Donorology

Hey you guys! Here's a question posted to the Facebook RE support group last week (but I've seen it many times): "How can I compare my donor age demographics to what they were 10 years ago?"   RE isn't exactly built to answer that question. With a couple of calculated fields in Tableau, you can quickly visualize this comparison from a simple RE export.  Check it out here .   What do you think?  Comments are welcome! Next time, I'll discuss ways to display the dates of donors' first gifts and perform some quick data analysis. I will also do it in a fraction of the time it would have taken to export this from RE as a summary field. Yours in Data -Dave

 Hey you guys! Last Spring, I did a five-part series on making a simple data warehouse for use with your choice of business intelligence programs. Forgive the audio and video quality. My interest is in getting the content into the hands of people who need it, so  I tend to skimp on the polish. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Enjoy! Yours in Data, -Dave

Hey you guys! (in my best Electric Company yell) Here's my first video for the YouTube channel.  I think the most common question I see on the Facebook Raiser's Edge support group is "How can I get a list of constituents and how many years they gave during any given number of years?"  You can use many tools to answer this question, but I love being able to take a data set and just dive into it with Tableau. Nothing else really compares for me.  This solution works with any donor data system, by the way.  Check it out here . Yours in data -Dave

 I prefer to do videos but on those rare occasions I like to write you can find my attempts here. Most of my content will end up on the YouTube channel .   Why Tableau?  Because it’s clean and I think most non-techie people will find it a bit less bewildering than the alternatives. Tableau Public is free and now allows for saving files to local storage. You still have to sign up for an account, but other than that you can save files locally if you desire.  It does just about everything you could want in a free product.  I hope to show a number of techniques for things like retention, donor growth, cost per dollar raised, ROI, conversion, lifetime value, and more.  Yours in data, -Dave