This data is fictitious data and was generated using random names and numbers that are commonly found on the internet. Any semblance to reality is only coincidental.
However, this data set is very interesting and the questions that were posed provided an excellent practice round for analyzing university fundraising numbers. Here are the questions:
1. Which degree donates the most to the university?
2. How are our funds performing?
3. Who are our major gift donors?
4. Are faculties meeting their pledge goals?
5. What are the top performing funds?
Answer: All those questions were answered in the visualization below!
Please note that there are further explanations to each question below.
(Click to Enlarge)
1. Which degree donates the most to the university?
Given that donations are often dis-aggregated, the client was interested in knowing whether recipients of particular degrees gave the university more money that others, and on average, how large were those donations.
To answer that question, it was necessary to calculate the average pledge amount based on the information available in the data set namely, the Pledge amount, the Amount received and the Write-off amount.
The color gradient is used to indicate the number of records available for each degree, this is to see which degrees have more overall donations in addition to the average pledge amount.
As we can see in the visualization below, the Master of Kinesiology students had donated to the university on average the largest amount. Meanwhile,
although this degree is second in line in terms of average amount donated, the Bachelor of Health studies appears to have more individuals actively engaged in donations than any of their peers from other disciplines.
(Click to Enlarge)
2. How are our funds performing?
After extracting the data and noticing that there are three different funds for which the university raises money, answering this question with a simple trend graph was the best course of action.
After juxtaposing the overall pledge amount per fund on the the years, we can clearly see that all of the funds are experiencing decline. This can be alarming if not intended, however, this is more likely due to the lack of data for the year 2007. Nevertheless, we can still see that the Scholarship fund is the most popular of the funds followed by the Prize and the Bursary Fund.
(Click to Enlarge)
3. Who are our major gift donors?
The Major gift donors were defined as those who give more than $100,000. Therefore, based on the list of donors available, we were able to separate Major donors from Regular donors, or those who donated less than $100,000. As we can see in the visualization below, the major donors have been color coded in blue to make them stand out.
(Click to Enlarge)
4. Are faculties meeting their pledge goals?
Certain donations are often designated for specific faculties. Those donations usually enter as pledges, yet they are considered fulfilled only when the money has been received. It is crucial that faculties track their fulfillment goals.
Using this information, we created a new field that accounted for such a calculations and then sorted it based on the percentage of the fulfillment to determine whether or not the faculties had met the goal.
In the visualization below, we set the fulfillment of the pledged donations at 90% and there we can clearly see the faculties that are doing really well in that measure and the faculties that need to up the ante on their fundraising.
(Click to Enlarge)
5. What are the top performing funds?
The visualization below is the result of ranking the funds based on the total pledged amount to that particular fund. Below, we can see that the Sybill Trelawney Divination Scholarship outperforms every other fund at almost $400,000 in donations.
It is worth noting that the client did not specify how many funds they wanted to see in this list. Although not pictured, we actually provided the client with an interactive field in which they can choose the number of funds they’d like to see. for the sake of this demonstration, I chose five.
Overall, this was a rewarding and very educating exercise. I firmly believe that visualizations such as these are so incredibly informative and helpful, precisely because they provide the client with a quick snapshot of where their business currently stands. These visualizations are crucial to any analytical perspective on strategy and development operations.
The information above is from the Graduate Certificate in Business Analytics: Descriptive Analytics course at Penn State University.