Data Science for Fundraising: A Review of Analytics in Fundraising

Abstract:Data analysis, data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence have affected how for-profit organizations make decisions for many years now, and even decades, for some methods. The nonprofit industry, specifically nonprofit fundraising, has been trying to catch up. This article lists various applications of analytics in nonprofit fundraising as found in the literature. I use the term “analytics” to capture the various methods used in data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence. This article is structured as follows: a brief review of analytics, followed by a review of the literature by decades, and then a summary of the findings and predictions on future work.