Introduction
Welcome! The main purpose of DonorFocus is to use your NeonCRM database to help you zero in on the annual giving donors most likely to bring value to your organization. When you contact only those donors most likely to respond, you waste considerably less money on your direct marketing campaigns and get a significantly higher donation return for your investment. The app does this by creating three predictive models that score each of your donors based on their annual giving:
Renew Score Model: Likelihood to renew their giving next year
UPG Score Model: Likelihood to upgrade their giving next year
Churn Score Model: Likelihood to churn next year
React Score Model: Likelihood to reactivate next year if they’ve lapsed
Using these scores, the app will recommend what you should do for each donor as a next step:
Churn Risk, Steward Carefully
Renew, Same Ask
Renew, Upgrade Ask Amount
Reactivate, Same Ask
Solicit with Extreme Caution
Once the scoring is finished (it shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes at the longest), you can then download a list of your donor IDs, scored and labelled by recommended next step!
Registering for DonorFocus & Your NeonCRM API Key
When you register for an account to use DonorFocus (online registration form here) you will see an optional text entry field that allows you to enter in your NeonCRM API key. See below for a screenshot of the field.
The API key is a lengthy sequence of letters and numbers that will allow DonorFocus to pull data from your NeonCRM database. For information on how to retrieve the API key for your organization, please refer to the documentation below:
API Keys
Which fields are retrieved from your neoncrm database?
The only data DonorFocus downloads from your NeonCRM database comes from the following fields in your Donations table:
- Account ID
- Donation Date
- Donation Amount
- Campaign Code
- First Donation Date
- Campaign Purpose
- Fund Code
Summary of Recommendations
Once you’ve clicked ‘Download and Go‘ and generated models for your data, this tab will show you a graph containing counts of how many donors fell into each recommended action category. The graph is reactive in that if you want to solicit fewer donors for renewal and reactivation, decrease the slider value (at the bottom left) and the numbers in each ‘renew’ and ‘reactivate’ action group will in turn decrease. If the number of people in the “Solicit with Extreme Caution” segment is too large for your liking, you can increase the number, shown under “Feeling confident?”, up to 3, and this will draw people out of the segment on the basis of their last year of donation.
Once you are satisfied with the scoring and recommendations, click the ‘Download a list..’ button to download a list of your donor IDs scored according to the three models along with recommended next steps for each donor.
Please monitor the ‘Warning Messages’ section for helpful notifications of whether there were any problems processing and modeling your data along the way.
Donor summary by recommendations
As soon as the app has created recommendations for you, this tab will display a helpful statistical summary table of the donors who fall into each recommended action group. This table is meant to answer the question “Who are the people best suited to each recommended action?”
The metrics in the table are aggregated on the basis of either calendar, or fiscal year. This depends on how each organization using the app operates.
A few points of clarification:
– Average Last Year of Giving means when the donors in that group tended to give their most recent gift. In groups like “Reactivate, Same Ask” and “Solicit with Extreme Caution”, there are donors who last gave in very different years. This measure summarizes the average of those years.
– Median is the middle point in a group of numbers. It’s like the average, except it’s less influenced by extreme outliers like the average is.
– Average Years of Donation on File summarizes the number of years during which donors were actively giving. For example, if the file submitted has 10 years of history in total, and “Donor A” gave during 4 of them, then they would have 4 years of donation on file.
Giving preference explorer
- Largest last appeal
- This is simply the top 5 appeals to which donors gave their largest gift amounts in their most recent year on file.
- Lifetime preference by appeal type
- Here you will find the top 5 appeal type codes to which donors gave the most of their money across their entire lifetime on file.
- Lifetime preference by fund type
- Here you will find the top 5 fund type codes to which donors gave the most of their money across their entire lifetime on file.
Using your donorfocus recommendations
Once you click “Download a list of your scored Donor IDs”, your computer will download a CSV data file where each row represents a donor (the ID is the first column) and each column is a characteristic of those donors.
Although you might want to create a custom communications strategy on the basis of any one of these characteristics, the core columns that will help you with your donor communications strategy are “Recommended_Action” and “Recommended_Action_Expanded”. The first column contains the recommended actions that you saw in the first graph on the main screen of DonorFocus. The second column alters these recommendations on the basis of whether or not each donor is a new donor (defined as someone who has only ever given 1 gift in their lifetime on file).
To use these recommendations, you need to create one or two custom account fields in NeonCRM (depending on whether you want to use one or both recommendation fields). To read about how to create custom account fields, see here. For documentation on how to import data into NeonCRM, see here. Once your recommendations are imported, you can then use them as you would any other piece of data on your donors in your subsequent campaigns.