Josh Birkholz

Redefining fundraising for the 21st Century.

Posting on analytics, technology, visualizations, fundraising, and other unrelated things I find interesting like Doctor Who, sci fi wierdness, crazy new ideas, and interesting people.




Author of Fundraising Analytics
Principal at Bentz Whaley Flessner

Founder of the analytics group donorcast

Recent Tweets @birkholz
Posts I Like
Posts tagged "predictive analytics"

BWF analyst position open.  Sure, its mostly charts, graphs, forecasting, and predictive modeling on the surface.  But the impact is transformative.  I do this work because I care deeply about the nonprofit sector.  When nonprofits do well, we all benefit.  I only want colleagues who share my passion.  In exchange, you will get autonomy to excel at your job, opportunities to publish or speak about your work, and the respect of your colleagues and industry.  Did I also mention we’ll pay you for this?


DonorCast Senior Analyst

Description
Bentz Whaley Flessner, a leading fundraising consulting firm for over 20 years, provides quality advice for every step of the development process to educational institutions, academic medical centers, healthcare systems, and arts and cultural organizations—nationwide—with specialty counsel on advancement services, annual giving, prospect research, and analytics.

Bentz Whaley Flessner seeks a Senior Analyst to join the DonorCast team. Under the direction of the director of DonorCast, this person will:

  • Conduct analysis of nonprofit constituent data to support prospecting, campaign preparations, program review, and constituent relationship management projects.

  • Produce analysis reports using contemporary data-visualization techniques.

  • Carry out predictive modeling methodologies in support of the DonorCast projects.

  • Participate in the engineering of new analytics solutions, including but not limited to data mining, forecasting, simulation, segmentation, and market research strategies.

  • Market the DonorCast products and implementation services of Bentz Whaley Flessner. 

Salary commensurate with qualifications and experience.

Qualifications

The following qualifications are required.

  • Bachelor’s degree

  • Demonstrated competence in statistics and data analysis

  • Experience with SPSS, SAS, DataDesk, or equivalent statistics application

  • Strong understanding of MS Office suite including Access, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint

  • Solid oral and written communications skills

One or more of the following qualifications is preferred, but not required.

  • A bachelors degree in statistics, economics, business, or related field

  • Graduate-level degree in statistics, economics, business, or related field

  • 3–5 years of experience in nonprofit fundraising, preferably in prospecting, prospect management, annual giving, or analytics

  • Published or presented work on the topic of analytics as it pertains to nonprofit fundraising

To Apply:
Interested parties should submit a cover letter
, resume, and three professional references to Alex Oftelie at aoftelie@bwf.com, or Bentz Whaley Flessner, 7251 Ohms Lane, Minneapolis, MN 55439. Applications will be reviewed upon receipt with a deadline of December 16th, 2011.


Click here for a PDF of the Description

Sensing NFL action using predictive analytics on Twitter Streams

By David Ruth

Cowboys, Eagles, Lions top NFL tweets midway through season

Midway through the NFL season, the Dallas Cowboys, Philadelphia Eagles and Detroit Lions have been tweeted most by football fans during game action.

Using millions of Twitter subscribers as living “sensors,” engineers from Rice University and Motorola Mobility announced in October that they found a way to monitor fans’ levels of excitement and to keep track of the action in NFL games via Twitter. SportSense is a computer program the engineers created to analyze NFL fan tweets in real time. The program can tell within seconds when touchdowns, interceptions and other big plays occur, and it can show how excited fans are about every game being played.

Read the entire article at Rice University News

The 10 most amazing databases in the world do more than store knowledge. They provide researchers with new ways to solve long-cold crimes, predict economic recessions, measure your love life, map the universe and save lives.

Why Children’s Mercy Hospital’s annual giving program rules. 

A great video from David Logan, director of annual programs and analytics on how they use predictive analytics for annual giving segmentation and prioritization.

Learn how to do this here (DonorCast)

Bentz Whaley Flessner

Predicting Personal Behavior (Next Frontier in Credit Scores) from the Wall Street Journal

BY SCOTT THURM

Do you know your Medication Adherence Score?

Fair Isaac Co. thinks it does. The company that created the FICO credit score is branching into new territory, assembling disparate data in an effort to better understand a range of human behaviors.

The Medication Adherence Score is Fair Isaac’s latest innovation. It aims to gauge the likelihood that a person will take his prescribed medications. Though the company is mum about how it crunches numbers, the score is based partly on how long a person has lived at the same address and whether he owns a car.

“We know what you’re going to do tomorrow,” Mark Greene, Fair Isaac’s chief executive, told investors earlier this year.

Read the entire article here

Web 3.0 (from social to big data).  Are you ready?

Using data to improve real life experiences. It’s all about Big Data. Watch this debate, a must!

If Web 2.0 was all about social, then Web 3.0 is all about “big data:” people and machines sharing an unprecedented amount of information. What does that mean for you as a recruiter, a professional, and an individual? In this session, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn Co-Founder and Executive Chairman, will be joined by some special guests to discuss the next wave of the internet and how it will change things—again.

Headline link goes directly to the Fast Company Article.

For information on applying analytics to nonprofit fundraising, visit DonorCast