This is the era of the customer. Every experience is designed around our needs: from Netflix queues and Spotify playlists dictating what we consume, Amazon and StitchFix suggestions guiding our purchases, or Carvana, Zillow, and RedFin making buying autos and homes easy, sight unseen.

These businesses deliver tailored experiences to millions of users by capturing data and putting it into action. Advancement must do the same. In order to confront donor decline and build the future major gift pipeline, we must go beyond traditional segmentation like class year or degree. We have to speak to donors’ interests and deliver the same personalized, high-impact experience they see in the rest of their lives.

The University of Iowa is doing this by introducing a new persona-driven approach to communicating with alumni, donors, and friends. By monitoring more than 400 ever-changing data points, including a newly refined machine-learning-driven engagement score, the team has defined new audience segments. Each of these personas reflects how those people interact with the University, its sports teams, or its medical center.

With these personas built and evolving as donors demonstrate new interests or engage with the university, Iowa is delivering custom digital experiences, programming, and appeals that create better experiences for every donor.

In this session, learn how they built their personas and engagement score, early returns as they roll out a new communication strategy, and how this approach fuels giving and prospect discovery. You’ll learn best practices for every shop, regardless of size, as we all seek to create more personal experiences at scale.

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.

In 2019, CASE’s AMAtlas launched a new survey to measure Alumni Engagement Metrics, which aimed to create a broader understanding of alumni affinity beyond purely philanthropic support. Several challenges arose in the first year, including socializing new metrics, creating a truly global survey, framing the data story, and developing compelling visualizations. In the second year, staff and volunteers incorporated lessons learned to make practical improvements to the survey.

In this session, join members of the AMAtlas team as they discuss their perspectives. The presentation includes a high-level overview about how to incorporate new metrics into existing paradigms and manage expectations externally, creating methods for managing an evolving survey, implementing changes based on feedback, and strategies for developing adaptive reporting using R to match changing expectations.

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.