Visualizing Success
From tracking alumni engagement to presenting fundraising data to leadership, dashboards are creatively solving problems and making day-to-day work more efficient for advancement professionals. Here, five Circle of Excellence Award-winning dashboard creators provide a deep dive into the origins, execution, and successes of these projects.
Presenting a ‘Single Pane of Glass’ View
University of Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.
When Peter Landgren, President of the University of Cincinnati Foundation, found himself overwhelmed by the data being presented at a pipeline update meeting, he determined that there must be a simpler way to receive, understand, and act on the data the foundation had within its systems. What resulted was the implementation of the foundation’s Pipeline Dashboard.
Previously, the foundation relied on at least five reports across multiple dashboards with multiple views. Each report was successful for its individual purpose, but to get a full picture of the health of the organization, data had to be combined manually.
“A plethora of reports with slightly differing details was fostering an environment of data distrust and technology apprehension,” says Carrie White, Vice President, Technology, Information & Philanthropic Strategy.
The impact of collaboration
The organization’s various departments and data resources collaborated to produce a single dashboard that displayed the primary content and data filters that Landgren requested, all within a few weeks. Landgren then provided feedback and the dashboard was refined before launching to the entire organization.
The impact teamwork had on the project cannot be understated, says White. “[Previous reports] had all been created at the request of one or two end users, units, or departments. There was little cross-functional collaboration to create a solution that would work for the whole organization. This project took the status quo and turned it on its head to foster a collaboration that delivered a single pane of glass view into the complicated world of fundraising data.”
The Pipeline Dashboard shows clear indicators of goals, performance, and high-value gifts broken down by vice president area, gift band, and timeframe and various filters display different combinations of campuses, units, and gift bands organized by month, quarter, or fiscal year.
A cultural shift in data reliance
All members of the UC Foundation can access the dashboard to utilize reports, understand goals, and assess the health of the organization. With a consistent reporting tool in place across the organization, a cultural shift has taken place, with the Pipeline Dashboard creating new ways to think about and view data.
The dashboard has streamlined data and reporting, emphasized consistency and the importance of data entry, and shifted focus to forward-leaning metrics to drive fundraising strategy. The new format provides greater clarity and consistency in alignment with the foundation’s overall goals, says White.
Words of Advice
“There is beauty in simplicity and the complicated answer is not always the best path forward. Aligning what the purpose of this data is and how it drives action is imperative in these projects. The use case must be clear. Otherwise, you end up including the first event date or their smallest gift amount. Are they good to know? Maybe. But do they really answer the use case? Probably not. Focus on the fundamentals and keep it as simple as it needs to be while driving action forward.”
– Carrie White, Vice President, Technology, Information & Philanthropic Strategy
Tracking Alumni Engagement
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.
Indiana University has long tracked and measured for fundraising success; however, this was not the case for alumni engagement, explains Allison Dewitt, Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives.
The IU Alumni Association partnered with the IU Foundation to develop an integrated, automated platform that analyzes and displays alumni engagement data at the individual school, unit, and campus levels.
The dashboard “tells the story of an alum’s engagement experiences with IU,” and provides a measurable and consistent method of tracking their generosity and commitment, says Dewitt.
The Alumni Engagement Dashboard was specifically designed for IU’s decentralized approach to advancement, uniting its community through a collaborative development and launch process. Over multiple years, the discovery and design phases of the project were guided by an advisory group made up of advancement partners and key stakeholders from across the multi-campus institution.
These partners played an essential role by providing feedback and applying CASE alumni engagement metrics and standards to the project, says Dewitt.
Acknowledging the connection between engagement and giving
Users of the AED can access data across four areas: volunteer opportunities (board and committee service), events and experiences (event registrations), charitable contributions (all gifts for which a constituent received recognition credit), and citizenship (individuals who voted in a trustee election, updated contact information, submitted class notes, or participated in a visit or phone call). The AED allows advancement professionals at IU to generate a variety of reports that show how and what number of alumni are engaging with their unit.
This helps to make data-driven programmatic and budgetary decisions, says Dewitt, and “opens the door for partnerships and collaboration opportunities across units on all campuses.”
“The functionality of the AED is a game changer when considering goal setting for alumni engagement and donor strategies throughout the year,” she says. “It is a way to celebrate the success of current alumni engagement work and identify opportunities for increasing engagement at IU.”
Refining an instrumental tool
Daily maintenance and upgrades to the AED are now a part of advancement services work queues. Advancement staff who liaise with partners throughout the university are responsible for ensuring platform adoption and training, as well as gathering feedback as the operations team continues to improve usability and functionality.
“Those perspectives and partnerships are vital to ensuring our system continues to evolve in a way that makes it easy to use from beginning (data collection and entry) to the end (reviewing and reporting metrics),” says Dewitt.
