To follow up on our recent double feature in Charity Finance a number of Civil Society leaders and friends will be gathering at Z/Yen’s offices on 26 June for a briefing and discussion. We will be looking at the use of predictive techniques, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) to rejuvenate lapsed donors/members, prevent lapses and thus boost regular income, with only limited extra cost and effort.

In other sectors, SVMs have been used successfully, for example in healthcare to spot early stage cancer and heart disease on scans; in financial services to separate out potentially anomalous transactions amongst a plethora of regular trades; in the media to predict television viewing figures and on-line hit rates. It seemed likely to us that the Civil Society sector, with its own types of "big data", could boost income and retain donors/members with such tools. So it has proved.

Within the Civil Society community there is a great tradition of sharing experience and ideas. We think these case studies and suggestions make a fantastic starting point for Civil Society leaders to meet and share their various work and experience in these areas.

The event will be chaired by Ian Theodoresen, the Chief Financial Officer of National Church Institutions and chair of Charity Finance Directors' Group. After a brief presentation from Ian Harris, Director of Z/Yen Group, there will be panel-style discussion enabling all participants to make comments and/or ask questions. There are only a couple of places left at this event, so if you are interested, please register as soon as you can.