APRA Wisconsin

Meeting Summary: APRA-Wisconsin held its 2011 Fall Meeting at the Marshfield Clinic in Marshfield, Wisconsin on Friday, October 21. Melanie Rayhorn, Research Database Assistant with the Marshfield Clinic, was the chapter's host.

Speaker: Marianne Pelletier, CFRE, Director of Advancement Research and Data Support for Cornell University, spoke the the attendees. Marianne delivered the following presentation at the fall meeting.

Big Picture, Small Picture: Where Do I Start? Today, research teams are charged with data mining, donor modeling, and other complex prospecting techniques. The first thing to do when building or rebuilding a prospecting program, however, is not to add complex systems, but instead to do some hands-on reporting and analysis to show trends, as well as donors who are raising their hands as good prospects. In this discussion, we reviewed different ways to see prospecting and how different techniques fit in from both angles--looking for that one incredible donor to understanding the patterns among all constituents. Techniques for simple analyses were demonstrated.