Donors to nonprofits increasingly suffer from solicitation fatigue when charities canvass them several times a year asking for gifts. With the advent of more personalized web pages and online advertising targeting their audience, charities must rethink communication channels, prospect segmenting, and engagement efforts. Additionally, gift officers have a larger need to work with the best prospects for cultivation and solicitation in an era where travel is more expensive and gift officer portfolios are being reduced in size to afford deeper cultivation. The tools needed to address these trends are under the analytics umbrella.

In this online course, you'll be introduced to R, a free statistics and data processing package that has been developed by hundreds of programmers over time.

Using R, you will work several exercises to build skills in visualization, data exploration, donor modeling, and prospect identification modeling. You'll watch theory and demonstration videos, then complete analytics exercises on your own data. Once you finish the exercises and quizzes, you'll be able to estimate an ask amount for your prospect pool and identify prospects most likely to make a major gift.

Class outcomes include donor models that you will derive from your own prospect pool.

The course offers:

Lectures on concepts and techniques
Video demonstrating how to do each exercise to cement your skills
R script for the exercises so that you can check your own programming
Resource list relevant to each topic, including recommended books, videos, and other documents
Comments section where you can ask questions and read other student questions and Staupell answers

Your outcomes will be:

A linear regression model of the highest likely gift from each prospect to set ask amounts
A probability equation for each prospect's likelihood to make a major gift

Hey there—welcome in!