Global Fundraising Benchmarking
Adroit Data & Insight have developed a global fundraising benchmarking and platform for a consortium of major NGOs. The benchmarking project in 2017 involved over 80 organisations and markets. This includes European, Asian, North & South American markets, and allow the NGOs to understand in detail how they are performing in their individual fundraising. Adroit have developed a large base of metrics for each NGO to support analysis of their fundraising program based on their actual gift transactional data, and other information held at the anonymised account or supporter level, which is processed and normalised. Users span the globe and can access and interrogate the dataset on a 24-7 basis as the system is hosted in a secure data centre, and the FastStats application is web-based.
Adroit have revolutionised the benchmarking deliverables by engineering the available data and developing specific insight and applications aimed at senior fundraisers through several applications. This included developing a SQL warehouse with SSIS load packages, a linked FastStats system and also an Excel VBA application called Indigo. The latter is loaded from the FastStats analytics system which also can be accessed by each organisations analysts to drill down to more detailed and adhoc analysis. This allows different users to access information from the same dataset and gain insight relevant to their markets. The applications are now being used globally by hundreds of fundraisers to better understand the dynamics in their market and how they rank against similar organisations. Adroit provide training, support and user forums for each market.
We will be repeating the exercise, and are reviewing the learnings made in 2017. Essentially we have now got knowledge on 80+ different source systems, their intricacies, and will apply developed code base to make extraction and transformation of data. We are improving the audit supply process to add more "error" trapping in the underlying data. Getting correct data supply and normalisation is the biggest challenge in the project.
