Virtuous Insights is a comprehensive donor and prospect research tool in Virtuous CRM+ that provides predictive and action-oriented insights and scoring. By combining first-party data from your CRM and third-party data with machine learning, you can see what matters most–who to engage, when to reach out, and how to personalize every interaction.
Table of Contents
- What Information Is Available in Insights?
- Where Does the Insights Data Come From?
- How Is the Insights Data Updated?
- How Will This Inform My Fundraising Strategy?
- How Can I Get Started with Virtuous Insights?
What Information Is Available in Insights?
Insights provides prospecting information compiled with the data in your CRM including historical giving trends and engagement history. It creates scores, predictive lists for donor outreach, and a variety of other valuable information to help fundraising become more Responsive. Insights data gives you both a compiled Aggregate View for your organization to view high-level giving across your donor base and a Contact View to understand giving insights for a specific record.
Aggregate View
To view aggregate scoring and data from Insights, navigate to the Insights tab from the left-hand menu.
Here, you’ll find Predictive Insights, Wealth and Giving Trends, Donor Engagement, and Demographic Charts.
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Predictive Insights: The Predictive Insights section provides lists of donors with bulk action capabilities who fall into the following segments:
- Potential Major Donors
- Potential Recurring Donors
- Potential Planned Givers
- Contacts with High Connection
- Donors at Risk of Lapsing
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Wealth and Giving Trends provides quick statistics and scores about Donor giving, wealth in the following sections:
- Giving Stats
- Average Scores
- Net Worth
- Donors by Lifecycle Category
- Donor Engagement: The Donor Engagement provides charts to help you understand patterns in donors’ behavior and causes, which can help your organization build better relationships.
- Demographics: The Demographics section, similarly, provides chart data on the backgrounds and interests of your donor base including Religious Affiliation, Gender, Political Ideology, Education, and Top 5 Interests and Hobbies.
Contact View
To view Insights for a specific Contact, select the Go to Insights button in the top right of the Contact’s record.
Here, you will find Donor Scores, Wealth Insights, Engagement Insights, Individual Insights, and Giving Stats.
- Scores: Insights Scores, ranging from 0 to 100, are assigned to each Household Contact in 8 areas that measure a donor’s wealth, engagement, and other factors.
- Wealth & Giving Insights: Use the values here to better understand donors that have the capacity to make a large Single Gift or begin a Recurring Gift with various wealth data and suggested ask amounts.
- Engagement Insights: Highly engaged supporters are more likely to give to your organization or be influencers in their networks.
- Individual Insights: Use the demographic details here to get to know your Contact better and engage with them based on their background and interests.
- Giving Stats: Use the quick stats on the left-hand side to view how this Contact currently supports your organization with their direct and Passthrough Gifts, Giving from their Network of relationships, and if they have a Gift Ask in the Gift Ask Pipeline.
Where Does the Insights Data Come From?
Unlike most donor prospecting tools, Insights combines first-party data from your database with third-party data from public sources to create a truly comprehensive view of your donors and prospects. Essentially, the more Contact data you have, the better Virtuous Insights can fine-tune Scores. While monetary donations are an important piece of the puzzle, additional data like event attendance, email engagement, and volunteer participation are also folded into the bigger picture.
The specific calculation to create each Score or value varies by the type of Score. For instance, some Insights Scores and values, such as the Predictive Insights lists and Social Score, rely more heavily on first-party data but still incorporate data like estimated capacity or net worth. In contrast, other Scores and values, like the Wealth & Capacity Score and Real Estate, are weighted more by third-party data.
First-Party Data
A Contact record must meet a threshold of data available on their record for Virtuous Insights to be available. The minimum required information includes:
- First Name and Last Name
- City and State (U.S. records only)
- Contact Type must be Household or any Household-based Custom Contact type.
As for record matching, Virtuous Insights uses key data points like address, phone number, and email. To ensure high accuracy, we apply data standardization techniques like address abbreviation and case standardization. Of course, this also depends on entering and maintaining healthy data for each record, such as:
- Contact and Individual Level Data (e.g., address, age, email)
- Giving History (e.g., amounts, frequency, recency, trends.)
- Engagement History (e.g., Event attendance, Volunteer participation, email activity, etc.)
Third-Party Data
To provide a more complete view of your donor beyond the data housed directly in your Virtuous CRM+, several best-in-class public sources of data are also folded into the scoring algorithm. Insights only uses public registries and databases trusted amongst all other prospect research tools. These data sources can help inform donor capacity and interest assessments, but this information should be reviewed for accuracy. We recommend using third-party data as one of several indicators when researching donor prospects rather than as a sole determining factor.
Third-party data includes:
- Estimated wealth, income, and capacity
- Real estate property values
- Political giving history
- Occupation and employer info
- Household structure (e.g. marital status)
- Demographics (e.g. religion)
- Lifestyle indicators (e.g. interests)
Confidence Match
Each profile comes with Confidence Match indicators to give you an idea of how much publicly available data exists. This means that if there isn’t much data coming from third-party sources, the Contact View will show Low Confidence Match for the donor and the specific Scores that rely on third-party data. When more third-party data is available, High Confidence Match indicators will display.
To view the criteria Insights has used for a Contact match, click the tooltip icon near the Individual's name.
Some Scores and values—like the Connection Score—rely entirely on first-party data from your CRM rather than third-party sources, so their Confidence Match indicator will be High.
How Is the Insights Data Updated?
Virtuous Insights data is updated daily as new data becomes available. This ensures that Scores, appended data, and predictions remain current and actionable. This also ensures recommendations—like lapse risk, wealth indicators, and giving trends—are accurate and aligned with the latest donor activity recorded in Virtuous CRM. This means that you do not need to use Automated Workflows to append new wealth data. Insights will search for and refresh the data automatically!
How Will This Inform My Fundraising Strategy?
Virtuous Insights is designed to aid your organization in the steps of Responsive Fundraising to Listen, Connect, Suggest, and Learn.
- Listen: Insights allow your team to better understand what motivates your donors. Insights can also help fill in gaps with new details that might otherwise go unnoticed. For example, you may already know a donor’s giving history and email preferences, but including data points like real estate and other philanthropic causes they support provides a better understanding of their capacity and motivation.
- Connect: Insights enhances the way your team connects with current and prospective supporters to deepen relationships by identifying how they currently and may wish to connect with you.
- Suggest: Insights equips your team to suggest tailored Asks based on each donor's preferences, interests, and journey with your organization.
- Learn: Insights provides your team a robust scoring framework to continuously feed all that you learn while working with your supporters.
Your team will be better equipped to provide a more personalized, and ultimately, more Responsive experience for your community. Learn more about Responsive Fundraising here.
How Can I Get Started with Virtuous Insights?
Reach out to your Customer Success Manager to discuss pricing and activating this add-on feature in Virtuous CRM+!