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expertPerspectives

34961

summer 2017 | volume 3

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Alumni,

SenseDONORS,

A Collection of Our Best Advancement Blogs

AND

table of contents

FACULTY INVOLVEMENT | 4

Bringing academic partners into donor conversations is more important than ever.

IDENTIFYING DONORS | 26

Competition for donor dollars is fierce. Plan a year-end campaign that is creative, strategic, and takes full advantage of data and technology to model the best possible audience for alumni solicitations.

BUILDING PIPELINE | 17

Explore best practices around how to transition modest gift donors to major contributors.

2 Featured Writers

4 Five Questions You Should Be Asking to Strengthen Faculty Partnerships

6 Three Things You Can Do Now to

Build Future Donor Loyalty

8 Why Reunions Are Still Essential to Advancement

12 Ensure Your Fundraisers Thrive in the Attention Economy

14 Four Strategies to Collect Alumni Affinity Data

17 Guide Your Donors from Modest Gifts to Major Contributions

20 Do Your Gift Appeals Inspire Young Donors?

24 Five Tips and Tricks for Giving Tuesday

26 Secrets for Reaching Your Ideal Donor Audience

30 How We Help You

eab.com | 1

LEGAL CAVEAT

EAB is a division of The Advisory Board Company (“EAB”). EAB has made efforts to verify the accuracy of the information it provides to members. This report relies on data obtained from many sources, however, and EAB cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided or any analysis based thereon. In addition, neither EAB nor any of its affiliates (each, an “EAB Organization”) is in the business of giving legal, medical, accounting, or other professional advice, and its reports should not be construed as professional advice. In particular, members should not rely on any legal commentary in this report as a basis for action, or assume that any tactics described herein would be permitted by applicable law or appropriate for a given member’s situation. Members are advised to consult with appropriate professionals concerning legal, medical, tax, or accounting issues, before implementing any of these tactics. No EAB Organization or any of its respective officers, directors, employees, or agents shall be liable for any claims, liabilities, or expenses relating to (a) any errors or omissions in this report, whether caused by any EAB organization, or any of their respective employees or agents, or sources or other third parties, (b) any recommendation or graded ranking by any EAB Organization, or (c) failure of member and its employees and agents to abide by the terms set forth herein.

©2017 EAB • All Rights Reserved • eab.com

eab.com | 3 2 | EAB Expert Perspectives summer 2017

Featured WritersThis issue’s contributing experts

Julie brings two decades of experience to EAB Royall, providing specialized insight into effective fundraising strategies. Prior to joining EAB Royall, Julie held development positions at Skidmore College, Union College, and University of Richmond.

Julie SolomonPractice Manager

EAB Royall

[email protected]

James is committed to bringing best practice, strategic insights to our fundraising partners. He has worked on issues related to major gift officer recruitment, affinity-based giving, talent acquisition, mid-level giving, and the changing face of the 21st-century donor.

James HurleyConsultant

Advancement Forum

[email protected]

Dana is a key member of EAB Royall’s data analysis and fundraising strategy team for our advancement partners. She has contributed key research on alumni fundraising and helped establish Royall as an industry leader in fundraising analytics and strategy.

Dana GreskoAnalytics and Fundraising Strategy Manager

EAB Royall

[email protected]

As a member of our Advancement Forum team, Dena conducts best practice research related to major and principal giving. She works with academic partners for multidisciplinary fundraising and major gift officers on professional development.

Dena SchwartzResearch Analyst

Advancement Forum

[email protected]

A leader on EAB’s Strategic Research team, Jeff recently spearheaded our work on “Winning Donor Mindshare in the Attention Economy.” Additionally, Jeff studies principal gift strategies, mid-level giving, disruptive fundraising initiatives, student philanthropy, alumni relations, and more.

Jeff MartinSenior Consultant

Advancement Forum

[email protected]

4 | EAB Expert Perspectives summer 2017 eab.com | 5

DENA SCHWARTZ

Five Questions You Should Be Asking to Strengthen Faculty Partnerships

Today’s principal gift prospects and donors have increasingly high expectations of higher education institutions. They want to support transformative ideas with world-changing impact—and they want to connect directly with the people doing the work.

