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.

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.

The ability to measure activity and understand the relationship between that activity and fundraising productivity are critical to the strategic deployment and maximization of fundraising resources. Furthermore, the capability to identify early intervention points for coaching new gift officers and the continued measurement of seasoned gift officer performance are key in ensuring gift officer success. But what should we be measuring? How should we be measuring it? Who should have access to the metrics? Can predictive solutions be deployed to assist in early intervention? And finally, how can these gift officer metrics be used effectively to inform decision making? The University of Texas at Austin has just completed an 18 month exploratory exercise aimed at building a predictive model to better quantify gift officer performance, establish baseline expectations, and identify early intervention points for coaching new gift officers. Multiple algorithms were explored in partnership with graduate students from UT Austin’s School of Information and members of the university development office’s analytics team. This presentation will detail the process undertaken to arrive at a solution, discuss the insights acquired along the way, and walk attendees through the mechanism produced to distribute scores. Considerations for generating equitable metrics based on role, unit assignment, officer type, and the impact of COVID-19 will be discussed along with an exposition of the final results.

The New York University (NYU) Development and Alumni Relations (UDAR) team and the University of Washington (UW)Advancement Analytics team will take you on a journey and share how they were able to jumpstart unique data analytics initiatives from inception to maturity in less than a year. Their journeys center on aligning technology with leadership visions and goals, while also empowering front-line fundraisers and marketers to uncover opportunities and take action on critical business insights. They will share an approach that helps them accelerate the implementation and deployment of specialized dashboards, improve the endorsement of their colleagues, and secure high adoption by diverse teams and non-data users. They will demonstrate how their approach can help instill a data-driven culture, and share strategies on how to tackle unique challenges presented by digital data and legacy systems while trying to provide flexible self-service analysis tools. They will also showcase UW’s Email Marketing Dashboard that serves over 50 units, three campuses and over 100 marketers and advancement staff, and NYU’s BI portal which contains more than 60 Dashboards and self-service reports that serve more than 300 fundraisers and development associates and staff and more than 20 schools and global camps.