Frequently asked questions

Dataro are data science and machine learning specialists providing data-science-as-a-service software to the NFP sector. We want to create a new best practice in the industry by partnering with NFP’s to improve fundraising outcomes using state-of-the-art predictive analytics. This means the use of data, statistical algorithms and machine learning techniques to identify the likelihood of future outcomes based on historical data, allowing NFPs to move beyond knowing what their donor behaviours have been in the past to assessing what will likely happen in the future.

We care about using our skills to make a difference. Look at it this way. Every time a charity acquires a donor or calls them for an upgrade, they are making a bet that they will get a positive return on their investment. However, in order to see a return most charities are taking every bet that comes their way, even the real stinkers. At best they’re making an semi-educated guess based on a limited range of factors. But in 2019, in order to have an edge you need big data and machine learning – exactly what happens on Wall St, at the Melbourne Cup, at Google, Amazon, at Woolworths, Coles and every major bank.

This same technology has enormous potential for social good, however, the costs of acquiring the skills and technology have traditionally been prohibitive. That’s why we are building a simple, software-as-a-service-based solution that lets charities access this technology affordably. We believe this will allow charities to invest only in the good bets and channel more money where it is needed most.

Ask 10 computer scientists and you will get 10 different answers! But here’s our attempt: machine learning is a subfield of computer science that enables computers to act and make data-driven decisions and predictions, rather than being explicitly programmed to carry out a certain task. Machine learning programs are designed to ‘learn’ and improve over time when exposed to new data.

Dataro uses machine learning to predict which donors will churn in the next three months. If you were going to estimate which donors are likely to churn, you may already have some ideas about what is important: “younger people”, “people who have had a credit card declined recently”, or “people who have not been giving for very long”. But it would be quite hard to know exactly how important each of those ‘factors’ are and how to formulate them (i.e. is a ‘young’ person 18 or 25?). Additionally, even if you did have some idea of what factors were important for one charity, there might be entirely different factors at play at another.

Machine learning essentially is a way of taking all these factors (and hundreds more), then looking at the whole history of your fundraising, to discover exactly how important each one is and how they can be combined mathematically to produce a ‘model’ which predicts the likelihood of, for example, churn for every donor. This process can be used to train models for churn/attrition and many other fundraising campaigns: upgrades, cash giving, and reactivation, amongst others.

If your organisation has a history of running fundraising campaigns, we expect that the rules you have developed to select a cohort for upgrades and cash giving are sound and reasonable. However, there are a number of advantages to using a machine learning based approach: instead considering a small set of factors (age, gender, last upgrade), machine learning can take into account hundreds of factors, discovering new and novel drivers for cohort selection that you may not have considered or that seem counter-intuitive.

Machine learning will by definition find the most ‘optimal’ solution to a problem given the data available. In some scenarios it is fairly clear what the optimal solution could be (someone is not going to upgrade their gift again if they upgraded yesterday), but in other cases it is hard to know where to begin (what makes one person a better acquisition than another). A machine learning based approach can be applied identically in all cases, opening up the possibility of new types of fundraising campaigns.

There are literally hundreds of potentially relevant factors that may be taken into account – a lot more than just transaction history! However, here is a sample that may be relevant: number of transactions; last transaction date; transaction regularity; days since sign-up; Regular Giving status; recent card declines; missed payments; petitions signed; email clicks; phone call history; website logins; onboarding channel; age; gender; postcode; time of year (e.g school holidays or tax time); days until Christmas; consumer confidence; house or apartment; charitable giving amount*; marital status*; renting or Home owner*; Profession*. *Factors may be estimated from 3rd party data enrichments, such as aggregated data from public sources such as ABS.

Accurate forecasts are incredibly important to us – that’s what our business is built on! We assess and ‘sense-check’ our predictions in two ways: 1) We always test our predictions against historical data. This means that every model is tested on data that it has not ever seen before, which allows us to create a reliable estimate of future performance. By evaluating models using a held out data set and cross validation, it is possible to have a very good idea of how good the model is going to be in practice. Some events are inherently random, but machine learning allows you predict and plan with a greater degree of assurance. 2) We frequently run experiments to evaluate model performance. This involves leaving a ‘control set’ that is not exposed to any sort of campaign or intervention, allowing us to see how the predictions perform in a controlled, scientific experiment.

We recommend updating models at least every month, or just prior to a specific campaign. In general, while a model can stay accurate for some time, the most important thing is fresh predictions as donors and conditions are constantly changing. For the best results, we recommend running fresh data for every campaign.

It’s simple! Create an account and use our drag and drop framework to import your formatted data direct into our system. If you have any trouble with formatting, our technicians are on hand to troubleshoot and get you started on your way to smarter fundraising!

No. The model we train is unique, not only to your data, but to the exact moment in time. Consider, for example, how people may have a different reason for giving or upgrading at tax time compared to other times during the year. For this reason, our models are constantly being re-trained to learn to most accurate model for any given point in time.

No. We take privacy just as seriously as you do and have built our system around compliance with the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the Australian Privacy Principles. We encourage the use of anonymised, tokenised data where possible and only ever ask for the absolute minimum of personal information, which is stored securely and encrypted on servers based in Australia. Ask us about our privacy and security practices if you have any queries!