We get this question a lot: Do you really need more data to build better audiences? Nicholas Ellinger breaks it down in this latest Moore Insight gem, and he brought receipts.
A new Dartmouth study analyzed 787 million donations and found that pet ownership is the fourth most predictive factor in giving, ahead of age, partisanship, and marital status.
So yes, even if you’re not an animal charity, your supporters’ pet ownership status might be telling you more than you think.
If you want to know which pet owners give the most, you’ll have to watch the video. Consider it today’s most useful bit of pet trivia.
People sometimes ask why is it such a big deal to have more data for your audience building? There's great aer just out by Ho Chun. Herbert Chang of Dartmouth University gives us a great example. He looked at 787,000,000 donations over the period of a decade to find out how predictive pet ownership is of giving. Now this is looking only at giving. It doesn't give us indications of likelihood of giving because it doesn't include non givers. But he did find some predictive patterns. Non owners donate the most overall, but pet owners donate the most frequently. Cat owners donate more than dog owners and donate to more charities. So 48% of cat owners gave to more than one charities. But only 37% of non pet owners gave them more than one charity. So if you're trying to get someone who's already a donor to another organization to donate to you, it's more likely to be a cat owner than a non pet owner. All of this means that pet ownership was the 4th most predictive factor in the model, behind income, gender, and education, but still ahead of age, partisanship, and marital status. So even if you're not an animal charity, if you're not looking at pet ownership in your models, you're missing a predictive edge. And that's one of thousands of data. Points that go together to make this a great data Stew that makes better predictions and better audiences.