However, many faculty members are reluctant to engage with donors.

From negative experiences with advancement to perceptions that donors will control their research, it’s no surprise that gift officers often struggle to engage thought partners who can make a compelling case for donor support.

Despite these challenges, bringing academic partners into donor conversations is more important than ever. During a recent comprehensive campaign at the University of Chicago, donors who made multimillion-dollar gifts held 5 to 10 close bonds with individuals on campus, The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported. Those bonds included a wide range of people—from development staff to faculty members. Clearly, when it comes to success with principal giving, the more connections a donor has with your institution, the better.

In order to foster working relationships, development staff should conduct discovery visits with faculty members and academic leaders. Similar to a donor discovery conversation, these visits enable fundraisers to learn what drives a faculty member, why that person’s research is important, and how its impact could be explained to a donor. To show faculty members that working with advancement doesn’t have to involve a large time commitment, visits should last 30–45 minutes and should take place in their office or lab.

Questions 1 through 3 set context for describing research in depth and can build faculty members’ confidence in their own narratives. These questions help show that their narratives are stories worth telling and could interest the right donor.

All five questions provide information that advancement staff can share with donors whose gifts are driven by impact. After discussing in-depth answers to these introductory questions, delve deeper into details that could be interesting to known prospects and discuss potential roadblocks that advancement should communicate clearly to donors.

A successful discovery conversation shows faculty members that working with advancement doesn’t require making an “ask” or finding a donor. Their role is to discuss the impact of their research with an interested donor—development staff will handle the rest. Engaging faculty members through discovery visits creates a win-win scenario:

They will be more willing to work with advancement, and frontline fundraisers will have a better understanding of how to talk about their groundbreaking research.

In order to make the discovery conversation useful for everyone involved, focus on five key questions:

1 Who are you?

2 What do you do?

3 What are your passions?

4 How does your research impact the campus, region, or world?

5 Why does your research matter in this time and place?

Faculty Discovery Visits Provide More Intel on the Project

Set content and establish expertise

• Background and previous research

• Upcoming research initiatives

• Benefits to campus, region, and world

• Value of philanthropy and other funding sources

• Thirty-second “elevator pitch” for initiative

• Features that distinguish it from other programs

Describe the project and its relevance

Communicate impact and urgency


DANA GRESKO

Three Things You Can Do Now to Build Future Donor Loyalty

Teach your youngest alumni to be loyal

In addition to recognizing three-year consecutive donors, we suggest that you also recognize alumni who have given consistently since graduation. This has proved to be one of the most effective ways to help build a culture of “every year, any amount” giving among young alumni.

For schools with a student philanthropy program, using senior gift communications to educate outgoing students about loyalty recognition helps reinforce their understanding that a yearly gift of any amount will be valued.

Don’t hesitate to send reminders

Many schools have a loyalty recognition program buried in some deep recess of their advancement page, but few seem to have made it onto the radar of the typical alumni donor.

Be sure to highlight your program. Segment those alumni who are currently eligible for the donor society both to communicate your undying love and appreciation for them and to remind them to make their gifts before the end of your fiscal year. Successful annual giving programs typically use strategic segmentation and variable copy capabilities to remind donors to renew so that they will not lose their loyalty recognition at the end of the year.

For donors on the cusp of loyalty recognition, sending out a single piece focused on the loyalty society is not enough. Instead, use your calendar year-end and fiscal year-end communications to target these donors for special reminders that express your appreciation for their past—and, if they’d like to join the special society of yearly donors, future—contributions.

Ultimately, the sign of a mature, healthy annual giving program is one in which the majority of donors fall into the multiyear (3+ consecutive years) category. These strategies will help you build an effective loyalty recognition program that can get you in front of your donors in a way that nudges them to support their alma mater, year after year.

Getting alumni donors into the pattern of true annual giving (as opposed to “I thought I gave last year but actually last gave in 2007”) is a feat that challenges even the best advancement offices. “Loyalty giving recognition” is a strategy that brings success for some programs and nothing more than administrative headaches for others.

Drawing on a wealth of data from EAB Royall’s partner institutions, we have identified three top program tactics to maximize donor loyalty opportunities.

