By admin on
9/18/2008
One of the tenets of great programs is that we measure everything we do and use these analytics and related tools to make improvements.
We all have campaign to date totals, year to date, this year vs. last year, fundraising by donor interest and designation and more.
Activity based metrics such as how many records have we updates, what is our average receipting times and similar are less common. It’s ironic that activity leads to investment, but we don’t have nearly the same amounts of focus that we do on bottom line numbers even though activity based metrics are just as important to “sell” our ideas. For example, a slipping addressable rate may be used to sell a board or governance body on the idea of using data tracing servi ...
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By admin on
5/18/2008
One of the first steps is to do a Google search which will bring up most of the vendors:
higher education business intelligence
business intelligence
etc.
< ...
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By admin on
6/30/2006
The Quality of your Data Warehouse
The Quality of your Reporting
The Quality of your Information
After you create your data warehouse, and use it for a while, it is inevitable that you will reach a point where you are experiencing a certain degree of anarchy.
This is especially true if you have a larger team, since not all team members can communicate equally with all others all the time.
Building a data warehouse is part art and part science. Although you may decide ...
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By admin on
12/1/2005
Some interesting listserv postings on whether telemarketing staff are using some of the free online services such as Facebook to help manage interactions with their telemarketing staff.
Responses included setting up Facebook clubs for callers, but needing to ensure that any information posted on Facebook should not be confidential. Facebook is more useful for asking if someone wants to take over a shift etc.
Other responses included using a blog, and the fact that there are a number of sites where you can get free blogs. Again, useful suggestion, but probably better contolled in house because of confidentiality, and the need to assign individual logins and passwords.
Microsoft’s Sharepoint is also another way to do this. You can build sites very easily, deploy reporting components directly into the portal and much more. I ...
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By admin on
11/1/2005
Business Intelligence Lowdown
Blog on business intelligence with ongoing commentary presented by Mini Singh. Good general source postings with links on BI and related topics such as data mining, data warehousing, data cleansing and more ...
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By admin on
10/1/2005
As we move further into the busy season, many of us will have the need for more annual fund reporting, which always has its challenges.
- Differences between summary annual fund reports for executives, summary reports for colleges, and detailed annual fund reports going to various constituency offices and individual fundraisers.
- You don't want to have annual fund or other staff spending time reformatting reports, although at the same time you need to provide slice and dice capabilities for the more complex analysis that annual fund typically requires.
- The need for detailed analysis also makes the distribution of details problematic, as everyone will tend to come up with different results once they start manipulating data in their own spreadsheets.
- Complex terminology, complex data models, complex an ...
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By admin on
9/1/2005
From a seminar by Dr. Ralph Kimball, one of the primary initiaters of the modern data warehouse.
Looking for the truth as long as it takes. As opposed to scientists and philosophers, an engineer has to build something that works and has to deliver it.
Beliefs that affect data warehousing:
1. The data warehouse will only be successful if your users like it.
2. The data warehouse task is distressingly difficult.
- You need to like end users.
- You need to understand what they do.
- You need to be interested in their cognitive psychology.
- You need to be interested in their business world.
- You need to understand technology.
- You need to be a good manager.
3. A data warehouse is a project ...
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By admin on
9/1/2005
At the Advancement Academy in August, Laurent de Janvry did a presentation on how the University of California, Berkeley used a combination of surveys, data mining and modeling techniques to re-evaluate how target groups were being communicated with and solicited.
Laurent has shared his presentations and they are certainly worth reviewing to see how you can use some similar methodologies to help evaluate your own programs.
During his presentation he also stated, that it's important for us to develop our own models, and the models that worked at Berkeley will not necessarily work in our own shops. The presentations do provide a very good starting point for your own.
Links to the presentations are on the Reports< ...
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By admin on
8/1/2005
Your data warehouse must be able to do all of these things:
- Drill Down (Gracefully, all the way using descriptive attributes)
- Drill Across (Transparent at query time)
- Handle Time (Time variance, evolving profiles, old descriptions and maintaining historical track records.
All of this takes standard re-usable logic. You don't want to have to program your applications individually.
The drilldown/across design will all be based on predictable dimensional structures, which should also be set up to be shared among different tables.
Good articulated planning and design will greatly facilitate the usefulness of your data warehouse as you enhance and add to the functionality over time.
Have a look at ...
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