Defining the right KPIs is an evolving process. The tools and visuals used to report on them can also evolve over time. At McGill, we’ve been reporting on prospect pipeline indicators for over 15 years. During that time, we’ve moved from collating printouts in a 3-inch binder to a one-click dashboard. Discover how we refined the process over time, what considerations were taken at each step of the evolution and how we adapted to changing needs and to our growing expertise.

We created dashboards allowing a pro-active approach to successfully collecting pledges. By becoming aware of the high risk pledges, Fundraising professionals were are able to focus on the high risk donors, to properly steward and sustain their affinity to the university. Thus, mitigating the risk and increasing the chance that the donor will fulfill their pledge.

Much of the conversation about improving predictive models focuses on finding the optimal model technology, such as linear regression, logistics regression, classification trees, etc. We argue that there should be just as much focus on Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques by exploring, diagnosing and transforming the data - before, during and after the modeling process. We will also demonstrate how to apply different Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) techniques to find optimal transformation and identify outliers.