Just Giving Uses Big Data To Predict Who Will Fundraise And How

“To try and get big data to work for us on these variables, we had to look at the fundraising page,” explained Mugembe. “We had to look at it like a machine. A fundraising page is a collection of really valuable data points.

“In the world of big data we could capture everything, [see] deeper motivations. We can see the text from people supporting you. Are these people passionate about the cause, you, or just about you sitting in beans?

“The data goes beyond that. We can get transactional and observational data. We can see people respond to targets. Some people want to be the first, and others want to be the ‘hero’ and refresh the page so they can help you achieve the goal.

“We went to the richest sources of data outside our organisation and spend time with academics.”

Gift graph

These insights influence the type of information served up to users and whether JustGiving wants them to donate or just spread the word.

Because charity is so personal and everyone has different reasons to offer their support, the type of algorithms used had to be customised and the organisation needed to know which data points were the most useful.

“We need our pages to be engaging to attract people outside people’s friendship groups,” he continued. “We need to be considerate. People can’t always give. Should we get you to give or contribute to the cause or just engage? It also needs to be relevant as people are passionate about different things.

“What we discovered was really interesting: We all care about connections. I care about children very differently after I became a parent. I learnt about certain conditions because of something a colleague suffered from.

“Because we are dealing with connections and social, we had access to graph theory.”

Cloud assistance

JustGiving calls this the ‘Gift Graph’, a model built out on Microsoft Azure which performs real time to help achieve the ambition of “growing the world of giving.”

“As an organisation we didn’t have an army to deal with, just a small team of data scientists. We were blessed when the Azure platform turned up,” added Mugembe

“For some of the biggest applications, we have a small team that can do the apps and support. Our graph is a system of connection and nodes. It’s a snapshot of real data that constantly moves It’s not static.”

The Gift Graph allows justGiving to predict who is likely to fundraise, what they needed to make that decision and what event they would do. It can also target people who care about a particular cause at a very detailed level e.g. women’s education or even women’s education in Afghanistan.

“This allowed us to get to the point where we could growth the world’s giving,” said Mugembe.

Quiz: What do you know about Big Data?