Ops Insights #027 Screening and Scoring

October 27, 2023 | Read Time: 4 minutes | Written by Jenny Kleintop

Happy Fabulous Friday. Thank you for being here and taking the time to continue to build, grow, and accelerate your expertise. Today we are going to talk about screenings and scorings.

Finding and using research tools that prioritize engagement and likelihood over wealth is essential in your fundraising efforts. Just because someone is wealthy does not mean they care about your cause to donate anything. And those who care greatly about your cause may give everything they have. Which means it’s important to do both.

The tools these days are more advanced in identifying likelihood and helping you hyper-personalize your outreach. It’s worth it to try them out.

Explanations

Engagement/Interest Scoring: These scores show how engaged someone is with your institution. Higher engagement signifies a higher interest or desire to give to your institution. To do the scoring, you select specific data points and give each data point a score based on which criteria they meet (an example is below). The higher the combined score, the higher the engagement or interest. This is a static model, meaning the criteria does not change, and it’s a moment-in-time analysis.

Likelihood Scoring: These are sometimes referred to as likelihood screenings if you use a vendor. Some institutions develop their own internally, but with the advanced tools on the market today, it’s more effective and efficient to use vendors. They also have access to a much larger data set, and if they use artificial intelligence, the models are continuously improving as more data is fed into them. Which means they are not static models like our engagement scores above. Likelihood typically means the model looks at various data points from past givers and compares them to the data points on your names. The higher the similarities, the higher the likelihood, meaning a person is more likely to give a gift than another person.

Wealth Screenings: These are the most widely used historically and are still heavily used today. These are outsourced to a wealth screening vendor and provide data points based on what the vendor could find in the public domain on that person. These indicate how much a person could give based on their wealth. Some vendors also provide you with a capacity based on gifts the person has philanthropically given to any organization where information can be found.

What Does All This Mean?

If you are not running wealth screenings, you want to look into starting. If you are doing wealth screenings, good job! Now it’s time to add engagement and likelihood scoring. The best option is to use all three in conjunction. However, if you are not able to do all of them, start with one and work up to all three.

Take Action

Here’s how you can get started:

#1: If you do not have some version of a routine wealth screening, you want to consider putting one in place, as this is your first step.

#2: Once you have one in place, ask your wealth screening vendor what they have available today regarding engagement and likelihood scorings. Many vendors have added predictive modeling and artificial intelligence tools to make predictions and provide you with additional data points to utilize.

#3: If it’s not in your budget, start to pull together information to make the case. Here’s an excellent place to start: Ops Insights #007. You can also talk to peer institutions to gather examples of benefits to get buy-in. Pulling best practices to support your case also helps.

Engagement Score Models Example

Here is an example of engagement score models to help you get started:


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Ops Insights #028 Use CUE to Strengthen the Partnership

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Ops Insights #026 Research Profiles