Words of Advice
“Start where you are. When we launched the Alumni Engagement Dashboard, we were very candid with our advancement partners in saying this is just the beginning. We commit to evolve and grow how we track and utilize alumni engagement metrics, and we encourage them to do the same. Start tracking what you can now and expand as you go. Your system doesn’t have to be perfect to get started if you’re committed to continuous improvement.”
– Allison Dewitt, Managing Director of Strategic Initiatives
Tracking Real-time Annual Fund Health
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Previously confined to fiscal year retrospectives that were only explored during benchmarking conferences when analyzing donor behavior trends and giving patterns, Brown University created a data visualization tool that provides a real-time picture of annual fund health. After implementing the Brown Annual Fund Donor Behavior Dashboard, the university saw increases in both overall and undergraduate alumni donors in fiscal year 2023, reversing a multi-year downward trend.
The dashboard displays donor retention, reactivation, and acquisition data and filters by constituency type, designation, source, timing, and program area. This allows for in-depth analysis of each specific program area of the annual fund, as well as a comprehensive overview that highlights trends.
Widely used by staff, the dashboard also replaced the need to manually compile data and reduced the number of reports necessary to conduct analysis, says Mamdouh Elanani, Lead Report Developer.
“It has substantially increased the data literacy of the organization by encouraging the thoughtful exploration of data from a multitude of staff members ranging from junior employees to senior leaders,” says Matt Salvatore, Executive Director of Data Strategies and Marketing.
Extensive research prior to creation
The Donor Behavior Dashboard was created by both advancement services and annual giving staff.
“It was a truly excellent collaboration between strategic leaders who surfaced an innovative concept and technical providers who brought to life a dynamic end-product,” says Elanani.
The team conducted internal and external research to determine the data elements required to accurately assess an annual giving program. This meant reviewing current annual giving reports, past benchmarking projects, and key metrics to identify the data sources necessary to inform the dashboard. Finally, they reviewed dozens of dashboard examples to determine ideal visualization. The team also developed a training program to ensure data literacy and proper usage by staff.
Identifying opportunities to shift strategy
The Donor Behavior Dashboard integrates seamlessly with the university’s constituent relationship management system to provide access to the most current demographic, gift, and appeal/source data.
“Leaders of each programmatic area are able to accurately assess the current state of their programs, while identifying opportunities for real-time, impactful shifts in strategy,” says Salvatore.
This includes more thoughtful segmentation for marketing efforts and identifying enhanced opportunities for volunteer and staff assignments, says Salvatore. And by leveraging diversity indicators, the team has been able to identify trends in the giving behavior of alumni of color, which has been instrumental in the team’s approach to increasing the segment’s donor participation.
The dashboard has refined the approach to key initiatives, including the university’s giving day, and contributed to an overall increase in donor totals from fiscal year 2022 to 2023.
Words of Advice
“It's important to prioritize conversations with key partners at the outset of the dashboard creation process—this ensures a shared sense of ownership, facilitates faster adoption and increased usage, and ultimately enables staff members to realize the true value of the tools.”
– Matt Salvatore, Executive Director of Data Strategies and Marketing
Optimizing Email Marketing
Stanford University, California, U.S.
The Digital and Data Team at Stanford University sought a way to limit email campaign opt-outs following the number reaching roughly 4,000 in fiscal year 2020. The solution? Implementing the Stanford Alumni Association Engagement Score.
The scoring system looks at data across 19 categories of behaviors for more than 180,000 contactable alumni to automate numerical scores. Its first objective was to help marketers better target alumni through email marketing, but it has also helped improve marketing productivity, more quickly increase revenue, identify levels of alumni engagement, and decrease the negative side-effects of email marketing, says Jeremy Ware, Senior Manager, Data Analysis.
Merging new and legacy technologies
Ware started creating what would become the Engagement Score model as a pet project, experimenting with new technology that came online for the university in 2019 as an upgrade to its alumni relations and advancement data stacks. The model has since become a central element of the team’s email marketing strategy, says Ware.
The original queries and values of the model were created with existing technology so the model can now be refined and updated without enlisting information technology assistance. The team continues to add categories and adjust queries on an ongoing basis. This also means all reports are accessible to alumni relations and development staff.
Three concepts make this model innovative, explains Ware.
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A cap on the number of instances counted towards a single behavior to prevent any one sub-score from overly influencing the overall score.
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Assigning scores based on the depth of the engagement relative to the depth of the behavior. (e.g., attending a reunion would have a greater impact on score than opening an email)
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When graduates stop engaging in a single behavior, the score automatically discounts it.
