Knowledge GraphDigest

Understanding your data is the key to almost any kind of fundraising. While we talked about VC fundraising in a previous post, we want to explore some other forms of fundraising. In this post we’ll talk about charitable fundraising. We will use KgBase to create a graph of donors, projects, and donations in order to understand which donors are right for certain projects.

We begin by importing our donor list, their donations, and the projects they supported into KgBase. Our goal is to define what kind of projects they supported - healthcare, education, makerspaces, etc. - and then assess what those donors prefer to support.

To build our demo database we entered the names of potential donors, the amounts they donated, and their favorite projects. Before, if you wanted to know if a potential donor would support, say, an afterschool program or the like, the best you could do was search a spreadsheet. Now, thanks to KgBase, you can look up specific projects and map the donors that prefered certain projects over many others. This lets us assess who would be a good contact for a future fundraising campaign.

In our demo database we have assigned certain projects with type tags. These tags allow us to associate projects together, clustering educational projects with other educational projects, for example, and allowing for a deeper understanding of donor behavior.

You can also import pre-qualified lists of potential donors that you can obtain from other sources to further expand your fundraising efforts.

The data collection requirements are minimal in this case and we believe that any average organization will be able to easily find the information necessary in their current files. KgBase also allows you to import Facebook data in order to target online donors.

Using tools like these to approach willing donors is key to maximizing your potential fundraising activity. The fundraisers we’ve talked to often use a spray-and-pray approach to fundraising, sending hundreds of emails or, worse, letters to donors who ultimately just bin the correspondence. Instead of wasting resources on mail or goodwill and time on email, KgBase can automate outreach and make it more effective.

In this time of pandemic, we’d love to make our tool available to anyone who is trying to raise money locally or globally. It is obviously only one simple tool in the fundraisers toolbox but we like to think it can be helpful in your efforts. See the latest vendors who are helping the cause - knowledge graphs to fight COVID19. If you would like to talk to one of our data experts, please drop us a line at contact@kgbase.com and we’ll be in touch as soon as possible.