The University of Illinois Foundation’s virtual assistant serves up insights and answers
It’s handy, it’s helpful, and it’s powerful: Meet the University of Illinois Foundation’s virtual assistant, a chatbot created to make giving simpler.
Launched in November 2019 from a university foundation advancement accelerator, the UIF chatbot appears as a round icon in the lower right corner of the institution’s giving pages. It can instantly clarify common questions—like, “Is my gift tax-deductible?” or “How do I make a credit card gift?”—and direct donors to key resources.
“Our chatbot is really about getting donors’ questions answered as fast as possible and as conveniently as possible, in a way that they like,” says Bill Reynen, director of enterprise architecture at UIF.
Powered by artificial intelligence, chatbots are on the rise in higher education—but are often deployed for student communication, like Arizona State University’s bot Sunny or the University of Wisconsin’s Cowboy Joe bot. UIF’s virtual assistant is focused on development, and it helps funnel questions to the appropriate staff.
“If I’m a donor asking the chatbot about charitable gift annuities, I’m not going to get connected to somebody in accounting; I’ll connect with someone in our planned giving office who can call me back and have a coherent conversation about that with me,” explains Lea Ann Gross, UIF’s executive director of development services.
The bot has fielded questions from all over the world, day and night, she says. UIF’s team has worked to make sure this virtual assistant—because it is donor-facing—uses a thoughtful tone and voice. Seeing what users ask and delving into the bot’s analytics have been a learning experience, say Gross and Reynen.
“You want to see what the trends and your most popular topics are, and where people are asking things that lead into a dead end. We’ve got to be able to analyze that and fill in the gaps,” Reynen says. For instance, sometimes, users ask questions about topics well beyond development—“Where’s my parking pass?” “How do I get football tickets?” or, more recently, “What is the university doing about COVID-19?”—so the team often tweaks answers and adds new information.
“We try to figure out: How do we answer that in the future? What do we need to do differently to make sure donors get what they need?” Gross says. MEREDITH BARNETT
