Modeling — Taking It Straight From the Experts (Part 2)

Swindoll: Too many nonprofits aren't even sure what the modeling questions are. You have to figure that out before new capabilities will be of much use. For those who do understand the questions, two areas deserve attention: advanced analytics and better visualizations. Leading nonprofits recognize the gold mine that is available to them in their donor systems if they take the time to capture every piece of information they can — from social-media involvement, to behavioral engagement, as well as traditional RFM and response metrics. They then need tools to analyze that data and look for correlations. We also need new ways to visualize information — beyond bar graphs and pie charts.

Becker/Longfield: The industry will continue to evolve its thinking about models. First with models being run externally and the results uploaded into systems, and soon, with models being directly incorporated into these systems. Vendors and agencies will develop proprietary models that can be plugged in and run (plug-and-play models). The future of modeling for fundraising will consist of improvements to both old and new. Mail-based strategies will continue to be enhanced with attribution-related insights, donor LTV calculations and campaign analytics. Newer channels, and their relationship with one another, will benefit from improved ROI measurement as a result of new transactional and behavioral data being harnessed in a breed of analytics. Ultimately, the opportunity for data and analytic providers serving nonprofits is to evolve from "descriptive" and "predictive" analytics to "prescriptive" analytics, whereby specific action recommendations are delivered that influence program strategy. This will necessarily involve the intersection of software and data, combining rules-based decision engines with data and analytics.

Wilder: To get a sense of where the nonprofit industry will be tomorrow, I think you need to look at where the commercial world is today, and that's unlocking the secrets of "Big Data." Through advanced analytics, organizations are applying social network/sentiment analysis and text mining to reveal hidden patterns and correlations in unstructured Big Data residing outside the consumer database. Combining these insights with traditional data assets is helping marketers identify key influencers for anything from new products to new drugs. The result has been an amplification of targeting as each marketing touch has the potential to reach well beyond an individual consumer. As nonprofits search for innovative ways to attract younger constituents with significant upside potential, Big Data may hold the answer.