Using Data Mining to Drive Development

You collect information from all your shop activities, including everything from gift size to gift timing to volunteer participation to event attendance. By enhancing your current data mining efforts, you can finally marshal your database to find the patterns that will focus your advancement strategy on the most promising prospects.

Join Academic Impressions for the Using Data Mining to Drive Development online course to gain a comprehensive perspective on how to more effectively put your shop's information to work for you. After taking part in each session, you will have the opportunity to apply your own data to the methods you just learned and then submit your results to the instructor for feedback and further guidance. During the course, you will learn how to use:

* Workarounds for fixing your missing values and excessive categories
* The bell curve and measures of center/spread for improving your participation
* Correlation and chi-square for finding patterns in your annual gift and membership pools
* Linear and logistic regression for analyzing your major gifts pool

This AI online course emphasizes hands-on application of statistical techniques to your shop's daily development work and features in-depth, personalized interactions with its faculty. An enrollment cap will ensure all participants have the opportunity to submit work after each session to the instructor for review, feedback, and further guidance. Participants in this program will leave with customized knowledge, templates and ideas that they can apply to their unique shop challenges.

All development stakeholders - especially those who deal with research or analytics daily - who are interested in analyzing and gaining insight from their existing shop data will learn the key statistical methods necessary to do so.

Each session to this online course is designed to build toward a comprehensive knowledge of data mining and modeling techniques. As such, we strongly urge your institution to attend all four offerings. If you are planning on only attending the later sessions, be sure you can meet the following prerequisites:

* Session 2 and/or 3 (Segmentating Your Participation/Renewal and Upgrade) - Choose either of these sessions for your first if your shop data is complete and prepared to the standards set by Session 1 (Planning for Success).
* Session 4 (Prospecting) - Choose this session for your first if you already have experience using the bell curve and correlation.