Big Data, Crowdfunding and the Fundraising Technology Craze

“It was trickling down to prove this makes our lives easier. Getting peer support and recommendations helped get buy-in, in addition to it being championed by our COO,” Martin says.

Availability and access
The goals in adding a system to streamline the donor data process were pretty simple. JDRF wanted easy access to data, easy analysis of the data and easy answers from the data for its staff.

With that in mind, JDRF chose dashboard solutions with the help of wealth intelligence and data analysis company WealthEngine. It implemented six dashboards that address all of the organization’s major fundraising areas. Now fundraisers have one central place to see how they’re tracking against their goals and pull data, Martin says. It’s easier to navigate and see more interactively how the data works together, combining the information from different systems into one place.

Now Martin and her team are able to do a lot of quick analysis behind the scenes with the new software and explore the data to answer strategic questions both individually and for the organization as a whole. The data team can then publish the relevant data for everybody and bring it to the entire organization — information like how many weeks before an event participants register so the marketing can be more targeted.

“We’ve been able to segment and focus efforts and resources more rapidly. Instead of waiting until the end of the month for a report to come out, we can see it mid-month. We can monitor in real time,” Martin says.

The dashboard not only makes the data available and accessible for JDRF’s fundraisers, but it’s also shed light on how important data and data entry are. Just by putting these dashboards on a screen, visually seeing how data interacts, Martin says, people understand why the data team asks them to fill out all those data fields when entering donor data.