Learn more about analytics and research best practices, as well as real world examples and solutions for nonprofits.

The Beauty of Small Data

Is CRM the nonprofit solution?

Everyone is talking about nonprofit organizations needing to buy CRM systems so they can be just like the Obama campaign and mine BIG data to make huge breakthroughs.

But I am not so sure.

I hesitate to sound like the great Jeff Brooks’ Future of Fundraising Now blog and criticize anything new in fundraising, but . . .

The aging promise of CRM has always been making insights from your data easy. But I have yet to see it. Rather than being a user friendly tool for nonprofits, CRM becomes the angry tyrant that everyone must satisfy. Much more time and resources are spent on the multi-step data processes then on mining the data for actionable insights.

And that’s just not right.

For now, I could not recommend moving forward with CRM. Rather than spending all that money on a data system, invest into some analysts to mine the data you already have. Your ROI on investing in analysts over infrastructure will be far, far better.

Echoes of the Dot-Com Bust

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I asked the AI Microsoft’s AI tool Copilot to tell me about the dot.com bust of 25 years ago. If you are old enough to remember, the dot.com bust came right off the heels of the Y2K computer fears, the September 11 terrorist attacks and anthrax in snail-mail...

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Each fall, we here at Analytical Ones survey the trends in fundraising and come up with testing ideas for your fall campaigns. Last year, we recommended testing first class postage, to avoid the USPS’s SOP of delivering all nonprofit postage appeals on the same day....

Part VII: How Analytical Ones Will be Using AI

by Bill Jacobs | Jul 16, 2025

Over the past couple of weeks, I have written about some potential effects that AI will have on the nonprofit sector. Today, I’m going to end this series on how we as a company intend to use AI. There’s no doubt there is a certain “wow-factor” using AI. It’s like Star...