Don’t wait to recognize current donors

Many Advancement programs don’t start recognizing annual donors until those donors reach their five-year anniversary—and sometimes even their ten-year anniversary. But there’s very little to lose by rewarding three years of consecutive giving with membership in a special society for loyal donors.

Not only does this three-year goal seem more immediate and attainable for your newer donors, but it also lets your advancement team use society membership as a “hook” when talking to donors who are in their second year of giving.


JULIE SOLOMON

To me, reunions and annual giving go together like “peas and carrots,” to quote the inimitable Forrest Gump.

Of course, I’ve spent the better part of my career on small liberal arts campuses, where reunions are ingrained in the institutional culture. But all institutions—large or small, public or private—can grow engagement and donations by harnessing the sentimental magic of class and affinity reunions.

Why reunions are essential to annual giving

Occasionally I hear, “Reunions are out of date.” Others lament that reunions are too taxing on staffing and budget resources with limited ROI—due to low interest or attendance from alumni who lack a strong sense of connection to their college, university, class, or program.

But reunions can still be a relevant and effective tool for engagement and fundraising. When executed with forethought and precision, reunions provide advancement teams a meaningful way to engage their alumni by giving them a memorable, relationship-building experience. Reunions emotionally bond your donors, volunteers, and university—a bond that can be long-lasting.

Similarly, reunions play well with up-and-coming millennials—young alumni who value their networks and friendships. Reunion giving blends perfectly with their preferred giving channels of digital and social media.

How reunions can keep your donor data pertinent

Reunions boost alumni giving and participation, broaden your base of support, and increase visibility for prospective donors, ultimately growing your organization’s fundraising coffers.

But reunions also provide an occasion to invest in data updates and review research profiles and class lists. For each reunion year or program, we reacquaint ourselves with leading influencers in our alumni circles and identify new potential donors to solicit. This regular “pulse check” of our alumni and prospect data is vital to our fundraising operations because it helps us reconnect our institutions with disengaged alumni.

While reunions are not one-size-fits-all, EAB Royall has identified four tactics to boost ROI.

Four tactical elements to maximize ROI for your next reunion

Why

Are Still Essential to Advancement


Four tactical elements to maximize ROI for your next reunion

And, post-reunion, many donors will renew their gifts and retain at a higher level than prior to the reunion, thus providing your annual fund with much-needed sustainable growth. So go ahead—invite them to think back, come back, and give back to their alma mater.

A digital peer engagement platform. Peer volunteers help build and maintain relationships between your institution and alumni. Improved digital channels and platforms for recruiting, training, and motivating reunion gift volunteers can simplify your team’s to-do list. Peer-to-peer contact—layered with staff-driven direct marketing and solicitations—is essential to reaching attendance, dollar, and participation goals.

Class gifts. Reunion class gifts foster and maintain class unity through a spirit of celebration that engenders broad participation, while concurrently inspiring others to make their “gift of a lifetime.” Alumni often feel a greater incentive to give and increase their gifts significantly when the request is tied to a class gift. Think of reunions as mini-campaigns that engage across all levels of giving and have a sense of urgency, a goal, and a deadline.

Class goals. Inter-class competition can motivate many contributions. After considering a class’s giving history, perceived capacity, and input from peers who serve on the reunion committee, integrate reunion-giving awards into your reunion program. Encourage each class to strive to break the current reunion records for that milestone year, as well as compete with the other classes in reunion that year for awards such as “the largest amount of dollars raised” and “the highest class participation rate.” These awards serve as a “carrot” to prompt contributions to meet goals within your annual fund and beyond. Awards such as these are often included in a special reunion awards ceremony and highlighted in class and university communications and newsletters.

Multiyear pledges and planned gifts. Reunion campaigns are designed for alumni to celebrate with a shared goal of supporting the institution to the fullest extent possible. Prior donors should be asked to increase the size of their previous gifts. The aggregate amount of gifts that are initiated during or leading up to the reunion time, including contributions to any area of the campus, can be counted in the class gift total—not just the annual fund.

It’s clear that reunions are still a great

opportunity to combine engagement

and fundraising.


