Tag Archives: National Business Intelligence Month

Facebook’s (continued) move into online giving

This month has focused on Business Intelligence, the process of gathering all your organization knows (typically through a centralized database and a cool data visualization tool, etc.) and improving your analysis and decision making. A key component to great BI is how to get at all of the data relevant to your constituents–bio-demographic, giving, activities, and, more and more, their online engagement. This means what Facebook, LinkedIn and others do matters to your fundraising operations.

Facebook (NASDAQ: FB) is delving deeper into providing a donor giving application function. The NonProfit Times offered a helpful synopsis of the Facebook’s plans. On its face, this is a neat idea and may hold promise for the charities involved. But it also has some risks. (How) will data be shared? What fees are involved (FB doesn’t have any now)? And, my personal favorite, what will be the real cost of handling such giving, particularly when the thrust of the tool appears to be tribute giving.

Money in mazeThis last point is important. On the one hand, I’ve written about the real costs of handling any gift. It’s pretty hard to do for less than about $7. No matter what. On the other hand, once a nonprofit loses control over data and deliverables, there can be substantial donor service costs. For example, a few years ago, as a result of a Facebook fundraising effort outside of its control, a client of mine spent dozens of staff hours trying to make a few donors-via-Facebook happy. This effort appears more structured than the example I shared, but the data-exchange-donor-satisfaction issue could be significant.

So, as technology marches forward, keep in mind the some innovations have costs that should be calculated. Want to see what it costs your team to process a gift? Check out my calculator here.

Are you using Infographics as reporting tools? You should be.

During National Business Intelligence (BI) Month, a number of top-notch infographics have caught my eye. These handy visuals are really reports, depicting data and details germane to a topic. But, they are also much more. They provide guidance about how to use the data. They tell a story. They provide business process guidance. In short, they’re quite helpful and you should be looking into how these can help your fundraising efforts.

I should note that I know this topic is not new. Infographics have been around for years and some folks have declared them irrelevant or unhelpful. However, any visualization of information that tells the story you need told can be valuable, so infographics likely have utility in your shop.

BWF Analytics Infographic

For example, our firm created a handy infographic (on the right) to present data from a survey we conducted on analytics. This image is really many reports in one. It presents the data in a logical order. In general, it is a useful guide to the topic of fundraising analytics, benchmarking for staff, and related information.

So, how should you set about creating an infographic?

  1. Determine your topic. Infographics can be great for 40,000 foot ideas as well as minutia, but generally not both.
  2. Find your data. What data do you have to display? What data would you like to go get?
  3. Lay out your story. The visual aspects of this process are important. Do you want the reader to “take it all in”, “follow along”, or just see some useful visual depictions of data and interpretation?
  4. Pick a infographic tool and get going. Many tools are out there. Check out this resource for some good and free tools.

Finally, I thought I’d take some of my own advice (for a change!). Below is the inaugural fundraisingoperations.com infographic. It uses data from a survey I did for my 2011 book An Executive’s Guide to Fundraising Operations. While my effort isn’t as amazing as this awesome college football bowl game pic, I created it in 20 minutes. Have any great infographic examples? Drop your links in the comments. Happy infographic-ing!

Data Quality and Quantity, v2
This pic presents data from Cannon’s 2011 book on fundraising operations, which shows how data quality expectations and perceptions vary.

December 2012 is National Month Month…

…or so I tweeted a few weeks ago. My plan is to envelope the work we lovingly call fundraising operations, or advancement services, or “the back office”, or “you know, that stuff they do with computers” into 12, neat monthly categories. The purpose is to drawn attention to whole sets of work that we sometimes avoid but can never quite escape (I’ve tried).

So, for those of us so fortunate to be toiling away the day after December 25th, what “National _____ Month” would you designate and why?