Jeff Shuck

Tomorrow at the 2010 Run Walk Ride Fundraising Conference in Dallas I’ll be delivering the keynote presentation about moving beyond traditional event fundraising metrics and towards a broader set of measures to create deeper insights about event fundraising programs. As part of the conference work, Event 360 has just released a new whitepaper, in partnership with Convio, on the same subject. This is obviously a deep topic — too deep to cover in any one short document — but I’m pleased with the depth we were able to offer. You can download an advance copy of the paper from the Resources section of Event 360’s website.

The 18-page guide is designed to help event fundraisers move beyond only reporting the past and start using analytics to predict the future. A case study featuring the Komen Global Race for the Cure highlights how we used analytics to help transform their highly attended event into a strong fundraising event.

Get the guide for free here. Thanks for reading!

I’m pleased to pass on that Event 360 has partnered with Network for Good and Sea Change Strategies to sponsor a new eBook, Homer Simpson for Nonprofits: The Truth about How People Really Think and What It Means for Promoting Your Cause.

This guide covers the basics of behavioral economics and how you can use these principles to craft more effective messages that will win the hearts and minds of your audience.

Some of the ideas:

• Small, not big - The bigger the scale of what you’re communicating, the smaller the impact on your audience
• Hopeful, not hopeless - People tend to act on what they believe they can change—If your problem seems intractable, enormous and endless, people won’t be motivated to help
• Peer pressure still works (Nope, it doesn’t end after high school) - People are more likely to do something if they know other people like them are doing it. 

You can download the eBook here.

Event 360 has launched a new webinar series, which gave me the fun opportunity this past week to talk for 90 minutes or so to well over 100 nonprofits about our first topic: the basics of event analytics. This is a subject near and dear to my heart, both because I’m a bit of a data geek and because so many of the groups I work with are great at tracking data but pretty poor at doing anything with it. 

The fact is, with an hour of time, a flat file of your fundraising data, and Microsoft Excel, you can get a far deeper understanding of what is actually powering (or holding back) your program. 

The webcast was recorded and archived; you can view it for free here. 

Don’t be afraid of your data!