What is discovery and how it is accomplished? It’s easy to understand the business processes involved in fundraising and how they are used to maximize fundraising – especially on the face to face fundraising front. A “large purchase” requires a significant degree of interaction with a person. We like our fundraisers to talk to other people. Most of us track this in some fashion and have some basic metrics in place. The science of identification focuses on which people are likely and have the capacity to give us money. The challenge is to determine what happens “in between” the various stages. How do we filter the list down to those individuals where we have a workable number that we can actually visit? At the macro level surveying, marketing studies and giving histories can do the initial filtering. Analytics have greatly enhanced the piece by adding elements of predictability into our scoring and database systems so at a minimum we have segments of people that we can target our activities. What does a personal…

Reporting is changing – in the conventional sense – papers/pages – to a more visual and data discovery approach. Visual analytics has become a new science. From reports to the idea of reporting solutions – integrated, based on a data warehouse as a foundation, utilizing data cubes and other structures that allow business analysts and even casual users to ease into the world of business intelligence – an approach to information that is much more iterative and visual.

Most users are challenged with reports. Even if the reports utilize dropdowns, users don’t always understand what the prompts will give them. The information output is still “fixed” in that it is in a static format on a page. Users are more familiar with tools such as Excel which allow them to sort and format information in ways that simply can’t be provided by static reports. How do we bridge the gap between standard reporting and data discovery while still providing the degree of control we need to protect users from mistakes they might make…