However, we believe there are three key strategies that college and university fundraisers can use to successfully win donor mindshare, even in the attention economy:

Make it easy to give: Donors are easily distracted, and a clunky, poorly designed giving page can be the deciding factor between a gift and a mere good intention. Streamlining the giving page, following up with drop-off donors, and funneling donors toward automatically recurring gifts minimize unnecessary attrition.

Cut through the noise: It takes a lot to surpass the modern donor’s “inspiration threshold”—the point at which an appeal motivates him or her to give. Advancement professionals have recently begun to experiment with digital micro-campaigns, deadline-driven solicitations, and donation incentives to effectively compete for awareness.

Connect alumni to a cause: 46% of young alumni fear that gifts to their alma mater will disappear into a budgetary black hole. To engage skeptical audiences, best practice institutions can reframe the ask around discrete causes and projects on campus, realizing that small gifts from these donors can make an outsized impact.

JEFF MARTIN

Ensure Your Fundraisers Thrive in the Attention Economy

Modern life is busy. Every day, people deal with a constant barrage of emails, calls, text messages, and other asks for their time and money. Their attention is spread thin. They make split-second decisions about where they will engage.

A growing number of commentators have begun to realize that the scarcest commodity in the 21st century may not be money—rather, it’s attention. We live in a world where more and more organizations compete for a fixed pool of awareness and engagement—a situation that many are calling “the attention economy.”

In the attention economy, whoever is best at elbowing his or her way to the front of an audience and staying at the top of their inboxes wins. Yet, relevance matters too. If you aren’t talking to your constituents about something that they care about, they’ll tune out remarkably quickly.

What does this mean for fundraising? It means that raising philanthropic support is a lot harder. There are three times as many nonprofits competing for donations as there were 30 years ago. The frequency with which they solicit donors has accelerated too.

Key Features of the Attention Economy

Information Overload

Individuals must sort through more information than ever before

Top of the Inbox Wins

An endless influx of communications means consumers focus on the last organization to reach out

Split-Second Decisions

Appeals for money or attention elicit gut-check responses from busy consumers

Relevance Is Paramount

Consumers stay tuned in and primed to buy as long as the organization is engaging them with content that is relevant to their lives


JAMES HURLEY

Four Strategies to Collect Alumni Affinity Data

As alumni receive an ever-increasing number of solicitations from a wide variety of nonprofit organizations, colleges and universities can no longer use a one-size-fits-all solicitation approach for annual giving. Alumni want to receive information about giving opportunities customized to their interests, or they will make gifts to other organizations that focus on these areas.

Unfortunately, past data collection approaches have left advancement shops with a lack of actionable intel to link donor interests and affinities to giving opportunities on campus. Tried-and-true practices, such as senior giving campaigns, still focus on generating revenue instead of building a reliable affinity database for future major gifts. While growing a culture of philanthropy remains more important than ever, advancement staff need to think outside of the revenue box to ensure that senior campaigns and other giving events generate the data needed for future solicitations.

While senior giving can jump-start young alumni affinity data efforts, data about ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation for older alumni segments remains elusive for many institutions. To capture demographic and affinity data across your alumni base, consider these low-cost, high-impact data collection strategies.

Refocus senior class giving campaigns

The class gift is often a staple of senior year. Advancement leaders lament that the efforts are monumental and the returns limited. We need to reconsider why these campaigns are most useful: growing a culture of philanthropy, even if they never become a large source of revenue. We need not only to allow seniors to direct their philanthropic support to a specific cause on campus but also to store and capture that information for post-graduation use. For example, if a senior directs his or her class gift to the African-American Studies program on campus, we should recognize that he or she has an affinity toward African-American research and history. We should shift our focus from sourcing major gifts to updating our affinity data for graduating seniors.

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Leverage Multiple Strategies for Affinity Data Collection

Registration Pushes

Pop-up box requests affinity data after event registration

Campus Newspaper Audit

Student workers scan old campus newspapers for key terms related to affinity groups

Alumni Newsletter

Advertise affinity groups in e-newsletters for all alumni

Local Board Searches

Examine board membership of local nonprofits to identify alumni of influence and capacity

Online Affinity Communities

Establish Alumni Facebook and LinkedIn pages

Alumni Weekend Breakout Sessions

Host roundtables for current students and alumni

Older AlumniYounger Alumni


JULIE SOLOMON

Guide Your Donors from Modest Gifts to Major Contributions

In 2013, former New York City mayor and renowned businessman Michael Bloomberg committed $350 million to his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University—a gift that lifted his total contributions to more than a billion dollars and made him the first individual to cross that charitable threshold for an institution of higher learning.

