This week (21 September 2026), PDV sponsored and spoke at the Chartered Institute of Fundraising‘s Insight in Fundraising Conference 2026 in London, where CAUSE360 was launched.
Milestone in the charity sector
This year marked 20 years of the Insight in Fundraising special interest group bringing the charity data and insight community together. The conference theme – turning headwinds into tailwinds: transforming challenge into impact – ran through a jam-packed agenda.
Jon Eserin, Executive Director of Engagement and Income Generation at RSPCA, opened the day with a leadership take on what turns good insight into great decision-making. Jen Shang, Co-founder and Director of Institute for Sustainable Philanthropy, closed the plenary sessions looking at what the psychology of love can teach fundraising about loyalty.
In between, three streams of talks covered everything from Alzheimer’s Society‘s supporter communications overhaul to Prostate Cancer Research‘s award-winning work on gaining 100,000 new supporters and Lloyds Banking Group‘s CMO Suresh Balaji on winning over Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
It was a rare chance for anyone working across charity data and insight to properly catch-up and swap notes with the rest of the sector and we were delighted to exhibit. Scott Logie, Naomi Hurst, Catherine Ellerd-Elliott and Jody Vickers attended from PDV, along with Matt Smith and Steve White attending from THINK – a chance for both sides of a newly formed partnership to meet in one place.
Scott and Dimitris on the main stage
Before lunchtime, Scott – Head of Data Consultancy at PDV and Chair of the Data & Marketing Association (DMA) UK Customer Engagement Committee – took the main stage with Dimitris Mandiliotis, Head of Income Data & CRM at Samaritans, for their talk: Artificial loyalty: what 260 marketers reveal about the trust AI can’t buy.
The session ran through the highlights of a newly launched DMA Customer Engagement research report. AI ranks lowest of all the skills marketers say build loyalty today, behind measurement, analytics and automation, with storytelling and creative strategy expected to matter most next as agentic AI takes on the routine work. Brand-side marketers remain considerably more confident in AI’s impact than their agency counterparts and trust in AI-generated content lags furthest behind.
Scott and Dimitris took the discussion further than the headline stats, testing the research against what Dimitris sees day-to-day in Samaritans’ own supporter engagement and closing on the question the session was built around: is fundraising’s caution around AI-led donor engagement a headwind worth having or one we’re creating ourselves?
CAUSE360 is here
Also at the conference, we launched CAUSE360 – a co-branded, postcode-level insight dataset built with THINK specifically for the UK charity sector.
Charities typically hold plenty of data at a top level on who has given but very little on who these people actually are. Generic demographic files and modelled wealth indicators weren’t built with charities in mind – they describe populations, rather than giving potential. CAUSE360 closes that gap with a single dataset covering 1.75m+ active UK postcodes, built on 40m+ verified individual records and continuously refreshed with 50,000+ live consumer conversations every month.
It’s structured around five dimensions of charitable potential – the CAUSE framework:
- Context – local environment, community type and neighbourhood characteristics
- Affluence – financial headroom and capacity to give
- Understanding – attitudes, values and what people care about
- Situation – life stage and personal circumstances
- Engagement – how people already support charities and what they do
Together, this help charities:
- Find more supporters by identifying postcodes and profiles with the strongest charitable potential
- Understand their existing base more deeply, beyond age and income, by overlaying CAUSE360 against their own CRM
- Segment with more confidence, built on how people think and behave
- Plan smarter campaigns by directing budget and effort to the areas where propensity is strongest, from appeals to face-to-face fundraising
- Strengthen local relationships, using region-specific insight to engage communities and demonstrate understanding to corporate partners
What sets CAUSE360 apart comes down to three things:
- It’s built on first-party, verified consumer data rather than modelled estimates
- It carries charity-specific knowledge – cause affinities, donor behaviours and giving signals – that generic datasets simply don’t hold
- It’s continuously refreshed rather than static
“Charities have limited data on the people who give, whatever they can gather at the time. What they’ve been missing is a reliable way to understand these people in more detail and why they give. That’s the gap CAUSE360 closes,” says Scott Logie, Head of Data Consultancy at PDV.
“This partnership brings PDV’s data and acquisition expertise together with THINK’s work in strategy and insight, with the people behind it each having 25+ years’ experience in the charity and data and insight sectors. CAUSE360 is the first product to come out of our collaboration, and it’s built specifically around how charities actually plan and target their fundraising,” says Steve White, Director of Data at THINK.
Learn more about CAUSE360 and contact the team to get started here.
