Data Dog

A dog's ability to smell is far more advanced than our mere human sense of smell.

An average dog has a sense of smell that is about 100,000 times more sensitive than her owner's. This is partly because dog noses contain 150 million olfactory receptors while human noses only have 5 million. On top of that, dogs devote about 30% of their brain mass to the detection and identification of scents, while humans a mere 5%.

With a quick sniff, a dog knows if a new friend is male or female, happy or aggressive, healthy or ill, and even what another dog likes to eat. If, after a pooch sniffs out a situation and decides to get a little closer, more detailed information is gathered and processed in an instant.

That's a whole lot of data processing power in our pups! You might say our dogs have an instinct for analyzing data.

We do the same thing with our donor data. We sniff around our donor database to determine the financial health of our donors and prospects through gift history, ratings, and wealth screens.

We know if a prospect will be a good match for our organization's mission by smelling for propensity, affinity, and capacity as well as recency, frequency, and monetary.

We become aware of a donor's surroundings and others who may be around them with a whiff of zip codes and relationships.

Just like our canine friends, we nonprofit humans breathe in our organization's data to make a charitable match between prospect and mission. Hopefully a lifelong philanthropic companion for our organization is what we come across.

So, keep on sniffin'. You'll be processing data as fast as our four-legged best friends in no time.