This results in a constantly updating list of alumni who are currently engaged with the university, with higher scores indicating who is the most likely to attend an event or purchase a marketing offer, explains Ware.
Connecting with alumni across engagement levels
The model provides the alumni association with a holistic view of alumni engagement not tied to a particular program or internal department.
“[Now] our more-engaged alums hear from us more frequently, and our less-engaged alums only hear essential news from campus,” says Ware.
Following the implementation of the Engagement Score, the marketing team has reduced the audience for email campaigns, instead targeting the best leads in the population to sell out programs, maintain revenue, and decrease unsubscribes. When reducing the audience for a football watch party campaign by 34%, unsubscribes decreased by nearly 60%. And for a wine-purchase program, limiting the email send list by 50% resulted in a 90% reduction of opt-outs.
“A secondary benefit from the scores is that we now have a measure of overall engagement of alumni that's the equivalent of a development organization being able to say, ‘We have raised $X so far this year,’” says Ware. “It lets us answer to university leadership, ‘How many alums are we engaging?’ and ‘How deeply are we engaging them?’”
Words of Advice
“Sure, it helps to have an automated system doing calculations, but it is far from being a requirement. Filtering for specific behaviors and applying a score can be done in Google Sheets, and that means you aren't limited by technologies or budgets. Anyone can build better targeted email campaigns.”
– Jeremy Ware, Senior Manager, Data Analysis
Leveraging Alumni Relationships
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, U.S.
“Successful fundraising is built on relationships. However, our industry often underuses data about alumni who were connected to each other as students. Universities record student clubs, sports, and dorm affiliations but rarely analyze the relationships developed in these shared activities,” says Kelly Douglas, Associate Director of Prospect Analytics at the California Institute of Technology.
While this data existed at Caltech, insights weren’t available in a useful or accessible format. It required the tedious task of pulling separate groups of data to be manually analyzed, says Douglas.
The university built the Relationship Recommender System and Network Map to identify alumni likely to have known each other while on campus to fill this information gap in its fundraising efforts.
Prior to the dashboard’s creation, Douglas checked the feasibility of the project using test data to see that the recommender would work as expected. Applying skills learned while earning her master’s degree in data science, she led the creation of the map and oversaw helpful collaborations between information technology and the prospect research team.
Student behavior suggests alumni connections
The Network Map is a visualization and list-generation tool that suggests relationships based on student activities like living in the same dorm or participating in the same student club. It filters for the connector's rating level, prospect stage, and donor status.
“The dashboard helped surface previously unknown connections between engaged alumni and their unengaged peers,” says Douglas. “Fundraisers then used these relationships to create new strategies for connecting with alumni prospects.”
To accomplish this, the dashboard visualization is filtered to only the most relevant connections. This allows fundraisers to focus on the highest value prospects, and leveraging relationships with passionate alumni supporters who could connect the institute with unengaged alumni from their network.
Pulling new alumni into the fold
The Network Map has streamlined the traditional outreach process, producing targeted, data-driven lists of contacts that allow staff to save time and have a warmer introduction when approaching high-value prospects who haven’t previously been responsive to outreach, says Douglas.
The map will expand as further data points are incorporated, such as using alumni event data to show connections through overlapping event attendance. “Rolling out the project in phases increases the probability for success and allows for better adjustments along the way,” says Douglas.
Already, several cultivations and at least one major gift have resulted because of the map. The team has also used the dashboard’s relationship visualization to present to leadership on the importance of looking at donor journeys holistically and emphasize that relationships unlock opportunities.
Words of Advice
“Whenever you’re making an innovative dashboard where there aren’t already a lot of industry examples of what you’re trying to create, be open to other sources of inspiration and guidance. Google, YouTube, and Tableau Public are all great resources. One of the examples I found super helpful for this project used data on country income levels, so explore visualizations outside of just the fundraising space. For another project, I looked at sales dashboards, because there’s a lot of overlap between how fundraisers and salespeople operate and the kinds of tracking and metrics that are relevant to both groups.”
– Kelly Douglas, Associate Director of Prospect Analytics at the California Institute of Technology
Want to explore further in the world of dashboards?
This year at DRIVE, CASE’s data and analytics conference, a two-part interactive session will answer key questions surrounding visualization and automated reports. Part one will feature a panel discussion and part two a visualization lightning round of live demonstration. Learn more about the Visualization, Dashboards, and Automation elective super session here.
DRIVE 2024 will take place March 25-27 in Washington, D.C., U.S.
About the author(s)
Hannah Ratzer is Editorial Specialist at CASE.
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Article appears in:
March-April Issue of Currents
DIGITAL ONLY ISSUE - Institutions are visualizing success with innovative dashboards. Plus, help for students experiencing homelessness, belonging as the corner piece of the work place puzzle, and more.