AASP: Campaign Reporting

Phone battery dying... May not be able to live blog this one. Also,
it's on reporting, which is usually pretty chart-heavy and diificult
to summarize. That said...

Presenters: Caroline Chang (Stanford) and Kai Kamrath (Columbia)

*Stanford doesn't do soft credit! This shocks the crowd.

*Both Stanford and Columbia do campaign counting based on
"commitments" (outright gifts and pledges). Columbia does count pledge
payments on pledges made before the campaign began.

*Columbia has a code that allows them to include or exclude gifts that
are exceptions to their counting rules. For example, they received a
gift from the Sultanate of Brunei. This would generally be excluded
from counting, as a gift from a government. However, since the Sultan
basically "owns" the country, it was counted as a personal gift would
be.

*Both Columbia and Stanford treat gifts from family foundations as
individual, rather than foundation, gifts.

Now, off to enjoy a glass of overpriced wine at the no-host reception
while my phone sips electricity.

AASP: Gifts and Record Management Best Practices

Presenters: Debbie Anglin of GG&A and Caroline Chang of Stanford

GG&A looked at Stanford's gifts and record management business processes and made some recommendations. Here are some gleanings:

*Advancement Services often considered a cost center, not a revenue generator. Consider how operations contribute to positive donor experience.

*Use benchmarking to convince leadership to change processes to match best practices. GG&A did a huge benchmarking study with a dozen top fundraising institutions.

*Look at gift processing workload by month, and use to plan staffing needs and workflow. Most organizations studied were over-staffed, maintaining enough staff to address highest-volume months. Cross-training is key.

*Focus on reducing processing time for major gifts.

*Track gift receipt date and processing date so business process can be better examined.

*Cost per gift processing transaction ranged from $2.26 to $18.21. Most were around $3 to $5.

*Most processed gifts within 3 to 5 days. Per Debbie, 48 - 72 hours is best practice.

*Adjustments should be less than 5% of gift transactions.

*Debbie encourages empowering end users to update biographical data. This increases ownership. Caroline doesn't agree.

*Records per FTE records staff ranged from 44K to 200K. Debbie recommends somewhere in the middle.

*Lost alums ranged from 4.9% to 34.6%. Should be less than 7%.

*Data management plans and goals are key to decreased lost alum rates, as well as decreased manual entry.

*Evaluate processing staff on accuracy and productivity.

*Implementing change: prioritize based on cost savings, importance, quick wins, "doability."

*Stanford reorganizing: instead of gifts, records, central files -- Automated Services, General Processing, Specialized Processing (high-value gifts, encourage independent thinking), Customer Service.

AASP: Blue State Keynote

Rich Mintz from Blue State Digital (Obama's online strategists) is the keynote speaker. Some gleanings:

*Internet 10 years ago -- "used by geeks & specialists (crazy uncle with an AOL account)"

*In 2003, online organizing was "like ham radio" -- fringey

*Blue State -- less than 25% of revenue is from political campaign, most is now non-profit. Will not work for "merchants of evil," or highly dysfunctional organizations (per Rich, the majority of those they turn down for this reason are higher ed)

*Points out that desire for online programs is decoupled from ROI

*Institutional messaging often "all wrong for small donors"

*Social networking treated as an infrastructure problem, not a messaging issue

*3 keys: engagement (most important -- don't just talk, listen); transparency; authenticity

*Obama: 2/3 of money raised was online, $560M. Average donor gave total of $100, more than 2 donations. Average age was mid-40s.

*Obama: 2 billion emails sent, more than 300 segmentation channels (!)

*New media must be on even footing with traditional communications staff

*Create and maintain a narrative -- plan 5 or 6 emails and segmentation branches rather than one email at a time

*Goal: lower barrier to entry while raising expectations

*Email: why am I on this list, what do you want me to do right now, what comes next? You have 4 or 5 seconds to get this across

*Be ready for surprises -- act quickly.

*Six lessons:
1) "Online" is a whole-enterprise project. About 1/2 of investment in online ends up funding organizational change management, rather than program.

Don't fear interactivity harming your brand -- they are saying it anyway! May as well make sure you are part of the conversation.

2) Message matters -- authenticity, timing, don't just ask for money.

Small donors: immediacy, imploring, group-oriented, concrete, collaborative.

3) "Mighty oaks from little acorns grow." Small donors may not even realize they are small donors.

4) "Relationships matter more than ever." Rich says newsletters are not that useful. They tend to serve internal political purposes more. Communicate more often, in shorter bursts. Make it relevant to the recipient -- segment, segment, segment.

5) "Everybody wants to be an insider." "Ask me to do something easy and meaningful today."

6) "Everybody is different." Rich loves segmentation! (So do I.)

Chicago!

I just arrived in Chicago for the AASP Summit.

I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's keynote address by Rich Mintz from Blue State Digital. Blue State was responsible for Obama's online strategies during the presidential election.

Stay tuned here for the highlights.

What are your favorite prospect management fields?

I'm making my gorgeous PowerPoint presentation titled "Fields of Dreams"* for the Association of Advancement Services Professionals Summit in Chicago next week.

It's about prospect management data fields from collection to reporting. Let me know some of your must-haves in the comments below, and I'll include them in my presentation -- with attribution of course.

I'll be talking about my favorite data fields, how to partner with development officers to collect the data, and how to report that data in a meaningful fashion.

And, I'm going to try to liveblog from the conference, but I won't make any promises.


*I was on painkillers when I thought of the title and concept. When I read the description, I couldn't remember whether I had written it. That said, I am enthusiastic about the topic!

Arty Data Mining Critique

Check out Personas, an art project hosted by MIT. It's a visually interesting critique of data mining. The project invites users to see "how the Internet sees them." The site "attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data."

The project is not a wholesale indictment of data mining -- though it's not very friendly toward data miners either -- but rather highlights the importance of smart and ethical design, and the vital role of the human brain in designing and implementing the results of data mining projects.

Netflix recommendation system = good; weaponized drone that makes autonomous decisions about targets = bad. (Or for that matter, a data mining project that uses name as the unique identifier = bad.)