Leveraging Power BI for Dynamic Fundraising Dashboards: Enhancing Portfolio Management with Data-Driven Insights"

Overview:
In the competitive field of fundraising, maximizing donor engagement and optimizing portfolio management are key to success. Power BI, a leading business intelligence tool, enables development professionals to transform raw fundraising data into dynamic dashboards that provide real-time insights into donor behavior, pipeline health, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This presentation will focus on how to use Power BI to build effective dashboards that track essential fundraising metrics, helping fundraisers and development officers make data-driven decisions to enhance portfolio management.

The goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how Power BI can be utilized to create and customize dashboards specifically designed for fundraising and portfolio management. Attendees will learn how to track donor movement, visualize portfolio performance, and monitor key metrics such as gift officer activity, prospect pipeline, and donor retention. This session will highlight best practices in dashboard design to support strategic fundraising decisions.

Technical Requirements:
Power BI Desktop (installed on the presenter's computer)
Projector or large display for live demonstration
Internet connection (if showcasing live data)
Sample fundraising data for demonstration purposes

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.

Are you ready to transform how Carnegie Mellon University handles data?

Join us for an insightful session conducted by CMU Analytics team, where we’ll share best practices and experiences in integrating Snowflake, Salesforce, and Tableau. These powerful tools work together to create a data system that enhances everything from data management to decision-making.

We’ll dive into examples relevant to CMU, showing how these platforms can streamline workflows, improve data accuracy, and provide deep insights through interactive dashboards. Imagine having all your data sources consolidated, processed efficiently, and visualized in a way that makes complex information easy to understand and act upon.

This session is perfect for seasoned professionals, leaders, data analysts, and anyone working with data in advancement teams at universities, looking to stay ahead in today’s data-driven world.

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.

This session will examine the processes, policies, and opportunities for building and maintaining alumni employment dashboards in your advancement shop. The speakers will use examples from projects at multiple institutions to discuss ways to scale the project, define your data goals, prioritize output based on institutional priorities, and build sustainable workflows for advancement data teams of various sizes and technical expertise.

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.

Recent trends in U.S. giving indicate a consistent decline in donor retention rates over the past decade. This trend threatens the sustainability of crucial programs and initiatives. To combat this, organizations must harness the power of data-informed strategies to better understand donor behaviors, identify gaps, and optimize outreach efforts.
This presentation will explore innovative ways to leverage data analytics to reverse declining donor trends. Key areas of focus will include donor segmentation, predictive modeling, personalized communication strategies, and the significance of donor lifecycle analysis. By integrating these approaches, we aim to cultivate more meaningful relationships with donors, enhance retention rates, and foster long-term support.

Do you know if your donor pipeline is healthy?
Are you seeing diminishing numbers of alumni donors but aren't sure why?
In this session, we will review the outcomes of the 2025 RNL National Alumni Survey with alumni survey responses from more than 20 institutions. These insights will help you go beyond the numbers to understand the perspective of more than 20,000 alumni and what's important to them in their philanthropic expression. This type of data is critical in contextualizing what we are seeing in the diminishing donor counts many institutions are facing.

In the age of data abundance, organizations have unprecedented access to insights that can significantly enhance their fundraising strategies. This presentation explores how leveraging historical performance data, coupled with compelling storytelling techniques, can transform forecasting processes and decision-making in fundraising. By analyzing past performance metrics, we can derive actionable insights that inform more accurate and strategic forecasts. The session will also highlight methods for effectively communicating data to stakeholders, ensuring clarity and context around financial projections. This approach aims to bridge the gap between raw data and strategic action, empowering organizations to achieve their fundraising goals with greater precision and confidence.