Looking at the title to my blog post, you might be wondering about the rationale behind such blasphemous words. Let me try to explain. When it comes to capturing the hearts and minds of your donors during a particular fundraising campaign, stories do indeed reign supreme. We are all of us wired
When industry standard doesn’t make enough sense
Recently I was finishing off an online interactive dashboard for a client. In various reports in the dashboard, I wanted to use a statistical metric called a median in addition to using the average. The median of a dataset is always defined as the value that splits the data evenly into 2 groups,
How to Win Campaigns and Influence People
Intro Every non-profit has to do it. Select or segment the right donors for the right purpose at the right time. You want to have the best chance at getting good results and not have to waste time and money in the process. This blog post will go through two methods of doing this, RFM
Reflections of a Data Nerd on Business Development
It's a new year, and I'm feeling the need to reflect on my past business development progress. When I started my business in 2017, I seriously thought that in order to get business all I had to do was mail people, email people, and call people - cold contacts, in other words. Many months and
Lessons I’ve Learned Making 2 Online Dashboards
Intro Hands down, the biggest and most beneficial challenges I've taken on in my business has been when I was contracted by 2 different organizations to create interactive online fundraising campaign dashboards. Simply put, a dashboard is a method of displaying summary information to the viewer
Canadian Donor Dashboard – 2020 Edition
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
#GivingTuesday tweets that got noticed vs those that didn’t
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
2020: The year a wrecking ball came for Canada’s federal political parties
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