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.

In July 2023, our organization embarked on a transformative journey, redefining data analytics and dashboard design, ensuring that all levels of the organization would experience increased data transparency through tailor made dashboards.

During this session, head of strategy planning, Mel Rowan, will outline the steps it took to get buy-in at the highest levels of the organization to mobilize around this effort. The lead for the analytics team, Stacey Barnes, will showcase some of the Tableau dashboards that have been deployed for the executive team, frontline fundraisers, and campus partners. Throughout the session Mel and Stacey will discuss the strategic steps necessary to implement organization-wide analytics, provide technical insights for optimizing dashboard design and lessons learned during the adoption phase.

This presentation is tailored for both data analysis professionals and non-technical experts. Non-technical professionals will acquire valuable insights into formulating a strategy to create a data-informed organization. Meanwhile, data analysis professionals will discover innovative ways to visualize and communicate their insights to non-technical audiences across the organization, as well as explore novel dashboard arrangements to enhance the visual representation of their work. 

Join us for an engaging session that promises to empower attendees with practical knowledge and foster a collaborative environment for leveraging data analytics and dashboard design to drive organizational success.

This will be a deep dive into using Python to automate tasks and improve workflows where we will walk through the evolution of a reporting task as we apply different levels of automation to it.

We will start with a hands on lesson on partitioning a file into multiple files using Python. Building on this, we will present some of the next steps that you could take to improve that task using APIs and prepare it for sharing among an organization. Finally, we will discuss how you can build small workflows for immediate needs and then iterate on them to create a full process with Python that saves labor hours and improves accuracy on a variety of reporting tasks.

Data is an institution’s most valuable asset, but only if it’s accessible and actionable. In this session, we’ll explore how to implement data hygiene best practices during a CRM transition, ensuring that only relevant, usable information makes the cut. Learn how to leave behind data that no longer serves your institution, transform valuable data to fit the future-state data model, and maintain long-term data integrity to support smart, data-driven decisions.

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

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.

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.