We are consistently asked from foundations "who are your donors/constituents?" They are generally looking for the average age, gender, income level, geographic region of origin, etc. I have not been able to find a report in RE that will give me summary information for the constituents in my database. I would like to know what other organizations are doing to summarize their constituents and their donors. It seems like this would be a great feature to add in RE because it would lead to the ability to better target the individuals who fit in your donor profile. So, my question is two-fold: 1. Is it of value to your organization to build a profile of your donors/constituents? 2. What kind of data is your organization using to create a profile of your donorbase? Thank you for your help.

We have been doing a massive project to this end. Here is what we have done:

1) Contracted with a data services firm - not BB, somebody else - to get demographic info: income, age, gender.

2) Analyzed it ourselves -- using tallies in demographic reports + some strategic exporting and Excel analysis, pivot charts, et cetera.

It has been useful for us - allows us to confirm some assumptions and also forced us to look at some other things (for example, many of our donors are not giving at capacity, ie, we have a lot of small gift donors with large incomes.) This can inform strategies and allow us to make better choices in how we approach our donors.

 I didn't get good information back from the data enricher about what biases might exist in their data -- for example, were they more likely to match richer individuals, older individuals, et cetera. I wonder if other services would have this information or if I am just getting a little data-nerd about things.

 Qs we have been asking: average donor age, average donor income, average donor income by size of gift (individual vs major donor), average online vs offline donor profile, and others too.

Let me know if you want or need more information! This has been my major project for the month of August.

I would be interested in someone recommending a program they have used to pull data on their existing members and donor prospects.  Currently looking at Blackbaud Target Tags Donor Conversion Models. Prior to June this year, our organization never attempted to create a profile of its members.  We began with a simple survey (surveymonkey) to collect general demographic information, income level, publications they subscribe to, memberships they hold to other cultural organizations, etc.  We discoverd we had members who were giving $40 annually with incomes $100,000+.