
DRIVE/Cast 2021 Sessions
Your Donors Are Speaking, Are You Listening? How to Embrace a donor-centered fundraising strategy by better understanding your donors’ giving behavior
With the development of advanced CRM’s and the increase in availability of alumni and donor data, we have the opportunity to become smarter marketers if we learn to listen to what the data is telling us. The University of Connecticut Foundation is using advanced analytics to better understand their constituents’ giving behavior, improve segmentation and shift annual giving strategy to a more donor-centered approach. This session will look at how to create and analyze metrics with the use of dashboards, and how to use these to produce actionable insights for both short-term and long-term success.
Theresa Condict, Decision Scientist, UConn Foundation, and Christine Masztal, Director of Business Intelligence and Analytics, University of Connecticut Foundation, Inc
DRIVING Data Driven Decisions
AMAtlas, CASE’s resource for data, metrics, and analytics has laid the foundations for a global set of benchmarking data on educational philanthropy, alumni engagement, and educational fundraising campaigns. This session will bring together a panel of advancement visionaries to discuss the ways they are putting CASE data to work in their development and alumni relations programs and explore ways they might leverage the Alumni Engagement Metrics (AEM) and new Core Metrics going forward. The session will also provide quick overviews of AEM and Core Metrics and discuss how institutions are adapting their processes to capture the data needed to put metrics to work.
Facilitator: David Bass, Senior Director of Research, CASE
Panelists: Jenny Cooke Smith, Sr. Strategic Consultant, AMAtlas, CASE, Mohammed Dasser, Associate Vice President, Strategic Planning and Analytics, New York University, Sharon Marine, Vice President, Alumni Relations and Development, The University of Chicago, Maureen Procopio, Senior Director of Campaign Strategy and Institutional Benchmarking, University of Oregon, and Nicholas Teff, Senior Data Scientist, Iowa Center for Advancement, University of Iowa
Key Session: Accelerate Change: Driving Your Data Initiatives Forward with Translation
Many advancement executives are excited by the potential of AI, big data, and data analytics. While data can improve decision support, there can be significant challenges in shifting from ideas to working reality. How can you—the data leaders and experts in your organizations—bridge the gap between exciting new capabilities and the complex realities of working with data? How can you effectively surface the infrastructure needs, governance quandaries, literacy gaps, data integrity challenges, and resource limitations that block these aspirations? Whether you are communicating to senior leaders, peers, or your team members, data projects often need some degree of audience translation. Join us for an engaging and interactive conversation on how to effectively communicate your needs to executives and decision makers in order to drive your data initiatives forward.
Rodger Devine, Associate Dean of External Affairs for Strategy and Innovation, University of Southern California, Cara Giacomini, Chief Research and Data Officer Operations, CASE, and Camden Morse, Assistant Vice President of Advancement Services, Johns Hopkins University and Medicine
Facilitator: Chris Cannon, President of Strategic Services, Zuri Group
On Your Mark, Get Set, Bake: Recipes for Reproducible Reporting with RMarkdown: Part One
Ever find yourself running the same report for multiple departments or prospect pools? Wanting to re-run an analysis, but forgetting how you undertook it several weeks, months, or years back? Frustrated over how best to combine multiple data sources? Rmarkdown may be a solution for you. This open source solution provides users with a format to combine analytical processes with documentation. It's flexible enough to run workflows in a multitude of languages (R, Python, and SQL, among others), produce various output media, and automate reporting.
This session will be followed by a Part Two Workshop at 4:00 PM.
James Rogol, Assistant Director, Advancement Business Intelligence, University of Virginia
On Your Mark, Get Set, Bake: Recipes for Reproducible Reporting with RMarkdown: Part Two Workshop
This will be an interactive workshop based on the Part One Session at 2:45 PM.
James Rogol, Assistant Director, Advancement Business Intelligence, University of Virginia
Taking Engagement to the Next Level: Using Engagement Metrics to Make Decisions and Identify Efficiencies
Hear from a panel of your peers as they share how their institutions are using engagement metrics to refine their approach to alumni engagement and fundraising. We’ll cover what data they chose to include in their engagement metrics, how they shared the results with their teams to ensure adoption, and how data can be used for future engagement strategy, while also supporting annual giving and major gift efforts. Leave this session with a plan for analyzing your constituent data so you can take the next step to turn that data into meaningful change for your institution.
Heather Andring, Director, Advancement Services, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Chase Carter, Director of Marketing and Engagement Systems, Oklahoma State University Alumni Association, Lesley Heffel McGuirk, Data Strategy Manager, Yale Alumni Association, Mark Thaden, Executive Director of Alumni Relations, University of Mary Washington, Mirko Widenhorn, Senior Director of Engagement Strategy, Anthology