Fundraising: Data Coding Age Ranges To Upgrade Donors

By Bill Farr
Through perseverance, hard work, and skillful efforts in sharing your organization's story with folks, you've developed a group of donors who respond each year to an appeal by writing a $50 check. Yet something tugs at you. You've got a group of dedicated repeat donors. But can you move some of them to higher giving levels? Can you turn $50 donors into $250 donors? If you know or can learn the age of your donors, it is highly likely that you can do it.

You might have come across data mining guru Peter B. Wylie's essays on the Web or own a copy of his data mining book published by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). He focuses on higher education and as such, his clients have data collecting advantages compared to most nonprofits. That advantage is that their target prospects are largely alumni and they are more likely to possess personal information on folks in their database. With this information, Wylie has uncovered many striking patterns that suggest universities can turn non-donor alumni into donors, and low-level donors into higher-level donors.

Perhaps your organization doesn't have the advantages a college has with regards to data collection. But, you have one advantage. Your sole concern is discovering which of your repeat donors can give larger gifts. You don't have to turn non-donors into donors, or bring back Last Year But Not This, (LYBUNTs) or Same Year But Not This (SYBUNTs) donors.

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You have a pool of motivated donors. And what is amazing in Wylie's work is the consistency in which age plays a factor in giving. By far, the most money given to his clients and his case studies comes from donors older than 60 years of age.

We can guess some reasons for this: education costs for the children of over-60 folks are likely finished, income levels are fairly high pre-retirement, housing expenses may lessen as homes are paid off. No matter the reasons, your organization will want to learn the ages of its fundraising base.

Organizations that subscribe to Alumnifinder can obtain ages on many folks. Screening companies can also do this for you. But more cost effectively, you can survey your steady donors in your next appeal. Do a Microsoft Access query from your database to pull your donors who have contributed $50 for the past three years and include a survey with your next solicitation to these folks. Ask them what they like about your organization, what inspires them to give, what they want to learn more about, and so forth. And at the bottom, ask them to check their age range: 21-25, 26-30, and so forth.

Code all those respondents in the "over 60" groups as "over 60" in your database. Have your IT staff code those who fall in younger age groups to become "over 60" in the respective time frame: say, three years for the folks 56-60 group, eight years for the 51-55 group, and so forth. What you want is something that moves folks into this category as they age.

Now take those survey responses that give you reasons why your steady donors are steady donors, and write an appeal that hits those points delicately yet powerfully. Thank them for their steady, long time support to your organization, praise them for their commitment to your cause and their generosity and ask them for a larger gift.

Decide your strategy: will this be a mail solicitation, or mail with a telephone follow-up, etc.? Do an Microsoft Access query pulling donors who contributed for the past three years and who are older than 60 years of age. Treat them well. Thank them by telephone if possible. Personalize written thank you letters. Let them know they are valued.

The beauty of this system is that, thanks to your coding of age ranges, you'll have new pools of motivated older than-60 donors being added every few years. Its successes could also suggest new populations to consider for solicitation. As repeat donors move up to higher giving levels through this, you could geocode them and consider targeting folks living near the good donors.

The site www.batchgeocode.com is effective for small projects. It is free, easy to use no matter the level of the user's technological skill, works effortlessly with Google Earth, and makes bringing the coding into an established database a fairly easy process. This system also helps identify potential major gift prospects for your organization. Those $50 donors who become $250 donors are prime candidates for prospect research. Who knows? A little effort now can lead to large dividends for your organization down the road.

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Bill Farr is a prospect researcher at Concordia University in Chicago. His email address is: bill.farr@cuchicago.edu