That’s the stuff of philanthropic legend and a development officer’s dream, but many assume it can only be that—a dream—because their institution is not Johns Hopkins and billionaire alumni are rare, to say the least.

But conversations with my advancement colleagues at the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges (AGB) Forum recently confirmed for me that we know how to make major donations more of a reality at every university: engage donors early in annual giving and keep them giving consistently.

Even Michael Bloomberg followed this path to his jaw-droppingly generous contribution. His first gift to Johns Hopkins was a mere five dollars back in 1965, just a year after he graduated. He gave consistently and made his first of many million-dollar commitments to the university in 1984, 20 years post-degree.

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Establish online alumni affinity communities

Younger alumni are fluent in social media, and establishing affinity-focused alumni groups on social media platforms enables alumni to share their affinities with us before they make a gift. Groups on platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter should promote relevant topics for affinity constituencies, such as recent celebrations of Latino scholarship recipients or accomplishments of alumni in the legal profession. Staff in social media, marketing, and/or prospect research functions should track the membership lists of these groups, and they should ensure that relevant alumni records are updated with the appropriate affinity information.

Audit the campus newspaper

Leveraging campus historical records provides another avenue for sourcing reliable information about an alum’s affinity, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Advancement student workers can skim old student newspaper articles, searching for key words that may relate to specific affinity groups. For example, a student worker might conduct a campus newspaper audit looking for words related to “LGBT,” “HIV/AIDS advocacy,” or “campus pride festivities” to identify and document alumni with presumed LGBT affinity. Be sure to send these names to your prospect-research team, who may have additional information, before coding them in the alumni database.

Cross-search relevant local boards

Looking at other boards within the local community can help source affinity information about older alumni. First, institutions should create a list of local area boards that have a specific focus (e.g. LGBT homelessness, Latino/a empowerment, African-American business growth). Then, advancement staff should cross-reference the organizations’ boards of directors with alumni from the college or university. While some alumni may serve on a nonprofit board without identifying with the corresponding affinity, most alumni who sit on affinity-related boards will have a greater likelihood of supporting related causes.


From modest beginnings to major gifts

As this chart demonstrates, Bloomberg’s path to major giving is fairly typical (in pattern, if not in scale!). The ascent to major giving requires steps along the way, not a straight shot to philanthropic legend.

Forty percent of major donors start their charitable ties with their alma mater with gifts of less than $100 shortly after graduation, and 80% of major donors give consistently during the subsequent five years. Consistent giving for at least three to five years signals an increased likelihood that a donor will persist and eventually make the climb to larger gifts; these commitments can, in fact, be steps up the ladder to major donations and contribute considerable lifetime value along the way.

The ascent of major giving

Advancement teams can use their annual giving data to determine where to place the rungs of that philanthropic ladder to ensure that as many alumni as possible are willing and able to climb it.

We find that analyses of past actions and strategic segmentation of your alumni in the annual giving pool can best focus your campaign resources. The chart below illustrates the process of soliciting and stewarding those alumni through the early stages of their giving—a process that increases the likelihood of future major contributions.

Donor’s Progress to Major Giving

GRADUATION MAJOR GIFTS

Consistent Giving While Young

80% of major donors consistently made gifts in the first five years after graduation

First Gift

40% of major donors start with a gift under $100

First Major Gift

On average, it takes 19 years for donors to

reach highest level of giving

First Leadership Gift

Donors, on average, take seven years to make a

$1,000 gift

Frequent Upgrades

Donors who upgrade consistently have a 9x better chance of one day giving a major gift

40% 80%of major donors start with a gift under $100

of major donors give consistently during the subsequent five years

Data from our partner institutions indicates that once a donor gives for three or more consecutive years, he or she is at least 80% likely to renew those contributions and is better positioned to upgrade to even larger gifts in the future.

