Analytics For Non Profit Organisation

Analytics have been growing at a rapid pace across the world. The well-established companies have realized the importance of analytics in their business where crucial decisions are taken that drives their revenue. But why do just the well-established corporates need to leverage this statistical and computational modus operandi when it can be implemented in a much-needed arena also?

The idea is to get to use the analytics for non-profit social organizations and provide a breakthrough. These are the organizations which strive to look for the upliftment of society by identifying the social responsibilities. The organizations cover a wide variety of aspects that helps to promote education, health, food, shelter etc

There are three main categories where the power of analytics could be utilized to its full potential:

• Fundraising
• Churn analysis
• SROI (Social Return On Investment)

Fundraising analytics

One of the major factors that would help the NGO’s grow financially would be the fundraising. It involves planning and execution of offline and digital campaign to spread the awareness to the public and let the outside world know the work that’s been happening in the organization.

The fundraising analytics points down to studying the behavior of the donors. The first step towards understanding the behavior would be careful segmentation of the donor population. It then paves the way in categorizing the donor based on the segments. Later, targeting/recommendation can be carried out by considering the distinguishing factors like the previous donating patterns of the donors, average calls to the donor, his financial stability etc. The cause for fundraising will always be the major driver as different audience respond to different social cause like LGBT, cancer awareness, Women empowerment etc.

Churn Analysis

Churn analysis throws light in the arena of child education in non-profit organizations. The rising issue in every state in India would be the number of students who are dropping out of school. These students need to be given financial support to pursue the education back. Let’s assume that each student needs to be helped with Rs 5000 with this education for a year. Assuming they are targeting 10000 kids, then their expenditure would be 50 Mm. By implementing analytics in their background, say they employ 1,00,000 they can work on concentrating the 10% of the kids who have a very high propensity in dropping out. The expenditure becomes 5Mm and it gives a wider view of the people dropping out.

SROI (Social Return on Investment)

SROI is similar to the concept of Return On Investment(ROI) where in addition to the financial factors, the social and the environmental outcome also play a major role in determining the health of a Non-Profit Organisation.

SROI = (Tangible + Intangible value to community) / Total resource investment

The concept of SROI in NGO’s lie by the principle of associating the socio and environmental outcomes into a dollar value. Let us take an example of gender discrimination that happens in many parts of the world.

The possible outcome after solving the gender discrimination:

• Women getting good quality education equal to men
• Women getting the job opportunity and earn a living through it
• Spreading awareness to the fellow community group

Now to measure the SROI in this scenario one should think of associating the financial equivalent of the above outcomes so that every single achievement is being communicated through dollar value.

In the first case, the women attaining education would involve the fees that are paid for each girl student. Secondly, the job opportunity would involve income to the women groups that contribute to SROI. Finally, scaling up the idea across the society will help in augmenting the first two steps across oceans and islands.

Under the umbrella of analytics, the SROI will be implemented with the help of a classifier to predict the outcome of the SROI. With the above example, there are 3 Business questions that can be answered

• Whether the women will get a quality education or not
• Whether the women will get a job opportunity or not
• Whether the women will be spreading awareness or not

Based on the several factors like demographics, # of siblings, Qualification of parents and occupation of parents we will be able to finally offer a prediction. This will yield us with the women population achieving the expected outcome in the problem of gender equality. Eventually, the Net Financial Worth associated with the outcomes (Similar to the Net worth in case of GDP of a country) discussed and the time involved in achieving this would yield us the Investment.

So, the aforementioned arena of discussion proves the application of analytics in such a domain that would need enormous and endless support. The set of procedures will be able to clearly guide many social organizations to leverage the domain’s capability with the careful use of resources available.