Avenue Donor Data is a new application available in the Blackbaud Marketplace that creates an add-in tile in your constituent pages to display a donor’s net worth, annual income, dwelling value, and annual donations, based on their postal code.
We think this application will be useful for any Raiser’s Edge user or fundraiser that either doesn’t have a team of prospect researchers behind them to create donor profiles – or a fundraiser who might be supported by prospect research but who needs data now and at their fingertips.
Imagine a time when we get back to galas and golf tournaments and a fundraiser meets a donor over cocktails (full disclosure – I just got my second COVID vaccine dose and so this actually seems like more than a hypothetical right now!) and wants to find a little bit more about them and if they might be a major gift prospect.
Since Raiser’s Edge NXT and Avenue are mobile friendly, the fundraiser can log in and quickly view Avenue’s data to qualify the donor on the spot using their smartphone.
If you’re interested in installing Avenue or want to find out more, including our pricing options, checkout our new Avenue Donor Data product page.
Avenue Donor Data is just a little window into some of the data we have in our main CharityCAN prospect research tool. If you’re already a CharityCAN user, you have access to the same data in Avenue via our Household Data Search.
If you want the same kinds of data that Avenue has to offer in your donor management system, then you might be interested in doing a donor screening with us. We can append similar data (plus a whole lot more) to your donor file to help you qualify your whole database at once.
If you’re already a CharityCAN user and a Raiser’s Edge NXT user, you might also be interested in CharityCAN for Raiser’s Edge. It includes the same constituent add-in for household data, plus add-ins for relationship and donation data too.
And if you’re interested in something totally different, get in touch directly. We love to hear what ideas for projects you have and see if we can help you bring them to fruition.
Back in the summer of 2020, with Black Lives Matter marches happening in every major city in North America, I was challenged to take a look at the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices at our little company. As anyone who works at a small business can attest to, there aren’t often official practices or procedures put in place until something goes wrong and forces you to create something to adhere to.
As a company that straddles the fundraising and software industries, we’re in a double whammy of fields that are predominantly white (in the case of the former) and predominantly white and male (in the latter). Our current staff is split 50/50 between genders, but we only have one team member who is racialized (or 12% of the company).
With that in mind, I contacted Lunaria, a local company that helps companies with their DEI practices. While taking me through some things to consider, Lunaria suggested hiring practices as one place a small company could look to reduce unconscious bias and make sure we’re finding the best candidates regardless of race or gender. While we don’t have any open job positions on the immediate horizon, we do hire a co-op student every four months to help on the software development team. I wasn’t sure how we would do it, but this term I made it a goal to use anonymous hiring, or blind recruitment – stripping away any identifiable information from job applications to reduce bias – while selecting co-op students to interview.
The Baseline
To start out, I was curious to see if I could pull together information about the co-op students from the University of Waterloo (UW) (where we hire our co-op students from). This would let me see whether or not we were attracting and selecting students that were more or less in line with the race and gender of the overall student body.
Using the Common University Data Set from UW , I was able to get a breakdown of students along gender lines from the programs we hire our co-ops from, Engineering and Computer Science (CS):
The closest thing I could track down was a demographic survey on the /r/uWaterloo subreddit. Despite all of the obvious issues with a self-reported survey from a small internet community, let’s take a look at the reported racial breakdown in the Math and Engineering faculties (note that this is slightly different than the Engineering/CS breakdown above – CS is only one part of the Math faculty at UW, but it still gives us some idea). The survey creators also posted a breakdown of the subreddit’s reported race vs. Ontario demographics in general, if that helps give some idea of who may be under/over-reported in the results.
Now let’s take a look at our hiring process! Every four month term, we submit a job posting to the University of Waterloo’s co-op job portal, Waterloo Works. Students who are interested in the position post a PDF copy of their resume, and the university includes a student grade report and past co-op employer evaluations. I review these application packages and select students for the next stage, the in-person interview.
Following another of Lunaria’s suggestions, I asked our current UW co-op to help with the anonymization experiment, and they took the time to black out identifying student information in the applications (names, addresses, emails, etc.), leaving only their student numbers behind for reference.
