Where’s your institution on the Culture of Analytics Ladder?

I’m laying on the couch with a bad head cold, and there’s a mix of snow and rain in the forecast. Time to curl up with my laptop and a cup of tea. I’ve got a question for you!

Not long ago I asked you to give me examples of institutions you’re aware of that are shining examples of institution-wide data-driven decision making. I was grateful for the responses, but no single institution was named twice. A few people offered an opinion about how their own organizations size up, which I found interesting.

So let’s explore that a bit more with a quick and anonymous poll: Where do you think your non-profit organization or institution fits on the Culture of Analytics Ladder? (That’s CoAL for short … but no need to be so formal. I totally made this up under the influence of cold medication.) Don’t over think it. Just pick whatever stage you feel your org or institution occupies.

The categories may seem a bit vague. If it’s any help, by “analysis” or “analytics” I am referring to the process of sifting through large quantities of data in search of patterns that lead to insights, primarily about your constituents. I am NOT referring to reporting. In fact I want you to ignore a lot of the day-to-day processes that involve data but are not really “analysis,” including: data entry, gift accounting, appeal segmentation, reporting on historical results, preparation of financials, and so on.

I am thinking more along the lines of modelling for the prediction of behaviours (which group of constituents are most likely to engage in such-and-so a behaviour?), prediction of future results (i.e., forecasting), open-ended exploration of constituent data in search of “clusters”, and and any other variety of data work that would be called on to make a decision about what to do in the future, as opposed to documenting what happened in the past. I am uncertain whether A/B split testing fits my definition of analysis, but let’s be generous and say that it does.

A couple of other pointers:

• If you work for, say, a large university advancement department and aren’t sure whether analytics is used in other departments such as student admissions or recruitment, then answer just for your department. Same thing if you work for a regional office of a large non-profit and aren’t sure about the big picture.
• If you have little or no in-house expertise, but occasionally hire a vendor to produce predictive modelling scores, then you might answer “6” — but only if those scores are actually being well used.

Here we go.