A thoughtful, steady stream of coordinated and personalized multichannel communication pieces that engage donors where they are, in their lives and in their relationship with the institution, can have a meaningful and lasting impact.

Executed successfully, data-driven segmentation can move your alumni along the same path of philanthropic leaders such as Michael Bloomberg—guiding them to their own gift of a lifetime.

New Donors

Lapsed Donors

Multiyear Donors

Third-Year Reactivated

Donors

Second-Year Reactivated

Donors

Third-Year Donors

Second-Year Donors

Strategic Segmentation

eab.com | 21

Do Your Gift Appeals Inspire Young Donors?

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JEFF MARTIN

Colleges and universities have struggled with young-donor fundraising for years. With graduating classes growing, these challenges have taken a toll on participation rates. The percentage of young alumni giving back is at an all-time low, and there are few signs that the trend will reverse itself in the coming years.

Many young alumni complain that giving to their alma mater feels too impersonal. Forty-six percent say they suspect gifts to their college would disappear into a budgetary black hole, and three-quarters say they would give to another nonprofit before their alma mater.

As a young college graduate recently told The Chronicle of Philanthropy, the prospect of giving back to the school “almost feels like giving your money to the mall.”

...the prospect of giving back to the school “almost feels like giving your money to the mall.”

To combat their skepticism, a growing number of colleges and universities have turned to crowdfunding. Crowdfunding allows donors to support small projects on campus. It ensures that their gifts have a visible impact on a cause they care about, regardless of how much they can donate. It’s the perfect tool for young alumni fundraising.

But it’s not a silver bullet.

Over the past four years, as more higher ed fundraisers have experimented with fundraising, they’ve realized that there’s a lot that can go wrong. New programs may struggle to get off the ground, adolescent programs can fall short on stewardship, and mature programs might find that they’re not renewing donors.

Advancement Forum recently compiled the best solutions to these problems in our webinar, “The Power of the Crowd: New Frontiers in College and University Crowdfunding.” Here are some of the best ideas we found.


Crowdfunding Stewardship at the University of Pittsburgh

• Automatic thank-you email from project leaders

• Handwritten postcards from all fundraising groups

• Information on gift use and impact

• Personal stories from students and faculty who administer the funds

• Renewal email discusses project

• For repeat projects, ask for renewed support to area of past gift

Thank You

6-Month Update

12-Month Renewal

If someone gives very specifically to

a project, they may be turned off by a

general solicitation from Pittsburgh.

But if they get a personalized

stewardship piece acknowledging

that we know they care about this

specific thing, they might give again.”

Morgan Walbert EngagePitt Development Coordinator

University of Pittsburgh

Make sure the campus community knows about crowdfunding

Crowdfunding relies on more than just a “crowd” of donors. On-campus partners have to be on board too. For example, at Dalhousie University, advancement leaders are strategic in engaging academics, development officers, and alumni relations staff to get the word out about crowdfunding. In the future, they’re planning on extending outreach to student services and athletics staff.

Choose the best projects upfront

Advancement leaders need to make sure that they get off on the right foot with crowdfunding. A critical mass of successful projects in a new initiative’s first year can provide the momentum needed to expand the donor base and ensure viability for years to come. Check out Advancement Forum’s Project Selection Guide to help you find the best projects for converting your young alumni.

Hardwire stewardship so that donors see impact

Donors give to crowdfunding because of the promise of visible, transparent impact. Yet it’s easy to fall short on stewardship. Projects end, student leaders move on, and advancement gets caught up in other priorities. At the University of Pittsburgh, advancement staff aim to avoid missed stewardship opportunities by requiring project leaders to reach out to donors immediately after they give, six months later, and at the twelve-month mark.

Transition crowdfunding donors into repeat gifts

Crowdfunding donors develop loyalty to individual projects. Where possible, soliciting repeat gifts to recurring projects can boost the crowdfunding donor retention rate. Arizona State University did just this, proactively identifying ongoing or annually occurring projects that donors can give to every year. However, other projects are one-and-done affairs, and advancement leaders must decide how to bring those donors back on board. At Carnegie Mellon, fundraisers reach out to crowdfunding donors to suggest related projects on a similar topic that might pique their interest. Meanwhile, at Temple, renewal appeals stress impact over loyalty.

