Dogs & Donor Data

A dog's ability to smell is far more advanced than ours. An average dog has a sense of smell that is about 100,000 times more sensitive than her owner's 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 working with data.

We human information processors do the same thing with our donor data. We sniff around our donor management system 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 zip code and relationship sniffs.

Just like our canine friends, we human nonprofit folks 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.

To hone your donor data instincts - keep on sniffin'. You'll be processing data as fast as your four-legged best friend in no time.

Happy data sniffing!