Next came the selection process. I was surprised at how much my old (non-anonymous) process relied on names until they were gone! My brain was apparently trained to use a student’s name as a placeholder in my head, and with student numbers any sort of personality I might have built up completely disappeared. It made remembering which resumes I had already read a little difficult, but it’s easy to see how unconscious bias seeps in without you even thinking about it.
Something else I noticed was that it’s probably not enough just to scrub names and email addresses – next time I’ll probably scrub any “interests” from the resumes as well. They made it too easy to make a gender (e.g. “mixed martial arts” vs. “figure skating”) or race (“Chinese Student Association” vs. “Minor League Hockey Referee”) assumption.
Other than that, it was no trouble to whittle down the resumes based on the anonymized data.
Results
Here are the results of the anonymous selection process broken down by gender and race (these are just guesses – the only way for me to identify student race and gender was to use names and LinkedIn profiles from applications). Out of 48 initial candidates, I selected 7 students for one-on-one interviews. Here’s how that looks:
Assumed Gender
# Students Applied
# Students Selected
Male
40 (83%)
5 (71%)
Female
8 (17%)
2 (29%)
Assumed Race or Ethnic Background
# Students Applied
# Students Selected
Asian
24 (50%)
1 (14%)
Black
1 (2%)
1 (14%)
Latinx
1 (2%)
0 (0%)
Middle Eastern
3 (6%)
1 (14%)
South Asian
14 (29%)
2 (29%)
White
5 (11%)
2 (29%)
So in the end I ended up with a fairly diverse group of students. If you look along gender lines, the anonymous process selected a number of candidates that matched up with the applicant pool.
But after all that I still ended up with an over-representation of white students! This is a small sample size, so maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but I wonder if some unconscious bias was still happening – through the interests section of the resumes, or the format of the resumes. Maybe the fact that these students are white means they have had better co-op jobs or were evaluated on those jobs better in the past? I also ended up with a severe under-representation of Asian students. Again, I’ll have to see if this is some sort of bias or whether we’re just looking at a small sample issue.
When I compare our applicant pool to the student body breakdown, it seems like our applicants are more or less as racially diverse as the general student population, but it doesn’t look like we’re attracting quite as many female candidates as are in the general student population. We did end up with a pretty good representation in our selected candidates, however. Maybe we can update our future job descriptions to make them more inclusive.
In the end, the anonymous selection added negligible overhead and seems to have worked out so far! I’m looking forward to using it again next term and finding other ways to improve our process.
Against this backdrop it feels a little trivial to give a company update. Any news we could put out about our business feels inconsequential up against the other headlines we seem to be doomscrolling past every day. Yet it’s also during these times of hardship and turmoil that I feel thankful to be able to have a small part in creating software to support organizations that are making real change in the world.
As a small business, we were extremely thankful for the support of all of our users out there at Canadian fundraising organizations that continued to use CharityCAN to help them carry out their increasingly important work. As part of that aforementioned white-collar worker cohort we were lucky to be able to transition to a fully remote working environment back in March when the pandemic hit and keep ourselves relatively healthy through the year. While we lost some customers due to budget cuts, we had others double down on major gift giving to fill the gap left behind by cancelled fundraising events. All across the sector we saw organizations getting creative with new ways to organize and fundraise online.
And while we stayed cooped up in our houses and at our desks, we managed to add features and products to our business. I have our amazing team to thank and heap praise on for that, who not only kept us going through the pandemic but also through a month in the summer when I was out of commission recovering from surgery on a broken arm caused by a pandemic bike ride.
Here are a few of our highlights looking back at a year where we didn’t always have things to look forward to:
We launched an integration with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, bringing our relationship data, donation records and postal code data directly into constituent record pages via custom add-ins
We gave CharityCAN a facelift with a new navigation scheme, homepage and donor profiles that immediately surface connections to your organization
We created donor recommendations based on relationships and past donations, surfacing local donors to like causes with connections to your organization
We launched new pricing tiers to simplify access to CharityCAN for users and teams and include some donor screening in the mix
We started working on an employee share ownership plan so we can reward our employees and give them real ownership in the company
We’re not done yet, of course – there’s always more work to do. This year we hope to expand our integration offerings to more donor management systems and add even more recommendation and prospect identification features.
