Reporting and Analytics

Understanding the data you have on your members gives you a powerful edge when it comes to fundraising. DMI gives you the keys so that you can unlock that knowledge.

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Solution

Cognos BI solution is a full suite of tools enabling marketers to make better and more profitable decisions. End users can create their own custom reports, dashboards, scorecards, charts, graphs, and pivot tables whenever and however they want.

Cognos 8 BI Solution has three advantages over traditional analytical tools:

Robust Analysis: Analyze what's driving your organization with data organized in logical categories such as fiscal periods, marketing channels, or lifecycles. Drill down from summary level data to transaction level detail or from one PowerCube to another. In addition, sophisticated time trending with built-in customizable time series lets you analyze what has changed over previous years, quarters, months and other critical measures.

Ease of Use: Cognos 8 BI's drag-and-drop technology allows even the least tech-savvy manager easily create detailed reports.

Easy to Distribute: Getting the information into the right hands quickly and easily is just as important as creating the report. Cognos 8 BI Solution has several built-in deliverability options. Reports with personalized content can be sent out on-demand to each recipient. Reports can also be scheduled to run based on time, calendar, events, or even external triggers and then sent to multiple destinations.

Two major features of Cognos 8 BI Solution are dashboards and scorecards.

Dashboards: Dashboards provide an at a glance view of business performance for many individuals within an organization. They give management a factual and timely window into performance, help indentify anomalies that could turn into significant business issues, and provide an entry point for digging deeper into root causes. Information is clearly presented using graphs, gauges, and charts.

Dashboards mean different things to different people. To some, a dashboard could mean a flash, interactive technology that promotes high levels of user involvement. To others, it's a static, at-a-glance report or drillable interface that makes it easy to derive additional insight. Cognos 8 BI Solution recognizes that users have different comfort levels with technologies and allows users to create dashboards to the level that they require.

Scorecards: Scorecards allow you to create and track metrics that are important to your organization. For example, you could create a gross revenue scorecard and track it against budget by region. Cognos 8 BI Solution lets you build and deploy scorecards quickly and easily using wizard technology.

Custom Analysis

Sometimes the questions you are asking require additional tools and/or additional time to answer. The team at DMI has many years of fundraising experience and is always available to help. This is in addition to analytical/statistical software that allows you to look at your data beyond standard RFM segmentation.

SPSS allows you to see your data at an entirely new level by using the following techniques:

Describing Your Data: Traditionally, non-profits focus on the "mean" as the measurement of central tendency to describe different variables such as gift amount and frequency-of-giving. Unfortunately, the mean is probably the weakest of all the possible measurements because it can be strongly influenced by outliers. In addition to the mean, SPSS will provide you with several measures of central tendency including the median and 5% trimmed median which are not influenced by outliers and therefore provide a more accurate view of your data.
Understanding how spread out from the mean each variable is can also give you valuable insight into your data. SPSS can easily give you this knowledge in the form of variances, standard deviations, ranges, and inter-quartile ranges.

Comparisons: Whether you are comparing test and control groups or before and after comparisons within a single group, SPSS can give you the statistical confidence to make crucial decisions. For example, on the surface a test sample may appear to outperform the control sample. However, because of the effect of sampling error, there is no way to know for sure whether the two samples are in fact different without performing a statistical test such as a T test. SPSS will also show you what the likely performance range (response rate and average gift) will be should you decide to roll out a test to the full population.

In addition to T tests, SPSS can also be used for Chi-square, Analysis-of-Variance (ANOVA), correlation, and non-parametric tests.

Predicting Outcomes: RFM segments are traditionally used in the non-profit world to determine which donors get selected for any given mailing. However, usually there are many other variables that have an impact in the performance of any given mailing. SPSS can be used to create Decision Trees that will help identify which other variables are affecting performance. Once the additional variables are chosen, they can be entered into the Decision Tree model which will show which segments within the variables are having the most influence on performance. These segments or "nodes" are then put into a gains chart to clearly show the cumulative effect of each additional segment.

Creating Strategic Segments: Identifying strategic segments is crucial to the long-term health of any donor file. Statistically different segments need different strategies in order to grow. The SPSS Cluster model can easily identify these unique segments based on variables ranging from behavioral to demographic.

The Mosaic Report Series

DMI offers a collection of analyses that will provide you with an unprecedented view of your donors.

Mosaic 360 Report: The Mosaic 360 Report provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your file by not only showing you where you are now, but also how you got there. This report includes metrics by Lifecycle, 5 Year Trends, Trends by Month, RFM, Donor Upgrade/Downgrade behavior and more!

Mosaic LTV Report: The Mosaic LTV Report segments your file by acquisition year. The first analysis shows net performance by subsequent year for the last 5 class segments. The second analysis will show how long an acquisition class takes to break even by breaking out donor performance by subsequent quarters after inception.

Mosaic Contact Cadence Report: The Mosaic Contact Cadence Report shows you how many times different donors are being contacted in a 12-month period and how those donors are performing. You may find that certain segments are being contacted too much and other segments not enough.

Mosaic Retention Report: The Mosaic Retention Report will provide you with valuable information on not only who is retained within various segments, but also who is lapsing off your file.

Mosaic Cluster Report: The Mosaic Cluster Report will provide you with an understanding of who is making up your donor base and how much are they contributing to the bottom line. Segments looked at include lifecycle, giving level, geographic, and combined variable clusters.

Crystal Ball Projection Tool: The Crystal Ball Projection Tool takes three years worth of averages and projects out what your file will look like over the next five years. But what takes this report to the next level is that it gives you the power to test up to five different scenarios against each other. For example, you can compare the effects of bringing in new donors vs. retaining more Multi-Year donors vs. increasing the frequency of giving for 2nd year donors. With marketing budget dollars at a premium, this report can help you decide where to invest those dollars.

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