AgeFinder results

shani traum · January 2016

Hi all,

We recently ran AgeFinder and I'm curious about a couple of things...

How reliable did you find the results? I'm spot checking our results (17,000 records) and am running about 50/50. Is that typical?

Given the spotty acuracy, am I unreasonable in not wanting to update the Birth Date field with the results?

For those with similar concerns, how did/would you recommend using this information?

I'm leaning toward not updating, but using the info for general info/mailings...Planned Giving/IRA for those over 70 and the like.

Thoughts/Recommendations?

Thanks!

Shani

Faith Murray · January 2016

I also did a spot check on our non-BlackBaud Age Append service this past quarter. What I found in our results was that in 90% of cases, the month and year were correct, but the day itself was almost always wrong. What we did to solve this was a two-fold approach. We imported the full birthdate into the Comments field of an AgeFinder Attribute. Then in a separate column of the import file, we removed the day and only kept the month/year, which we then imported into the Age field on Bio 1.

We felt this gave us the most complete information, for the least amount of error. On our recent survey, most of our donors preferred not to receive birthday cards anyway, so day is not important for us, and the year is what is most important for Planned Giving purposes.

Tatyana Leifman · January 2016

We've had similarly poor results when we ran AgeFinder in the fall. We had over 22,000 records returned. I checked those who came back as having been born in 1992 and later and my results were much worse than 50/50 for that cohort. I think it ran more toward 20/80 with 80% being blatantly wrong and 20% including people for whom we don't have much info so I was generous in accepting the possibility that at age 18 they were making gifts of $250 or more by personal check. I didn't have the time to look at the older group so I chose the low hanging fruit. Since then, having opened various records for other purposes and checked the AgeFinder results too, it does seem that the percentage improves for those who came back as having been born much earlier than 1992.

I have not imported the information into the Birth Date field, and I'm not sure if I ever will. I actually contacted BB about these results and had them investigate but the end of the year rush has put this project on hold for now.

Tatyana

shani traum · January 2016

Yeah, given that we're a senior housing and healthcare organization, anyone showing as too "young" is suspect, so I've been checking those and am coming up with about a 0% accuracy rate. I've checked (comparing AgeFinder results with LexisNexis info) records that aren't so obviously wrong and am coming up with about 50% right.

So, I think we're going your route and not putting them on Bio 1. We'll use to advise, but not as necessarily accurate.

Thanks.

AgeFinder results

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