Channel Cohort
A collection of donors for each period and period type based on how they’ve interacted with the organization in offline, online, or in multiple channels in the same period. Offline is categorized by all channels except online, where online is defined by your criteria for online donors.
The value of this data is that it lets you assess and refine your channel-level and multichannel upgrade strategies. For example, you may need to know how many donors are in a particular channel cohort to know it’s it’s worth the effort to segment them for more targeted strategies or measure the performance of existing strategies that are already in use.
The initial value is set when the donor is first acquired, based on the channel of their acquisition. Like Lifecycle, donor cohorts have a single value for the entire year based on behavior in the period. Unlike Lifecycle categorizations, a channel cohort may change throughout the year from the acquisition cohort if a donor continues to give.
There are 5 possible values for channel cohort:
Offline Only
This donor only gave offline in the indicated period. They are contactable offline (generally postal), but do not have a valid/deliverable email address on file. If the data does not indicate email validity (usually through a data marker or boolean value) or is not available to Avid AI, we fall back to whether the email in the CRM data is syntactically valid to be used.
Offline w/ Email
Same as Offline Only, except the donor can be contacted (and thus cultivated) via email. This means there must be a valid email on the record. If an Email Data Connection is created, we’ll adjust this to be only mailable contacts excluding unsubscribed, hard bounced, or spam complaint emails to improve data quality. If email system data is not available, we will utilize CRM-based email records, matching any records that exist in the account by default. Again, addresses marked as invalid or undeliverable for any reason are excluded and treated as Offline Only.
Online Only
A donor who gave in only the online channel in this period, as defined when you configured your data connection’s channel mapping for online vs. offline transactions. If you haven’t yet configured this setting, all active donors will be shown in one of the Offline Channel Cohorts.
Multichannel
Unlike the first three channel cohorts, multichannel requires that donors have given in both the offline and online channels in the same period. In combination with Previous Channel Cohort, you can use this to see how donors are migrating channels from the previous period.
Lapsed Donor
Since donors aren’t assigned their cohort channel cohort until their first gift, all donors with a channel cohort value are existing donors. If, however, the donor hasn’t yet given in the current period, their channel will read as “Lapsed Donor” until that first gift. As soon as at least one gift is made in the period, the donor will be recategorized as one of the other channel cohorts.
Previous Channel Cohort
Similar to channel cohort, except there’s an additional possible value, to account for the fact that new donors in the current period didn’t yet exist in the prior period: non-donor.
Non-Donor
These donors had not yet given their first gift in the previous period. You can exclude this group when calculating retention or reactivation numbers since 100% of these donors will always have a gift in the following period.