In this interactive panel discussion, hear from data, digital, and strategic leaders from prominent nonprofit organizations and technology companies as they discuss their greatest data successes, challenges and how their role has transformed from a governance emphasis to a strategic focus with revenue responsibilities. If you aspire to be a CDO or strategic leader, this is a must-attend general session. 

Advancement organizations are overwhelmed with text data, including surveys, contact reports, and social media. Now, with off-the-shelf software solutions such as Microsoft Power BI and Azure, we no longer need programmers or data scientists to begin leveraging this information. By pairing textual analysis with our existing quantitative analytics, we can enhance our reporting, providing deeper insights into our constituents and their engagement with the institution. Review a case study that uses text mining to analyze reunion survey responses, and explore the techniques used and review samples of the reporting developed. 

“Big data analytics” has become a prominent buzzword in the business world. The techniques deployed are being increasingly applied in the education sector, but primarily for understanding trends and relationships in the recruiting or retention space. These same techniques can also be leveraged to improve alumni relations and donations. This session is for leaders in education who need to understand what types of challenges big data analytics can address as well as data analytic experts who are tasked with how to approach those challenges. Arizona State University shares how their Knowledge and Insights team went about measuring alumni affinity and quantifying its relationship to alumni giving. They will reveal how big data can be leveraged to predict affinity levels of your entire alumni base and to diagnose what actions you can take to have the greatest impact on your success metrics.

Discover how free statistics and data tools from the U.S. Census Bureau are foundational for your institution’s next data-driven decision. This session provides an overview and demonstration of the American Community Survey (ACS), the nation’s most current, reliable, and accessible data source for local statistics. You can use the ACS to understand the demographics of the population or learn more about neighborhoods where alumni live. View a demonstration on tools that can be used to access ACS data and a current ACS data user discusses how ACS data helps them make data-driven decisions.

What is the ideal implementation of a grateful patient analytics program? This session outlines foundational guidelines for GP data management, integration, and analytics. Learn what programs of varying size and maturity need to do to drive the success of their organization's grateful patient philanthropy strategy.

AI, BI, EI – oh my. Ask any human if data is important to make the decisions, and about 98% of them will say absolutely. Our industry often gets stuck in a paralyzing swirl that prohibits us from moving forward. Why does this happen? Explore the history and understand how we got here. Once we have a framework of where we came from, let’s dig into how do we overcome this? How do you use your powers for good and help advance the organization? How do you convince your colleagues that data is meant to be chewed up, tossed around, consumed and ever changing --- and all along not scary? How do we position ourselves as the carrot, not the stick? Everyone wants data and technology, but we get stuck. It’s never about the technology or data – it’s about the people. From the view of an executive seat - let's talk about how to break down some barriers, gain some actionable skills, and figure out how to drive forward what we know is the way.

From the team that brought you: Does Behavior Trump Capacity, see the progress one year later and discover what machine learning has uncovered. This session takes you inside the inner workings of pioneering teams in the sector who took the risk that will pave the way for every charity to do more with less. In 60 minutes you will learn more from failure than from success and leave with battle-tested tactics, high-level strategy and the inspiration that you can take back to your colleagues. Explore deep learning with recurrent neural networks which allows for learning on time-series data, namely the ordered steps a donor takes along the way to making a donation and continuing to donate. Join this session for a practical understanding of the future of fundraising.

In January 2019, UVA's office of University Advancement rolled out a new prospect management policy affecting all 22 schools and foundations. Successful implementation would require, among other things, awareness of and easy access to the development officer performance metrics and activity around prospect pool activity. The Advancement Business Intelligence department developed new data protocols to enable a holistic approach for prospect managers and development officers to manage their constituency and help keep in compliance with the new policy. The new report suite developed with Tableau makes it easy for fundraisers to keep track of things like prospect qualification plans, progress and results; prospect time in stage; portfolio activity and balance; and coordination among teams. To support campaign readiness, they also developed a scheme for each school and unit to systematically define their pool of likely donors and flag them for campaign interests/priorities, which provides an easy way build and monitor prospect pipelines. This presentation covers the key concepts of data-informed prospect management, how the team implemented the system in Advance, and includes dashboard demonstrations.

For the past few years, Boston College’s University Advancement shop has been using data analytics and AB testing to drive more giving and engagement through its use of marketing tactics. However, this is not universally adopted across the organization for a variety of reasons, such as risk aversion to change, uneven knowledge and experience, disparate information, and lack of standardized metrics. As a result, progressive ideas such as an integrated marketing journey and marketing segmentation remain “in progress.” This session highlights the process the Data Analytics team has taken to develop a systematic framework of measuring success through hypothesis testing and confirmatory analyses within the organization. They share their experiences in setting up this framework and provide specific examples of what they did to overcome cultural barriers and preconceptions, build on small wins, tackle the technical challenges, and set up protocol for repeatable testing.

Follow Georgetown University’s journey partnering with CCS Fundraising to integrate predictive modeling into their Prospect Development process.  The primary goal of the modeling for was for campaign feasibility analysis and to evaluate and optimize gift officer portfolios. The greater benefit of the modeling has been the opportunities that developed for Georgetown to further build their team’s internal capacity and replicate the methods and analysis across the university. 

Learn how this work not only uncovered new fundraising opportunity, but how it impacted the team’s approach and integration into the Georgetown University Medical Center development programs.

During this executive level session, we will discuss how the advancement community can effectively navigate the changing technology landscape.

In recent years there has been a colossal shift in technology that affects every aspect of the work we all do every day.  It’s a shift that shows no signs of slowing down or reverting. But once we understand the shift,  think about it, and accept it, we can budget better,  plan for talent better, architect systems better, manage change better, and get more value out of our increasing investments in technology.

