To assist main reward officers concentrate on donors as a substitute of desk work, The Salvation Military Southern Territory has begun utilizing Microsoft Energy BI to construct highly effective dashboards for the group’s main giving program.
With 45 main reward officers and 26 deliberate giving officers—spanning from Maryland to Florida, west to Oklahoma and Texas—The Salvation Military wanted to streamline workflows and enhance lead technology for particular reward sorts and reward ranges. By extending the ability of its Blackbaud CRM™ platform with Energy BI, the workforce now sees extra centered details about their main giving prospects.
What Is Microsoft Energy BI?
A set of instruments, apps, and connectors that helps rework disconnected knowledge into clear, partaking, and interactive visuals, Energy BI means that you can pull from an open knowledge supply—may very well be from an Excel spreadsheet or a cloud-based CRM system or a federal database—so you possibly can extra simply combination, visualize, and interpret your knowledge. This lets you determine key insights and share them along with your fundraising workforce or stakeholders with a lot much less effort than pulling studies manually.
How Nonprofits Are Utilizing Energy BI
Nonprofit organizations and academic establishments typically work with knowledge from a number of sources. Energy BI will help organizations translate complicated knowledge into an motion plan for each workforce, from the finance workplace to fundraising. Listed here are some helpful Energy BI tasks for nonprofits:
- Creating program effectiveness studies
- Growing donor exercise studies
- Figuring out income traits
- Forecasting
- Amassing, organizing, and analyzing knowledge from exterior sources, equivalent to authorities research
- Creating state of affairs planning
- Managing prospect portfolios
- Knowledge modeling
Implementing Energy BI at The Salvation Military
Based in 1865, The Salvation Military has 1.8 million members and serves greater than 27 million individuals in 134 nations. The group presents help and support in pure disasters and likewise gives ongoing neighborhood packages to handle points equivalent to homelessness and meals insecurity.
Tim McCleary, CRM Director for The Salvation Military Southern Territory, mentioned the group’s 71 main and deliberate giving officers have portfolios assigned by geographic area throughout 15 states. Their collective annual purpose is $112.5 million.
“One of many advantages of the Energy BI platform is to have the ability to drill down at any stage throughout the group,” McCleary mentioned. “We are able to see how we’re doing from a territorial perspective, a command, a selected division, or a person.”
Ache Factors Addressed by Energy BI
With such a big fundraising workforce and a large database, The Salvation Military confronted three essential challenges that led them to undertake Energy BI instruments.
- Logging the work: Fundraisers wanted a foolproof approach to doc and share what they’re doing and the place.
- Manageable portfolio measurement: Prior to now, fundraisers would have as much as 500 members of their portfolios, which is simply too unwieldy for them to provide enough consideration to prime main giving prospects.
- Deeper use of know-how: Fundraisers wanted to leverage analytics in a lead-generation instrument, with out overcomplicating the know-how.
Constructing a Energy BI Undertaking
Earlier than adopting Energy BI instruments to assist the foremost giving workforce, The Salvation Military labored with Blackbaud to develop predictive mannequin scores primarily based on chance to provide and different standards.
- Principal Giving: Identifies the wealthiest prospects already in The Salvation Military’s database who’re making very massive presents to different organizations; every is assigned to one among 4 chance tiers, starting from $100,000 to $750,000 or extra.
- Main Giving: Identifies prospects with a chance rating as much as $100,000, however who are usually not principal giving prospects.
- Deliberate Giving: Contains everybody within the database, pinpointing chance for annuity giving, bequests, Donor Suggested Funds (DAFs), and charitable the rest trusts.
Lawrence Henze, Blackbaud senior principal analytics architect, mentioned The Salvation Military additionally applies Affluence Perception™, which makes use of previous giving and spending mixed with sociodemographic knowledge to foretell wealth traits and philanthropic affinity. Utilizing these analytics instruments, The Salvation Military has recognized greater than 150,000 prospects for midlevel and main giving and 30,000 for principal giving.
“You need to know if they’ve the potential to be a philanthropist or in the event that they’re only a informal donor,” Henze mentioned. “Our idea of philanthropist is mostly individuals who make annual presents of a minimum of 5 figures.”
Alternatively, informal donors pop up in your database yearly or so. Henze mentioned they could not warrant the time and advertising effort of a significant reward officer.
The Energy BI Lead Era Dashboard
With donor tiers, analytics, and a strong database in place, McCleary was able to see what he may do with Energy BI. His purpose was to create a lead technology instrument to marry predictive analytics from exterior sources with inside metrics equivalent to giving historical past to The Salvation Military to assist main reward officers determine best-fit prospects.
What did McCleary’s workforce construct? A simple-to-use dashboard. It’s a lead technology instrument that gives fundraisers a approach to filter prospects with search standards.
“Should you select, as an example, to have a look at the Principal Giving Rating, you will note donors who’ve the potential to provide us a six-figure reward,” McCleary mentioned.
Fundraisers can then apply extra filters to search out donors primarily based on extra standards, equivalent to:
- Giving historical past with The Salvation Military
- Donors with DAFs
- Latest enhance in giving velocity
“This provides us a approach to make some goal choices about the place we should always focus our time and power,” McCleary mentioned.
Enter from Workers Members
The purpose of including Energy BI instruments for lead technology was to simplify prospect identification and portfolio administration, with out requiring customers to be geniuses of software program integration. They will dive deep or they’ll use it for at-a-glance data.
“We need to make know-how simpler to make use of for our employees and extra environment friendly and efficient,” McCleary mentioned. “Now we have a variety of technophobes in our consumer base. They will have a look at the lead gen dashboard to their coronary heart’s content material. They will’t break something.”
McCleary relied on a gaggle of beta customers to check out the dashboard. He added filters and fields primarily based on their suggestions, together with a brand new integration with their e-mail system so there’s connection and communication between occasion calendars and every fundraiser’s prospect plan. Subsequent might be a roadmap instrument to plan out prospect visits for extra environment friendly journey throughout the territory.
“Now we have constructed a reasonably sophisticated dashboard, however from the viewing and utilizing perspective, it’s quite simple,” McCleary mentioned. “It’s simply filtering knowledge to a consumer’s particular instructions and their particular function.”
Recommendation for Adopting Energy BI Instruments
McCleary mentioned nonprofit organizations experimenting with Energy BI instruments ought to count on their extensibility and integration tasks to vary over time. It’s seemingly you’ll create a number of iterations of your challenge as you incorporate consumer suggestions. The Salvation Military created six variations of the lead gen dashboard its workforce is now utilizing. They began, the truth is, with a income challenge and labored their method as much as the extra complicated dashboard for main giving. Connecting with different Energy BI customers helped the workforce as they experimented.
“This has been a fantastic instrument for us,” McCleary mentioned. “We knew that it might be evolving over time. The ability of Energy BI platforms is admittedly spectacular. You are able to do so many issues with it, it’s extra a matter of what shouldn’t you achieve this you don’t make it too sophisticated or visually crowded.”
Wish to study extra? Watch the free webinar, Utilizing Energy BI and Predictive Analytics to Optimize Main Giving Operations.