Thank you again to my fantastic team and our amazing customers. I am incredibly privileged to be able to do what I do for a living. We all look forward to what 2021 will bring!
If you’ve logged into CharityCAN recently, you’ll already know that we’ve been working on freshening up the site a little bit. In the past couple of months, we’ve given the site a new look, a new menu, a new place for news and now a new homepage. It’s all part of our software development efforts this year on streamlining the prospect research experience on CharityCAN.
It’s not a total re-imagination of our website – instead, it’s kind of like when you’ve lived somewhere for a while and feel nicely settled. And then you realize that maybe things would work better if that couch were just over there, and this chair was closer to that wall…
A New Menu
One of the first changes we made was to move our old menu from the side of the page up to the top, and rearranged our menu items to make it a little easier to find all of our most-used features. This may not seem like a big change, but it frees up a lot of screen real estate and makes things a lot nicer on tablet-sized devices.
A New Place for News
The next thing we did was move our news from the home page to a smaller widget that shows up on each CharityCAN page you visit. This way we can keep you informed of new changes and features no matter where you are in our application. It also freed up more space that let us create…
A New Home Page
With the extra real estate from our menu moving and our home page freed up, we were able to re-imagine a new experience for someone logging into CharityCAN for the first (or thousandth) time. We moved some of our most used features right to the home page so that you can use our integrated search and our donation records search as soon as you sign in.
We also chose to highlight something else we’ve been working on: donor recommendations based on our relationship maps. We choose a couple of donors to highlight based on their connections to your board of directors or their donations to similar charities. To view a larger list of recommendations, you can also visit your saved prospect pages to see who else you may already be connected to.
We hope you are enjoying the changes we’ve made so far, and there are more planned, so stay tuned!
Hello, and welcome to 2020! I’m a little late in welcoming everyone here to the new decade, but I wanted to reflect a little on 2019, look forward to 2020 and give our users and audience a look at what we’re thinking about here at CharityCAN.
Trying new things
We spent quite a bit of time working behind the scenes here at CharityCAN in 2019, culminating in the launch of our new donor screening product. It’s been the first new product we’ve launched here at CharityCAN in quite some time, and definitely the first new product with me in the role of CEO. Launching anything new is hard, but I’m really proud of what our team has been able to accomplish.
We also kicked off another pilot project near the end of 2019 to integrate CharityCAN with Raiser’s Edge NXT. The project, whose first phase is nearing completion this month, is our first foray into the world of CRM (constituent relationship management) software, with a goal of making CharityCAN data more accessible wherever you need it.
These two projects took a lot of our software development time, and I’m excited to start seeing the returns of our work in 2020 when we start getting these new features into the hands of our users.
In non-software projects, in 2019 we also hosted our first online webinars, which we hope to continue to do on a quarterly basis to keep everyone updated on the newest features here at CharityCAN.
Refining other features
Because we did a lot of work behind the scenes doesn’t mean we ignored the CharityCAN platform entirely, however! In 2019 we launched the ability to create your own custom relationship maps, so you can leverage the connections your organization has that aren’t in the public domain.
We also added some more CRM-like functionality of our own, allowing you to create notes on prospect profiles and to save companies and charities of interest to your prospect profiles page. We also have the ability to create a list of favourite profiles to use in relationship path searches, and the ability to easily merge and edit prospect profiles, instantly updating your relationship graph in the process.
Looking ahead
As I mentioned earlier, one of our first priorities in 2020 is getting some of the work we did in 2019 out the door and into the hands of our customers. Besides donor screening and our RE NXT integration, we have a couple features waiting in the wings!
For the rest of 2020, we’re going to be taking a very close look at the CharityCAN platform. We’ll be examining the data we already have there to try to find new connections we might be able to make between various data points. Then we want to discover the best ways to present that data and get it into the hands of our users. We want to make sure we’re able to give Canadian prospect researchers the data they want, how they want it, in the most user-friendly way possible – whether it’s through a donation record search, inside their CRM, or maybe even pushed to them in a recommended list of prospects.
I’m excited to see what 2020 and the rest of this decade will bring for CharityCAN and Canadian prospect research. Happy New Year and happy searching!
