Recently, I got to chat with Chelsea Drake and James Dye, who are both Data Analysts at the College of William & Mary, about the work they've been doing on campaign pyramids. For a more in-depth look at the functions that their campaign pyramids serve, and their process for building them, be sure to check out their presentation at our user conference or stay tuned for a webinar rebroadcast in July.
What is a campaign
pyramid’s function in your office?
CD: Right now we’re using the pyramids as a donor-centric
list of prospects. To give some background on the pyramids, we did a massive
data mining project to determine where our donors’ interests were. The end
result is a dynamic pyramid that updates as new gifts come in and as we get new
information about where their philanthropic interest lie. We use them as
accurate prospect lists.
JD: We had a bunch of people in our prospect pool and needed
to know where their interests were. For example, if they’re into Athletics but
graduated from the Business school, do we want to go after a split gift, or do
we say that their primary interest is athletics, so they should be doing the
ask? The pyramids help us decide which one we should try to raise money for.
They also help to set goals for each department and each school. So we’ll set a
goal and ask a question like ‘how many gifts do we need at different levels,
and prospects do we need to make up that pool and reach our goal?’
How do you set the
goals for each pyramid?
CD: We’re able create pyramids to test high, medium, and low
goals to see which one is most feasible for each unit and each campaign
overall.
JD: Each unit has three pyramids – they have a high goal,
say 120M if 100M is the medium or mid-range goal, and a low goal, which might be
something like 80M. The mid-range goal should be something they can accomplish
without too much effort and the low goal is what we think they’d get if they
only asked people we already knew. This allows us to see how much stretch we
need to do and how many people we need to identify in order to hit certain
monetary goals. The idea behind the project was to figure out where our
prospect pool’s interests were and where we need to do work and identify new
prospects to fill in gaps and holes.
What triggered your
interest in campaign pyramids?
CD: We started last summer, our Assistant VP of Operations wanted
to make sure we were being as donor-centric as possible. She knew we had some
information on interests but that we didn’t have a reporting tool that
identified which prospects should go with each interest. She knew I had an
analytical background and that’s how she chose to bring the project to me.
JD: Previous pyramids had been done at the university level.
For the college, we wanted to know who we had out there and how much money that
would bring in with specific gift ratings. But we were also asking things like
‘How much can we get for athletics?’ and ‘Who are the people who are interested
in athletics?’. That’s where it spawned into a donor-centric thing. We wanted
to know what our donors’ interests were, what they’ve given to in the past, and
on a program and unit based levels, who were the donors for each area.
Who builds the
pyramids in your office? How did you decide that?
CD: James and I do, and that was decided based on our
backgrounds. James has a programming and computer science background and I have
a background in research and analytics.
JD: We’re the programming and analytic people in our office
and were already working on data pools, but were brought onto this project
based on our skillset. Within our department, we’re the ones who generally work
with the data.
What’s your
administration’s take on the pyramids?
JD: They like them a lot. It gives them an idea of monetary
goals for each unit and school to stretch for and concrete lists of names. We
can show them the people we’ve identified, and if we sum up all of things we
have in a pyramid, we can see if the goal set for a department is realistic. It
helps them to see who’s out there and who’s in our database. They also use it
to present to a board of visitors in a slideshow on where we stand in a
campaign and how our numbers are at any given point. They can tell how many
people we’ve already identified and how many new people we need to identify to
meet a goal.
What advice would you
have for someone looking to undertake a project like this?
CD: One of the things that was really helpful for us as the
project started was having a good relationship with IT to fine tune what the
data files we get from them would look like. The key to doing this type of
analysis effectively is to have the best data that you’re able to get from your
system in the most consistent way possible. Also, you should absolutely plan
out what your goals are for the project before you get started.
JD: You have to know which data points out there you can
pull from and what would be relevant for your goal. Depending on the size of
the school, you might want to focus on a single unit pyramid to narrow down the
scope of what you want to do. You could start with a major gifts or annual fund
pyramid, for example. It’s about first defining your question, then looking at
the data to figure out which people to target and looking at the numbers to
establish what your monetary goals should be. It helps to nail out a template of what you want the end
result to look like before you start programming. We knew what we wanted our end result to be,
so then when we were programming forward, the question became ‘how do I fill out
these blanks where these numbers should be?’. This way, when you start
building, you’re able to visualize how to compile everything correctly
according to your template. Also make sure that you have a good team working on
the project, and that team members know what their role in the project is.
CD: Anytime you’re taking on a project like this, you want
to have the ability to talk to the managers or executives of your department to
make sure that your end result matches what they feel they need.
JD: Make sure it’s helpful for them. We’re numbers people.
We can make a page full of numbers and look at it and understand it, but
management might need something a little bit more nice looking. So the sheet we
create for them outputs to a single page with colors so that when we turn it
over to them, the information is logical and easy to read. It comes down to
knowing your audience.
