a short time ago was that the analytics would be driven by a single model, and in some instances augmented by some segmentation. As effective as this approach was in improving fundraising response rates, all of us involved in the development process knew that more was possible, we just did not have the computation horsepower to do it.
Many repeat donors have a well-defined giving cycle defined by frequency of donation and the timing of their donations. These cycles can be very well predicted using techniques available in data science. A fair question here would be, why should an organization incur the extra expenditure in putting analytics in place to detect a donor’s giving cycle, and not just reach out to its existing donor as per their regular campaign-based schedule?