I probably should not be the person talking about DIY.  I have a T-shirt that has a bit of every paint color I’ve ever painted a room, because I am physically incapable of not dripping on myself.  And that is minor compared to some of the crimes against home-anity I’ve committed.

Let me take the opportunity to apologize to everyone who has ever bought a house I’ve worked on.  I hope the electrical burns have healed by now.

But I do believe in DIY analytics and tricks to save money.

You can and should be using professionally produced models.  Many of them will help save you money and/or produce additional revenues.

But you can do a few things on your own to avoid breaking the bank, speed the rate of progress, or both.

Here are some cost-saving things you can do in your own spreadsheet:

• Deduplicating in Excel.  There’s a beginner and an intermediate guide
• Doing a seasonality analysis, which can reduce your mailing costs throughout the year.  It won’t be as fancy as real ones, but it’s a safe way of removing some costs from your program.
• Using a formula for linear RFM analysis
• Using interaction data to customize your communications (and not mail unnecessary ones to people who are unlikely to respond)
• Analyzing your content marketing efforts
• Finding out the value of an email address
• Customizing your online ask string by donor (this is less analytics and more programming, but it’s still a DIY revenue generator)
• Building your own ZIP select.  We talked about ZIP selects on Tuesday as a way of reducing costs – there’s little need to pay someone to select the ZIPs for the select if you can select them yourself.
• Running your own RFM segmentation in a pinch. I did this earlier this year for a number of pieces when between external mail vendors.  It can’t be called fun except for the more masochistic among us, but it gets the job done.

Any others that Direct to Donor readers have used?  Please let me know at nick@directtodonor.com so I can share with the community.