How Can You Produce Business Intelligence

In theory Business Intelligence is simple – it’s the technologies and processes businesses use to analyze data – but the reality of its application in the world is a bit more involved than that. Think about all the data at your organization that you might care about – information about donors, transactions, ticket buyers, marketing campaigns, website visits, who knows. If you were to take all of this disparate data and collect it in one central place you would likely be on your way to creating a Data Warehouse – the common first step toward building a Business Intelligence suite. Now hopefully all of that disparate data would be organized in such a way that it is easy to report on. Collected and organized data provides the foundation of Business Intelligence.

From this nicely organized Warehouse of your data, you would take the data and analyze it using calculations, averages, and metrics that would give a non-technical person a prayer of being able to gain some insight from that glut of data. This analysis could be a simple report, perhaps a pivot table where you can drag and drop fields onto a grid. Taking your nicely cleaned and organized information and learning things from it can be the hardest and most interesting part of BI. How do tickets sell on Tuesday versus Thursday? Which zip codes provide us the best average gift? Building good Business Intelligence means taking a lot of time and using the needs and trends of your business (giving trends, marketing trends, donor trends) to inform which metrics you create.

Donna Caputo Guest Blog Post at 101Fundraising

I’m excited to announce that I have a guest post on the 101fundraising.org blog today.  This newly formed crowdblog offers fundraisers and other professionals involved in philanthropy an opportunity to blog and connect.  The site serves the international and Dutch fundraising community, publishing posts in both English and Dutch.  I wanted to support the site, so I submitted a blog post about the highly-charged situation in which someone requests the return of a gift.

Please read my blog here, and feel free to leave me a comment.  If you’re interested in blogging yourself, the site includes all the information you’ll need to sign up.

Donna Caputo is the Director of Consulting Services at Jacobson Consulting Applications, Inc. (JCA)
JCA provides strategic consulting to the world’s leading nonprofits.

CAN-SPAM Act – What Do I Need To Know?

New to e-marketing?  You need to understand and abide by the CAN-SPAM act.  First of all, it’s CAN-SPAM as in “stop spam” rather than “canned spam,” the lunchmeat Monty Python couldn’t live without.  The CAN-SPAM Act is a law that affects every organization that uses email in its operations.  It covers not only bulk email campaigns, but every commercial email message.  A violation is worth $16,000, so you’ll want to understand and abide by the rules.

Think about the email you’re sending.  Messages fall into one of several categories:  commercial, transactional, or other.  Commercial messages sell or advertise something, transactional or relational messages confirm or facilitate an ongoing or past transaction, and messages that fall into the “other” bucket are not commercial, transactional, or relational.  Messages that are primarily commercial are covered by the act. Messages that are primarily relational are exempt from most of the act although they cannot contain misleading or false information.  How does this work for a non-profit organization?

Arts Funding Crisis in the UK

Greetings from London, where the arts world is bracing for its worst crisis since 1974, when a combination of steep increases in the price of oil and a coal strike paralyzed the UK economy and, by extension, the arts world.  Fast forward to 2011, and we have another potential oil shock coupled with impending government austerity measures of the like never seen in post-war times.  Unlike in the States, where there is a culture of fundraising and private support for the arts, the UK has long subsidized its arts community with free admission to many museums and heavy subsidies for non-profit theatres.  British patrons, especially those of the middle class, feel entitled to free or heavily discounted access – and it appears that is going to change, and change drastically.

Our clients here are scared.  In theatres, where government support can account for 50% or more, there will be huge holes in their budgets should national and local support go to zero – a real possibility given current budget discussions.  And museums face the real – and terrifying – prospect of having to charge admission to cover their anticipated shortfalls.  How will British patrons respond?  Will there be an outpouring of private support?  Will the privileged and cultured middle class pay for something that they’ve taken for granted as their right?

The Hat Never Comes Off

Whatever your political sensibilities, the tape of the NPR Foundation’s former top fundraiser sharing unguarded opinions to build rapport in a lunch with people posing as left-leaning potential major donors is decidedly cringe-worthy.

A mere 12 minutes into their lunch (3:26 on the published video), Ron Shiller, then president of NPR Foundation, says “I’ll talk personally, as opposed to wearing my NPR hat.” And then launches into his opinions on Republicans and anti-intellectualism, among other things. The individual posing as the potential donor is heard on the recording saying “I like it when you take off your NPR hat,” an ironic reference to the fact that the conservative actor is happy to be taping such inflammatory statements but meant on the face of it to indicate the potential donor’s approval of such informal rapport-building conversation.

Theorist Erving Goffman posited that we are creating our selves through social interaction at any given moment in time, what he termed “front stage”  behavior. No one can be witness to another’s “back stage” self, the place where we stop being a social construct. In practice, we routinely issue invitations like Ron Shiller’s – to that supposed back-stage self – by saying things like “this is off the record,” or “I am taking off my organizational hat.” The reality is we are simply signaling that our construct is now going to be different, somehow more genuine, and that it should be perceived without reference to our organization.

Yes, there’s the rub. Ah, how tempting it can be to ask a donor to perceive us without reference to our organization.  Sometimes we really feel a personal connection with a donor we have known a long time.  Other times we are simply searching for a common point upon which to build a relationship between ourselves, individually, and that donor.

What Is Business Intelligence?

At JCA, we spend a lot of time thinking about Business Intelligence (often shortened to simply “BI”). Just in case you don’t spend all of your day thinking about BI, I thought I’d use today’s blog to provide a few basics on BI.

Business Intelligence has been defined many ways. The term was first used in a modern context by Howard Dresner when he called it “a set of concepts and methodologies to improve decision making in a business through the use of facts and fact based systems.” Over the years business intelligence has evolved, but at heart it is still defined in that same way. Cindy Howson’s definition says it succinctly: “A set of technologies and processes that allow people at all levels of an organization to access and analyze data.”

But what do these definitions really mean? Let me ask if you have ever done this: 

How Do You Measure Success for Major Gift Officers

There is nothing I enjoy more than informally talking shop with my fundraising colleagues. One recurring theme, casually bantered about in our social gatherings, and more seriously examined as part of our work with metrics and reporting, is that executives who manage major gift officers face challenges.

Major gift cultivation takes a long time to pay off, and executives struggle to find the best candidates.  They rely on gut instinct and anecdotal evidence to “feel” if an officer is successful, and they need months and sometimes a year or more to identify who is really working out.  Waiting for the money to come in, everyone agrees, just doesn’t cut it anymore.  No one wants to miss opportunities to identify which gift officers need help and who is on the path to success.

Although I would never discount the value of professional instincts in assessing gift officers’ effectiveness, gut can only get someone so far. The key to minimizing this struggle is, in a word, metrics. And I mean metrics beyond how much money the officer brought in, or number of calls this month. Dollars in the door can be a good measure, to be sure, but it is a lagging indicator of successful activity, and it will fluctuate even for a great officer. Everyone has stories about the officer with great call numbers every month who, seemingly mysteriously, just didn’t work out. So what can we measure to give us clues to performance beyond the dollars?