Say hello to our little friends! Like Tony Montana, we experienced a rapid rise and fall of our dreams (in our case, dashboard development). Unlike Tony, we lived to tell the tale of how we used that experience to move on to an even better environment. We'll focus on our initial use of Google Looker Studio, which is hardly the BI Tool of your dreams, but the price is right (FREE!) and it's proven to be surprisingly versatile for a variety of dashboard needs. In the aftermath of us taking our Looker Studio dashboards behind the barn, we've penned this final love letter to a frustrating yet functional (and FREE!) product in the hopes that a less financially fortunate organization can benefit from our experience. We will give a glimpse of the dashboards we've created for proposal pipelines, portfolio reviews, initiative reports, principal giving profiles, fundraising progress, career center data, integration with Slate CRM, etc. in the hopes that those of you with no shortage of sweat equity can push Looker Studio to the limit. We will also give a glimpse into how the lessons learned from our experience made it easy for us to adapt to Power BI.

Join us for an engaging session, "From Silos to Synergy: The Reporting Hub Revolution!" as we explore the transformative power of a multidisciplinary and cross-collaborative reporting hub tailored for fundraising and alumni relations. Discover how integrating internal departments with external stakeholders can enhance data sharing, drive strategic decision-making, and elevate fundraising outcomes.

In this session, we'll cover:

Innovative strategies for breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across teams.
Real-world case studies showcasing successful reporting hubs in action.
Best practices for leveraging data to strengthen alumni engagement and drive fundraising initiatives.
Tools and technologies that facilitate seamless communication and reporting.
Don’t miss this opportunity to revolutionize your reporting processes and unlock the full potential of your fundraising efforts! Together, we can create a vibrant community that thrives on collaboration and shared success.

Wealth capacity is an essential financial indicator that many gift officers use to assess a potential donor's ability to contribute. However, like many aspects of fundraising today, it's essential to find the right balance between "art and science" to engage potential donors in a way that encourages generosity while respecting their capacity to give.

Join this session for an interactive discussion and presentation on the different data-driven approaches to evaluating the effectiveness of gift officers' asks in relation to a prospect's capacity.

A recounting of Welcomed Triumphs and Unexpected Follies on the journey to deepen our understanding of the nature of our Fundraiser Portfolios and our Visibility into the Future.

The presenter will share three specific examples of how he identified a problem with fundraiser behavior, developed and implemented a solution, and succeeded in changing fundraising behavior. As an individual major gifts fundraiser, the leader of a lead annual gift officer team, and the Interim Vice President of Advancement, each example addresses how reporting and assessment tools were incorrectly configured to encourage exactly the wrong behaviors. By partnering with advancement services team members to develop more effective management tools and aligning reports and metrics to the true definition of success, the presenter effectively reshaped fundraising behavior and improved bottomline outcomes.

While the definition of a “major” gift varies according to institution size, mission, and community, the quest to identify and rank the best prospects is as old as Advancement itself. We have all faced the challenge of building a top donor model when only a tiny fraction of donors make gifts at or above their threshold for a substantial gift. In this session, we’ll talk about how we overcame the challenges of small sample sizes, incomplete and sparse data, and administrative data that imperfectly captures business practice to develop an approach to major gift prospect prioritization. We’ll describe how our methods have evolved over the years to the solutions that underlie our current reporting tools. Arriving at actionable insights is only half the battle. Our largest challenge has been marketing the math to fundraising professionals that go by gut. We will close out with a demonstration of a Tableau tool that brings this research to life. We hope this presentation serves as Part 1 of our story, and intend on pitching deployment and lessons learned at Case 2026.

Everyone wants to make “data informed decisions” especially during periods of strategic planning and solicitation plan development. Yet, we often underutilize vital data-informed positions such as Prospect Development, which traditionally is viewed as a resource primarily for leadership and major giving. But what would it look like if we took prospect development and applied advancement data analytics to serve as a resource for all University Advancement? Come learn from Texas State University how their restructuring took prospect development, data analytics, and business processes and turned it into a strategic arm serving the entire advancement organization. Learn about holistic pipeline development when leveraging both prospect development and analytics together to advise and inform strategy development for alumni relations, annual giving, AND major giving.

In fundraising, it is often difficult to calculate the probability that a given prospect will make a gift, or the likelihood that our organization will reach a specific fundraising dollar goal. The usual measures used in identifying probability don’t always work when it comes to human activity, and donative behavior is no different.
During this presentation, Dr. Gregory Duke will review several methods of identification of probability and identify which of these methods can give you a better understanding of your prospects’ likelihood to give. Dr. Duke will also use other measures of probability used in games, sports, medicine, and nature to illustrate the depth and breadth of donor possibilities. Lastly, Dr. Duke will demonstrate a technique to put all these together to create a predictive model of donor behavior over time.

It’s been almost nine months since the world’s first fully autonomous fundraiser interacted with its first assigned donor. During that time, 11 higher educational institutions joined together as a cohort to engage donors with an AI-powered Virtual Engagement Officer (and a second cohort is now live), but more importantly research, develop, and accelerate the deployment of autonomous fundraising for our entire industry.

In this session, Jennifer Shimp-Bowerman of Bucknell University and Natalie Spring of VCU will present the results they’ve seen from autonomous fundraising – donors engaged, dollars raised, and pipeline built, in addition to their experience being the first organizations in the world to deploy a Virtual Engagement Officer to a portfolio of their donors.

We’ll present what we learned, what we got right, where course corrections were needed, and how we navigated AI in a field defined by relationships. We’ll share all of our findings including portfolios for autonomous fundraisers, sourcing engagement content independently, accuracy, data collection, and more.

Finally, we’ll conclude by looking at where we are going, how we can continue to further personalize donor journeys led by donor engagement data, how to push the outer limits of technology, and more.

Discover how R can simplify your work by automating repetitive tasks, from data analysis to generating reports and PowerPoint presentations. This session explores how to create reproducible workflows that save time and increase efficiency. Learn practical methods for integrating machine learning and GenAI to enhance your analytics and presentation game. Whether you're a seasoned data scientist or just starting, you'll walk away with actionable techniques to restructure your process and maximize impact.