Predictive Modeling in Fundraising: Applications & Approaches
Channel: The DRIVE/conference
Date: 2014-03-19

The tools needed to build predictive models describing donor behavior are getting easier to use all the time. But getting fundraisers excited about the potential impact these models can have on the fundraising program may take some doing. In this presentation he'll share some examples of ways to demonstrate the usefulness of models that answer the fundraisers most basic questions: who will give and how much will they give.

John Paiva
Account Executive, Rapid Insight

John enjoys working with teams to build processes and systems that avoid problems. While there is a lot of focus on problem solving, how much better is it to avoid the problem to begin with? Over the past 25 years, he has worked as a manger in the Hospitality, Healthcare, Auto, and Big Box Retail industries. His success managing the large amount of data needed for success in each of these areas led him to his current work with Rapid Insight. John and Rapid Insight know that a company or institution will live and die by how well it makes use of the large amount of data available. Nonprofits and Higher Education are a focus of his work, and he believes we have a great opportunity to become more efficient with the data available to us. Working with customers nationwide, he assists with providing improved ways for delivering a better education for students, increasing funds received from donors, and increasing overall effectiveness. John currently lives in New Hampshire with his wife and daughter, working and playing in the White Mountains, and all they have to offer. With his daughter entering college in the Fall of 2014, his work has become even more important to him, as he has experienced first-hand the results of well executed systems, and those that are complete failures.

Mike Pasqua
Senior Director of Advancement Services, Mills College

Mike is an innovative problem solver with an extensive customer support background. He is an expert in designing and implementing Web-based workflow and reporting tools, communicating business requirements to IT organizations, and managing international support operations. Mike is currently the Senior Director of Advancement Services at Mills College in Oakland, California. He served as the Director of Advancement Services for 6 years at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and before that, he was the Director of Advancement Services at Colby-Sawyer College in New Hampshire. Mike has worked on a wide range of initiatives, including: * A 90% reduction in the number of ad-hoc data requests to IT. * Redesign of Annual Fund segmentation strategy based on donor behavior vs. donor demographic attributes. * Introduced predictive modeling within prospect research and integrated modeling techniques into the solicitation process.