As fundraisers, we know, we live it, we breathe it: building a pipeline to grow programs, portfolios, and, ultimately, revenue for our organization. By using personalized affinity scoring, organizations are able to define how their pipeline is information.

And not just for one program, but usually many: Principal and Major Gifts, Annual Fund, Events, Planned Giving, Corporate Giving, etc.  It most cases, the right prospects for each of these programs all tend to give differently and, therefore, require a more personalized approach to assessing prospects for pipeline through affinity.  

Now consider 3 aspects of what it takes to measure a credible prospect, regardless of program:

• Capacity: Wealth and Financial Ability

• Inclination: Propensity or Likelihood to Give

• Affinity: Demonstrated Engagement and interest

In summarized terms:

1. Capacity uses publicly available wealth information to determine how much a constituent might be able to give to the organization.  Capacity is built built from confirmed data sources and from known assets to the organization

   
   

2. Inclination The same sources of information can also leverage known gifts to other organizations that can be used to determine if and how someone is philanthropic.  Often these are in the form models or another proprietary score that’s meant to rate potential giving.  

   
   

3. Affinity offers insight into the known engagement with or attachment to an organization.  

You can tell by the diagram that the best prospect is one with top scores in all three categories - the transformational gift prospect.  But realistically most organizations don’t have all the data they need or they’re left with few prospects in that category, wondering if they got it right. 

Inclination and Capacity are pieces of information you either have or you don’t, meaning it’s great to be able to leverage where you can.  Most large organizations do this, but many mid-size and smaller programs don’t have the resources to include this in their pipeline development the most effective way.  

With or without Inclination and Capacity, Affinity is a critical piece any organization can weave into their pipeline process.  It uses information specific to your organization that can directly inform all programs.  It’s customizable and specific, meaning you can create generalized ratings, or specialized to tendencies of prospects in certain categories.

So how can you measure affinity in practice?  

Look at prospects based on their philanthropy and engagement specific to your organization.  Use the pieces of info you have available to build a custom score that’s personalized with criteria and rankings that matter most in your definition of a ‘good’ prospect.

Make sure that it:

• Is a simple score that everyone can easily understand, including leadership and key stakeholders.

• Consider your understanding about your constituent base and translates those data points into action.  Turn the qualitative into quantitative.

Use what you know about your constituents to inform how you think about their affinity.  What’s impactful?  What’s somewhat helpful to consider?  What’s really important to consider?  What doesn’t matter? The answers to these questions will help you define a list of those affinity to points to ultimately build your formula:

What to look at:

• Event participations, attendance, sponsorship, etc.

• Volunteerism

• Digital Engagement

• Giving

Here’s one example of what such a grid could look like.  Your organization may decide to weigh criteria differently or change point ratings.  You may decide you want to break it into quartiles or make the score total no more than 100.  It’s entirely up to you.  

How?

There are countless ways to set up a way for all this data to get where it needs to go and analyze it. Most often, you're using tools, like Omatic, to move it and manipulate it. There are other software and tools to investigate, but it could even be an Excel Pivot Table. Use exported constituent data to create a pivot table that gives you summarized results and allows you to assign scores back to constituents. Then upload the new rating to The Raiser's Edge or whichever CRM you're using.

Why?

• Retention, retention, retention

• Targeted solicitation

• Improved ROI

The impact of adding an affinity scoring to your standard prospect analytics provides information to refine your segmentation and audience strategy, KPIs, annual performance goals, and more.  

But donor trends are always shifting - so are behaviors, mediums and attitudes.  Take the opportunity to review your affinity formula annually so that you can adjust accordingly.