Fundraisers are rightly excited about crowdfunding’s potential to make inroads with the next big generation of supporters of higher education. The path forward isn’t an easy one, but with some planning and inspiration, advancement leaders and their teams can get there.

Best solutions for university crowdfunding


DENA SCHWARTZ

Five Tips and Tricks for Giving Tuesday

With Thanksgiving around the corner, the pressure is on for advancement shops to meet huge goals for Giving Tuesday. However, as alumni are bombarded with more digital solicitations than ever before, it’s becoming harder to cut through the noise.

Instead of falling into the pile of ignored solicitations, one Advancement Forum member increased their Giving Tuesday revenue from less than $4,000 in 2012 to more than $490,000 in 2015. This increase was possible thanks to a clear strategy, long-term goals, and extensive teamwork. However, their success was not one-off—momentum has been sustained, along with ongoing increases in year-over-year annual fund revenue.

In order to exceed your goals on Giving Tuesday, begin by following these five steps.

Increase urgency with alumni challenges

Alumni can give to the annual fund at any time of year, but challenges make it urgent to give on Giving Tuesday itself. This institution solicited a group of alumni and parent donors who would give a specified amount if the institution reached a minimum number of donors. By creating clear goals and communicating them widely, a range of first-time donors was motivated to click “give” on the website. A dynamic website was updated throughout the day to recognize each donor.

Create a volunteer toolkit

Instead of relying on advancement staff to drive all momentum, volunteers were equipped with sample social media posts and email templates. Staff reminded volunteers about the plans and provided direction and support on Giving Tuesday in order to help volunteers drive participation. Volunteers responded positively to the resources, creating a constant stream of consistent messaging on social media throughout the day.

Consider planned giving

Adding a box to the Giving Tuesday donation form enabled new donors to indicate interest in planned giving. While the number of donors who indicated interest was small, the box increased awareness about planned-giving options for all donors and informed the planned-giving team of new prospects who previously may not have been on their radar.

Leverage affinities

A wide variety of donors gave to the campaign, from young alumni making their first gift to alumni in reunion years and graduates of professional schools. In order to engage these different populations, appeals were made from a variety of athletic teams, extracurricular activities, and regional programs. As a result, alumni found their interests reflected in the campaign, and 21% of Giving Tuesday donors made their first gift in at least two years.

Don’t forget about parents

Giving Tuesday occurs after many students return to class from their Thanksgiving travels. However, parents are still a crucial component of one-day campaign success. From serving as volunteers to providing challenge gifts, working with parents can make the difference between surpassing a goal and barely meeting it.

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The results speak for themselves. This institution has seen annual fund giving increase year over year, thanks to an extended planning process that engages teams across the advancement shop. Even if you are just beginning to plan your Giving Tuesday efforts, thinking about these aspects of the mini-campaign can help make the day a success.


Secrets for Reaching Your Ideal Donor Audience

DANA GRESKO

As the year comes to a close, your alumni will be bombarded with a flurry of solicitations from the many charities competing for their philanthropic dollars. No matter how charitable, donors often tire of appeals at year’s end.

This alumni ennui can be tough to combat, and getting effective solicitations in front of likely donors during the critical calendar year-end time frame can make the difference between meeting annual goals and falling short. In a perfect world, you would be able to send every appeal to every alumnus and donor, but of course, most schools can’t afford the opportunity costs or scale of investment.

Efficiency is imperative, so annual giving officers have to plan a year-end campaign that is creative, strategic, and takes full advantage of data, research, and technology to model the best possible audience for alumni solicitations.

Through our work with advancement offices, we have found that parsing and analyzing data allows us to know who likely donors are, how they like to be reached, and where else their dollars are going. This combination of actionable data and analytics enables our partners to maximize their limited resources and still drive participation and giving growth.

Here are three strategies our high-performing annual giving teams employ to achieve success for our partner institutions.

