Modeling the gift in fundraising process: A parametric approach for the donations’ count

In fundraising management, the availability of accurate estimates of the expected gift is crucial to implement a successful fundraising campaign. To this aim, assessing the gift process is relevant. In this contribution, we first suggest modeling the gift as an individual risk which can be seen from different perspectives: occurrence, number and timing of donations, and the gift’s amount. Then, we focus on one of these aspects; in particular, we model the number of donations as a Poisson random variable with an intensity parameter that depends on the individual characteristics of the Donors. The expected number of donations and the probability of gift can be estimated by performing a Poisson regression.