from Philanthropy.com:

A New York Cancer Center Uses Technology to Predict Who Will Give

Almost every charity’s pool of donors includes plenty of people who have both the means and the inclination to make a far bigger gift than they ever did in the past. The trick, of course, is to figure out just which people will make the leap.

To that end, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, has become one of a small but growing number of institutions to embrace a technique known as predictive modeling to help it set priorities and decide which donors deserve the most attention. While the approach requires fairly sophisticated statistical software and a staff member or a consultant who knows how to use it, fund raisers say predictive modeling can be an option for even relatively small organizations in need of a way to sort through records of previous donors.