Are we missing too many alumni with web surveys? (Part 2)

Guest post by Peter B. Wylie, with John Sammis

 

Download a printable PDF version of this paper: Are We Missing Too Many Alumni P2.

 

It seems everyone we know, no matter how young or old, has an email address or uses Facebook. So we might assume that nowadays online surveys will reliably deliver a representative sampling of a school’s alumni population.

 
 

In this guest post, Peter Wylie and John Sammis demonstrate that alumni available and willing to be polled online differ from non-online constituents in potentially significant ways. Although current practice tends towards online-only surveying, the evidence suggests this probably skews the conclusions we can draw about our constituencies, with key differences that go well beyond just age.

 
 

(This is “part 2” of an earlier piece. To download the first paper, click here: Are We Missing Too Many Alumni With Web Surveys?)

 
 

Again, the link for Part 2:  Are We Missing Too Many Alumni P2.

 
 

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Regular-season passing yardage and the NFL playoffs

Guest post by Peter B. Wylie, with John Sammis

 

How much is regular-season passing yardage related to success in the NFL playoffs? (Click link to download .PDF: Passing yardage in the NFL.)

 

Peter was really interested in finding out how strong the relationship might be between an NFL team’s passing during the regular season and its performance in the playoffs. There’s been plenty of talk about this relationship, but he wanted to see for himself.

 

A bit of a departure for CoolData, but still all about data and analysis … hope you enjoy!

 

Ready for a sobering look at your last five years of alumni giving?

Guest post by Peter B. Wylie and John Sammis

  

Download this discussion paper here: Sobering Look at last 5 fiscal years of alumni giving

 

My good friends Wylie and Sammis are at it again, digging into the data to ask some hard questions.

 

This time, their analysis shines a light on a concerning fact about higher education fundraising: A small group of donors from the past are responsible for the lion’s share of recent giving.

 

My first reaction on reading this paper was, well, that looks about right. A school’s best current donors have probably been donors for quite some time, and alumni participation is in decline all over North America. So?

 

The “so” is that we talk about new donor acquisition but are we really investing in it? Do we have any clue who’s going to replace those donors from the past and address the fact that our fundraising programs are leaky boats taking on water? Is there a future in focusing nearly exclusively on current loyal donors? (Answer: Sure, if loyal donors are immortal.)

 

A good start would be for you to get a handle on the situation at your institution by looking at your data as Wylie and Sammis have done for the schools in their discussion paper. Download it here: Sobering Look at last 5 fiscal years of alumni giving.

 

How to measure the rate of increasing giving for major donors

Not long ago, this question came up on the Prospect-DMM list, generating some discussion: How do you measure the rate of increasing giving for donors, i.e. their “velocity”? Can this be used to find significant donors who are poised to give more? This question got Peter Wylie thinking, and he came up with a simple way to calculate an index that is a variation on the concept of “recency” — like the ‘R’ in an RFM score, only much better.

This index should let you see that two donors whose lifetime giving is the same can differ markedly in terms of the recency of their giving. That will help you decide how to go after donors who are really on a roll.

You can download a printer-friendly PDF of Peter’s discussion paper here: An Index of Increasing Giving for Major Donors

 

A fresh look at RFM scoring

Guest post by Peter B. Wylie and John Sammis

Back in February and March, Kevin MacDonell published a couple of posts about RFM for this blog (Automate RFM scoring of your donors with this Python script and An all-SQL way to automate RFM scoring). If you’ve read these, you know Kevin was talking about a quick way to amass the data you need to compute measures of RECENCY, FREQUENCY, and MONETARY AMOUNT for a particular set of donors over the last five fiscal years.

But how useful, really, is RFM? This short paper highlights some key issues with RFM scoring, but ends on a positive note. Rather than chucking it out the window, we suggest a new twist that goes beyond RFM to something potentially much more useful.

Download the PDF here: Why We Are Not in Love With RFM

Census Zip Code data versus internal data as predictors of alumni giving

Guest post by Peter Wylie and John Sammis

Thanks to data available via the 2010 US Census, for any educational institution that provides us zip codes for the alums in its advancement database, we can compute such things as the median income and the median house value of the zip code in which the alum lives.

Now, we tend to focus on internal data rather than external data. For a very long time the two of us have been harping on something that may be getting a bit tiresome: the overemphasis on finding outside wealth data in major giving, and the underemphasis on looking at internal data. Our problem has been that we’ve never had a solid way to systematically compare these two sources of data as they relate to the prediction of giving in higher education.

John Sammis has done a yeoman’s job of finding a very reasonably priced source for this Census data as well as building some add-ons to our statistical software package – add-ons that allow us to manipulate the data in interesting ways. All this has happened within the last six months or so, and I’ve been having a ball playing around with this data, getting John’s opinions on what I’ve done, and then playing with the data some more.

The data for this piece come from four private, small to medium sized higher education institutions in the eastern half of the United States. We’ll show you a smidgeon of some of the things we’ve uncovered. We hope you’ll find it interesting, and we hope you’ll decide to do some playing of your own.

Download the full, printer-friendly PDF of our study here (free, no registration required): Census ZIP data Wylie & Sammis.