September 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic has halted numerous scheduled fundraising events and activities, putting a severe strain on many nonprofit organizations’ budgets. As a result, some nonprofits have turned to data mining to sharpen the focus of their ongoing fundraising efforts.
Data mining is the process of discovering and extracting previously hidden patterns, knowledge and trends from large data sets and establishing relationships between similar characteristics. By applying machine learning (a type of artificial intelligence that improves and “learns” through experience) and statistical analysis to data sets, patterns and trends can be found through cluster analysis, anomaly detection and mining for associations or sequential patterns.
