Note from ProspectResearch.com: Nicole Bechard is a Product Manager for Modeling Products at Target Analytics. You may reach her at nicole.bechard@blackbaud.com. Recently the attention of the entire country was captured by a machine, in fact a very smart super computer named Watson, and its deep analytics capabilities.  As a self-proclaimed analytics geek, I quickly marked [...]

Note from ProspectResearch.com: Kevin MacDonell from Dalhousie University kindly agreed to write a guest post showcasing his predictive modeling and prospect research knowledge. You may visit his blog at http://cooldata.wordpress.com. Guest Post from Kevin MacDonell: Lacking databases full of alumni information, nonprofits can’t do predictive modeling at the same level as their peers in higher education. I’ve [...]

While it seems almost impossible that a donor’s wishes would be ignored, it happened recently in Nevada.   The donor, Ray Styles, placed $2.5-million in a donor-advised fund with the Friends of Fiji (a California-based fund).  The fund administrator made gifts of $600,000 from the fund to pay its two directors.  When Mr. Styles objected and [...]

Engagement.  Stewardship.  Relationship building.  People give to people.  Words and phrases heard frequently in Development circles.  But, what does it all mean?  And how important are these concepts actually to our major donors?  Dini Partners’ , a fundraising management and consulting firm, recently released a study on Giving in 2011.  The survey reached out to [...]

Those of us who have been “in the business” for a while probably can’t even count the number of times we have been asked “How did you ever get into development?”  Of course, the first hurdle is getting others to understand what exactly “development” is.  After nearly 30 years “in the profession”, I still frequently [...]

There are many reasons why Americans may use a post office box as their primary address.  They may live in a rural area that the post office does not serve.  They may be concerned about identity theft.  Or they may have a home business and prefer not to list their home address in publications. In [...]