2015 Nonprofit Technology Conference

Ever had a colleague tell you about her fabulous fundraising results and wondered: How did she do that? And: Could it work for me? Well, we’ve all been there comparing ourselves to other organizations, searching for the right combination of activities and programming that will yield great fundraising results. But aside from trial and error, what do we have to go on? How do we know if we’ll be able to replicate the results? Is it the new strategy that works, or some other combination of internal and external factors that make or break a new effort?

A group of development directors from advocacy organizations were inspired to find out. In May 2014, we set out to work on developing a predictive model that would tell us which activities (matching campaigns, sustainers, major gifts, etc.) would bring the best results. In this session, you’ll hear about our journey identifying independent variables, collecting data, developing a model, and testing it among friends. Partway through the session we’ll ask you to complete a survey about your own organization and feed it into the model. Join this session for a “work-in-progress” and help write the rest of the story