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Recently, Statistics Canada posted their yearly update to their lovely dataset: "Summary of charitable donors". I really like it, because it gives you a stark perspective on the state of trackable charitable giving in Canada. I've been following it yearly and used this year's update to refresh a

Introduction Go on Twitter and search up the #GivingTuesday hashtag and you'll find a never-ending torrent of tweets by non-profits trying to get the attention of digital passersby. Given how jam-packed the market is, and how short peoples’ attention spans are on Twitter, if there’s anything a

This is a story about fundraising, told with the benefit of open data from Elections Canada. As you probably guessed, it's also a story motivated by COVID-19. As we know, the pandemic had its early roots in late 2019, but didn't become a major public concern in Canada until early 2020. Before

I think it's pretty much axiomatic that kids are expensive! However, how does that affect charitable giving? That's the topic of this post. I was able to find an interesting dataset from Statistics Canada which was created based on charitable giving data from 2013 (I know, I know. It's quite old

Apologies for invoking Jeff Foxworthy, but I assure you the rest of my blog post is quite serious! Over the course of my career, I've done a lot of major gift prospect models.  After doing enough of them, I've noticed some commonalities in terms of the key question of what information you can use

Today I had a really fun time hosting a digital roundtable on Prospect Research with a bunch of really bright professionals.  During the spoken panel discussion, there was also a lively chat conversation as well!  I wanted to provide a listing of what I thought were helpful resources and discussion

This week I started a new data science contract for a post-secondary institution in the US. The idea is to build a major gift prospect model that predicts likelihood of a donor responding to a high level gift ask. I've done many of them over the years, and frankly, I still love them. Any time I

Table of Contents Introduction Sector Trends Canadian Charities Recession Dashboard Video Recording of Convo with Anne Rosenfield about 2008 Major Gifts Fundraising Introduction As many of you probably know, this story starts in the United States of America. In response to the recession