While we were in there adding these data points, we also improved our matching algorithm and our output format, so you get more information in your output file and more transparency about what kind of matches we were able to find.
Best of all, you can now use custom graph relationships while screening to see if a donor has a relationship to your organization.
Don’t forget, we can always work with you to integrate your donor screening results back into your donor database so you can slice, dice or analyze it to your heart’s content.
Or are you looking for something more sophisticated like predictive modelling? We’d love to hear about your project goals and work with you to come up with something that fits your organization.
Giving Tuesday is one of the most important days of the year for Canadian charities. Every Giving Tuesday, thousands of charities across Canada receive millions of dollars from donors.
In 2021, CanadaHelps estimates that Canadians donated $43.6 million on Giving Tuesday. As Giving Tuesday continues to grow in popularity, it’s a safe assumption that this number will continue to grow, as well.
In 2021, Canadians donated $43.6 million on Giving Tuesday
– CanadaHelps
It is clear that Giving Tuesday has a positive impact on Canadian Charities. One, it is extremely effective in encouraging people to give (some of whom will be brand new donors) and two, it raises the profile of philanthropy in Canada generally, creating an increased awareness of Canadian charities, the work they do, and the funding required to do that work. But is there a way Canadian charities can benefit from Giving Tuesday beyond the gifts made and the recognition received?
Consider a charity that receives $100,000 in donations from 2000 new donors on Giving Tuesday. Fantastic, right? $100,000 in incoming donations from people who have never given to the organization is an amazing accomplishment and should be celebrated. But is that organization maximizing the benefit these donors could provide?
To truly maximize the benefit of Giving Tuesday, charities should look beyond the initial gift, and funnel new donors into their pipelines. The best way to do this is through screening and segmentation.
Here’s an example:
Consider the charity that received $100,000 in donations from 2,000 new donors on Giving Tuesday. If that organization screens and segments those donors, the impact of Giving Tuesday will be far beyond $100,000.
Let’s say, if after screening, the breakdown of the group’s 5 year total giving capacity is as follows:
Suppose, if after segmenting: The top 5% (100 people) are funneled into the Major Gifts pipeline. After careful cultivation and stewardship 10% (10 people) of them make a major gift with an average size of $10,000 (which is just a fraction of this group’s total 5 year giving capacity). The result is $100,000 in additional revenue stemming from Giving Tuesday, just from the Major Gifts segment of the screened Giving Tuesday donors.
Giving Tuesday is an important day for Canadian charities. It generates fundraising revenue, increases recognitiion, and creates awareness. Screening and segmenting the new donors a charity acquires on Giving Tuesday and funneling those donors into appropriate pipelines will ensure the impact of Giving Tuesday lasts far beyond a single calendar day.
Today we’re excited to announce that we’ve upgraded the way CharityCAN builds our Prospect Profiles – the profiles on individual Canadian donors in our database that are algorithmically created by mixing and matching data from all of the various datasets that CharityCAN has to offer.
This upgrade brings improvements in a few different areas. Read on to learn more!
By adding these datasets, we added profiles for almost 2 million Canadian donors, bringing our Prospect Profile total to well over 4 million records.
More Profiles Mean More Relationships
Adding this new data to our Profiles also means we now have relationship data between not just individuals on registered charity and public company boards, but between individuals on federal corporation boards too.
Now you can find connections your organization has to local business leaders via local chambers of commerce, or see donor relationships through boards of private companies registered at the federal level.
A New Algorithm To Match Them All
Using all this new data to generate these profiles meant we needed a new way to match different datasets against each other, and figure out what pieces of the profile puzzle fit together.
We overhauled our prospect matching algorithm to better use name frequency and geographic location when de-duplicating donor name data, which we hope has led to cleaner Prospect Profiles.
The best part about our new algorithm is that it is easier to tweak going forwards, so if you see anything that looks amiss, please let us know and we can use your input to fine tune our profile building process in the future.
We know it’s been a while since you’ve heard from us here at CharityCAN, but that’s because we’ve had our heads down working on three new exciting features for you: Federal Corporation data, Obituary data, and a new and faster way to search our donation records.
Federal Corporations
We’ve added data from Corporations Canada on all federally registered corporations and their directors. This data includes information on not only privately held corporations but also not-for-profits, co-operatives and boards of trade from all across the country.
We think this data will be a boon to prospect researchers all across Canada, but especially those in smaller cities and towns looking for local business leaders. Altogether this data covers more than 1.1M corporations and almost 2M director positions and will be updated with more data monthly.
We’re already hard at work incorporating the new connections that this director information will provide into our relationship maps. We’re not quite there but the corporation data on its own was too exciting to keep back until the relationship maps were ready.
Canadian Obituaries
Obituaries have been on our users’ data wish lists for quite some time. We’ve finally been able to team up with our new friends at Canada Deceased List to offer obituary data from their ObitScan and Canada Bereavement Registry products. With their help we’ll be providing thousands of recent Canadian obituaries from public online sources every month.
Improved Donation Records Search
As our database of almost 15M Canadian donation records continues to grow, it has started to put enough of a strain on our database that we decided we needed to make things better. We found that certain searches were starting to take a few seconds to deliver results, and so it was time to speed things up.
We’ve completely rewritten our Donation Records search engine so that results are now consistently delivered within milliseconds of your query, no matter the complexity. We look forward to moving more of our searches to this new search engine in the future!
More On The Way
As I mentioned earlier, work continues on getting these new datasets into our prospect profiles. For the moment both datasets are searchable on their own or through our Integrated Search. Stay tuned for more developments, and as always, contact us if you’d like to see these new features in action.
After months of work behind the scenes, today we’re announcing a new way to do prospect identification in CharityCAN: a new feature we’re calling Donor Discovery.
Donor Discovery uses our donation record dataset with our relationship graph to give you a customizeable way to find new potential donors.
Set up filters like geographic region, donation amount, connections, donor type (individual, foundation or corporate) and cause to cast as wide or narrow a net as you’d like. We’ll show you donors who have given gifts according to your filters but who haven’t (yet!) made a recorded donation to your chosen organization.
For example, a university looking for funding for a new medical school building might look for health care donors in their geographic region with a connection to the university’s board of directors. A smaller local charity might look for individual donors to their cause giving amounts of under $1,000.
Once the results are generated we’ll show you how much the donor has given in the past and how they’re connected to your organization, with a link to the donor’s profile so you can quickly qualify your prospect.
We hope that by using relationship data as well as past donation data, we can surface prospects with a higher affinity to your organization and give you a path to connecting with them.
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.