For a long time, our systems have consisted of a main database used to collect and maintain a depth of data about our constituents and donors.  There were a handful of vendors that we could work with, and we had technical people on our teams who could create custom reports and lots of other very custom tools.  That was the Buy/Build era which as most of us already know is over. 

As we move from Buy/Build to Rent/Integrate there are 5 key areas that we will discuss during this session:  

1. UX (User Experience)
2. Business Intelligence
3. Data Governance
4. Talent and Cost
5. Change Management

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.

(Winner of CASE’s 2019 H.S. Warwick Research Award for Outstanding Research in Alumni Relations)
Although alumni and students of online degree programs might live a long way from campus, they are an important part of higher education’s advancement strategies and campaigns. This multi-institutional quantitative study examined the giving patterns of alumni of online degree programs as compared to alumni of campus-based degree programs at five universities including three public land grant universities, a public urban university, and a private research university. Results suggest that alumni of online degree programs tend to donate early after graduation. In the case of one institution, alumni of online programs donated up to 12 percent more than alumni of on-campus programs within the first three years of the most recent degree earned at the institution.

What is your non-profit's 5 year plan? What donors or constituents are you trying to reach, and are you currently reaching them? Do you know your stakeholders' greatest needs, now and in the near future? The answers to these questions are usually found in a non-profit's mission statement, but may not always be rigorously pursued, tracked, or altered as an organization grows and evolves. This session will provide tools and strategies used by some of the most successful for-profit entities, while tailoring specifically to nonprofits in need of low-cost, easy-to-implement methods that will allow them to define their target audience, increase visibility, and grow their services.

While it may be true that data doesn't lie, the quality and integrity of your data can seriously impact the effectiveness of the programs and the decisions made by your advancement team. Elevated data integrity is imperative for successful data driven decision-making while maintaining accuracy. Miami University's Data integrity model ensures data quality and continuous improvements. In this session, we will examine their data integrity model, review how they score data points, and discuss the importance of data integrity along with the benefits they've discovered from this strategy along with areas of data they have improved. 

In recognition of the need for more consistent driving of and reporting on prospect movement through the pipeline, our prospect development team at GW developed definitions of and guidelines around key proxy measures to form the concept of “prospect aging.” Together, the combination of these variables provides a holistic picture of the pipeline progress a gift officer's assigned prospects are making, as viewed through the parallel lenses of stage aging and portfolio saturation. This session will describe the process of developing this concept, dive into sample micro and macro level reports, review outcomes to date, and provide attendees with a framework for establishing prospect aging at their own institutions.

Meeting a donor’s expectation of immediacy, on-demand availability, and consistency can be the lynch pin in resolving an issue, providing needed info, or even finalizing a decision to make a gift. The University of Illinois Foundation chose to expand donor service by implementing a chatbot to complement existing, and more traditional, donor service avenues. We will take you through the idea, vendor selection, implementation and plans for the future. Hear about the challenges, opportunities, and benefits of offering a chatbot for donors. Learn how it works, and how the donor can ‘leave a message’ or request a time to be contacted back to further discuss their needs. We will share the metrics of use, donor feedback, and plans for expansion beyond the core websites to other areas of the university system.

There are many ways to manage a project: at UC Innovation, we use a method called Agile for implementations of our managed CRM solution based on SalesForce. We'll describe agile project management and explain why it works so well to shorten the length of CRM implementations.

(2019 Winner, CASE Platinum Award for Best Practices in Advancement Services)
2004 called and they want their Gift Table back. Modern campaigns have outgrown traditional planning approaches; a disconnect exists between the questions they ask, should be asking, and the answers that our data can provide. Join us to poke holes, question assumptions, and explore why we deconstructed the campaign pyramid in favor of building a better mouse trap.

Have you ever heard a presenter say “…and test your [report/process/model] thoroughly before putting it into production,” but they never tell you “how.” Regardless of what you are testing, there are fundamental steps that can help define the process and affect the outcome. Learn where to start, from setting the goal of testing, to the logistics of conducting testing, and presenting the results.

Audience targeting is a key to engaging donations/membership and program relevance is key in targeting. Organizations that do a good job engaging or reengaging donors/members do a good job in connecting with donors/members or potential donors/members in areas of mutual relevance. But engagement is only a piece of the puzzle. Once a donor/member is engaged, it is important to understand they need to be continually reengaged, and if reengaged, that donor/member is more likely to donate again/renew membership. The takeaway from this session will be how to create a framework that allows an organization to fill the funnel of engagement; how to build tactics within your overall strategy that grows the relationship between organization and donors/members; and, finally, how to tap into that relationships to meet organizational goals.

Today’s advancement operations are increasingly pressured to do more with less. To be effective, institutions need to benchmark with peers, prioritize strategic planning, implement best practices, and skillfully execute projects by leveraging data and analytics to make better decisions. Discuss the function of strategic initiatives along with the skills needed to be successful for an incumbent, and examine examples from a number of institutions. A growing number of advancement shops are achieving the benefits of having an office of strategic initiatives to address these issues and realizing that having a function dedicated to cross-team, innovation-oriented projects can promote the use of data to inform decisions. Learn how you might transform your advancement operation.

AMAtlas is CASE’s global resource for educational advancement-related metrics, benchmarks and analytics. In its second year, AMAtlas has greatly expanded the data and metrics available to CASE members. In the year ahead we’ll be rolling out new core metrics for advancement, launching a new online Campaign database, adapting many of our global surveys, and making new metrics available in the CASE DATA Miner. Learn about the progress we’ve made, where we’re going, and share your feedback on the resources that would be of greatest value to you and your institution.

Learn to recognize the symptoms of choice overload and hear about innovative solutions for treating the malady. Sheena's goal is to help you separate the important choices from the trivial ones and to teach you how to create a better choosing experience.