News and Resources
Using Social Media to Find Planned Gifts
It is becoming increasingly clear that social media can be a tremendous tool for annual giving shops seeking to engage donors. While annual giving has found value in social media, where does planned or major giving stand? Is there value waiting to be tapped? I believe...
The Forbes Nonprofit Council shares 5 ways to maximize your data insights
BWF's 7th annual survey of the fundraising analytics community found that the role of data analytics in fundraising is evolving. Successful shops are investing in more sophisticated tools and methodologies, and leadership is a growing consumer of data-driven insights....
Philanthropy Trends: A Look Back on 2016 and Towards 2017
2016 was a year of major world events from the U.S. presidential election to Brexit to the spread of the Zika virus to the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series! The world of philanthropy and fundraising was not without its own notable activities, trends, and events...
Can Machine Learning Crack This 4,000-Year-Old Mystery?
Be sure to check out this fascinating article about some cutting edge machine learning being used to decode the language used by the 4,000-year-old Indus Valley Civilization! For more than a century, thousands of examples of Indus "seals" - small tablets with a few...
Engaging High Net Worth Individuals and Families
Major Findings from the 2016 Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy In October, US Trust in partnership with the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy released the 2016 Study of High Net Worth Philanthropy. This report gives us insights into high net...
Coaching and Mentoring to Combat Turnover
Coaching and Mentoring Programs Can Increase Gift Revenue A young gift officer recently contacted her mentor, who thought the gift officer must be in a crisis. Quite the contrary. The young gift officer’s first words were an ecstatic "yay!!!" followed by cheers of...
Comparing Visualizations
How data is visually displayed can impact the understanding of trends and patterns and can help viewers retain information. Here is a blog post from Data Science Central on comparing visualizations using different tools such as SPSS, R, Tableau, and a few others....
Finding The Wealthy With Social Media
A Case Study: What nonprofits can learn about wealth targeting from selling investment real estate on Facebook. I feel strongly about the power of the tools and strategies available today to savvy digital marketers. To put myself to the test, I decided that I would...
Trump's Impact on Charitable Giving
In the aftermath of the November 8th election, non-profit organizations have been asking themselves the following questions about President-elect Trump's impact on charitable giving. How will President-elect Donald Trump's income tax rate proposals affect...
Analysis: Pivot tables
I have been playing around with the pivot_table function in the Python package, pandas. The reason for this is because I was using groupby and wanted to see the difference in functionality and how it could impact my work. Using the pivot_table function is a lot like...
Guidance For Digital and Social Fundraising in 2017
Introductions First Hello, fellow fundraising professional. My name is Barett Christensen, recently hired Senior Associate at Bentz Whaley Flessner. If you will humor me, before we get to the predictions for 2017, it seems a brief introduction may be in order. For the...
Engaging Nonprofit Board Members in Work That Matters
Boards Play an Important Role in Fundraising Boards play incredibly important roles in helping organizations fulfill their missions. One of the most important of these roles is helping organizations raise money. A recent study by the Nonprofit Research Collaborative...
Partners in Philanthropy: Hospital CEO/CDO
The December 2016 issue of Bentz Whaley Flessner's Points of Practice offers valuable insights about how hospital CEOs and CDOs can partner to grow their institutions. If you’re a chief development officer, we encourage you to share this piece with your CEO. Its...
Your Telefund Program: 4 Considerations Before Pulling the Plug
The Stanford solution. Stanford started quite the commotion when they announced the end of their telefund program a few weeks ago. This bold move has initiated an important dialogue regarding the future of phone programs in development offices. But before you go...
Formatting: Leading Zeros
How many times have you exported data and realized a little too late that the leading zeros in constituent IDs were no longer showing up? I know I have, and much to my chagrin I have had to re-send the file or spend time working through a process of making Excel or...