Throughout most weeks, I communicate with members of various development and advancement teams. We discuss their data and strategies to maximize its potential. There are two recurring issues that I commonly encounter.
Firstly, teams often express the need for more time to manage their data. Having a clean and up-to-date database is crucial for thorough analysis. One of the major time-consuming tasks is reporting. While some reporting needs can be met with built-in report generators in many systems, organizations frequently find their most beneficial reports are beyond the capabilities of these built-in tools. As a result, they spend considerable time and resources generating and disseminating these reports, time that could otherwise be devoted to activities directly impacting fundraising.
To address this challenge, we created Reporting Xpress. This platform automates the process of extracting, transforming, and loading data into temporary, single-use data warehouses, which are immediately deleted once processing is complete. From there, our automated report generator can create the custom reports that usually consume significant time of your best data analysts. Moreover, these reports can be updated daily and easily automatically distributed ensuring everyone has access to timely information. By automating hundreds of data sets and producing thousands of reports each night, Reporting Xpress allows organizations to devote more time and resources to maintaining their data and discovering other ways to use it to boost fundraising.
The second major time-consuming task is ad-hoc reporting, which is necessary for answering new questions or deriving new insights from your data. Often, exploring new ways to understand your data or segmenting your constituent data more precisely requires manipulating your raw data in ways that don't fit within the confines of your built-in reporting tools. Testing these ideas usually involves exporting data and processing it with another tool. Although tools like Microsoft Excel can be powerful, they demand significant time, effort, and concentration.
A large portion of this time and effort is dedicated to extracting and organizing data for analysis. These ETL processes are identical to those automated by the Reporting Xpress platform. We are exploring ways to automate the most common ETL requests, saving you from the hassle of preparing your data for exploration.
Furthermore, we are developing new tools that use the latest Artificial Intelligence models to assist with ad-hoc report design. Typically, creating many ad-hoc investigative queries/reports requires proficiency in tools like Excel, Power BI, Tableau, Access, Crystal Report, etc. The tools we release will allow you to interact with your data in plain English, similar to how you would with a human database administrator or reporting analyst with strong data skills.
Our early testing shows promising results. While AI models, like humans, may sometimes misinterpret your requests, you can usually spot the misinterpretation quickly if you know your data. The process is comparable to when a DBA or reporting analyst doesn't exactly capture your request in a report. We are consistently working on reducing these misunderstandings, and we believe our future performance will be similar to what you'd experience with a human assistant, likely in the 80%-95% range. Moreover, an AI-driven assistant can respond in less than a minute, so if the results are off, you can quickly revise your query and try again. In the past, in some organizations, I have often had to wait between three hours and three weeks for someone to prepare the first cut of a new custom ad-hoc report.
All of these processes are conducted without sending your data to an external model, eliminating the risk of your data being "retained" and becoming part of the model's memory. It is essential to ensure that your donors' personal data such as wealth ratings, giving history, and familial relationships, do not become accessible through future online searches.
We are excited about what the future holds. We believe these tools will allow your organization to operate more efficiently, as well as allow you to segment your donor data more granularly so that you can better communicate and build the kind of connections with individual donors that foster long-term giving relationships. By providing you the ability to quickly and more easily explore your data, you will be able to confirm those intuitions you have developed and convert them into actionable information.