Match alumni giving to other philanthropic causes

Advancement officers sometimes use wealth or capacity scores to determine which never-givers are most likely to contribute and how much. However, we have found that these scores have only modest bearing on annual giving. Instead, data on constituents’ charitable giving behavior outside of the university is a more useful measure of a prospect’s likelihood to give.

We help our partners discern whether alums are giving to charitable and political organizations, which ones, and how much. This information then helps prioritize whom to ask for support and what amount to target.


Flag engaged alumni and parents

Engagement is a sign of willingness to contribute. It is essential for advancement teams to follow up quickly and effectively with any alum or parent who attends an event, participates with a local alumni club and, more commonly, clicks through an email.

The ability to identify who is clicking through solicitations is extremely valuable. Armed with this type of engagement data, we are able to help partners decipher which “recent-clickers” are also lapsed donors or never-givers who have not made a contribution. We feed this recent-clicker data back to our partner schools so they can then prioritize more personal follow-ups that yield significantly higher conversion rates.

Deploy 360 modeling and leverage channel preferences

Each college and university has a unique identity—and their alumni donors do too. Recognizing the special characteristics of alums that correlate with charitable giving is vital for return on investment, particularly with never-givers. We’ve found that proprietary predictive modeling that includes key engagement-related data points helps isolate the high-performing prospective donor profiles and allows our partners to focus acquisition resources on the alumni who are most likely to contribute.

Once target groups are identified based on predictive indicators, EAB Royall uses longitudinal and transactional gift data to establish donors’ preferred giving channels. This comprehensive, data-driven approach enables our partners to reach the right alums with the right messaging through their preferred media.

Each of the three cutting-edge data tactics described in this article can improve your ability to find—and grow—donors. None is a silver bullet, in and of itself.

But executed together, they form a comprehensive strategy for identifying the most likely donors and engaging them in informed and persistent ways.

If you have easy access to this data internally, congratulations! You are certainly ahead of the curve. If this data is hard to come by at your institution, working with a partner like EAB Royall can unlock actionable insights to target the alumni and parents who are most likely to respond to your annual giving appeals throughout the fundraising cycle, particularly at year’s end.

Flag engaged alumni and parents

Match alumni giving to other

philanthropic causes

Deploy 360 modeling and leverage channel

preferences

Comprehensive Strategy for Identifying Ideal Donors


How We Help You

EAB’s advancement practices help higher education leaders with best practice research, actionable insights, and data-driven marketing services to…

Build strong alumni relationships

Increase revenue across donor lifecycle

Attract and retain top fundraising talent

The 200+ college and university members within our network partner with us to drive growth and improve outcomes by identifying, hardwiring, and executing the best practices that work for you.

Advancement Forum Royall Advancement

We partner with advancement executives on the full range of their strategic and operational challenges—talent management, pipeline development, alumni relations, annual giving, and more.

We analyze years of donor data to find untapped opportunity and then execute customized strategies and campaigns to increase annual giving participation, revenue, and pipeline.

EAB is what forces us to think outside the box

and anticipate what lies ahead. They serve as

our thought partners time and time again.”

With a lot of other conferences and association memberships, you get a lot of great ideas that are just somehow supposed to magically happen. What I love about Advancement Forum’s work is that you provide diagnostics, discussion guides, tools, and templates that I can share with my team and we can immediately implement.”

Royall Advancement is an innovative, flexible, and reliable partner. Through your work, we’ve grown our annual giving and donor retention in critical areas. We would not experience the success we have without your support.”

VP Development and Alumni Relations Private Research University in the Northeast

VP Advancement Public University in the West

VP Advancement Private Liberal Arts College

Increase Your Participation, Revenue, and Pipeline

To learn how EAB Royall and Advancement Forum can help you achieve your fundraising goals, visit eab.com/advancement.

32 | EAB Expert Perspectives summer 2017

For more information on the topics presented in this issue of Expert Perspectives, subscribe to Alumni, Donors, and Sense: The Advancement Blog at eab.com/blogs/advancement.

EAB is a best practices firm that uses a combination of research, technology, and services to help more than 1,200 colleges and universities improve academic performance and strengthen core enrollment and fundraising revenue streams.

alumni - agb · analytics and fundraising strategy manager eab royall [email protected] ... your...

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