From tracking alumni engagement to presenting fundraising data to leadership, dashboards are creatively solving problems and making day-to-day work more efficient for advancement professionals. Here, five Circle of Excellence Award-winning dashboard creators provide a deep dive into the origins, execution, and successes of these projects. 

Emporia State University used tasting boxes containing local delicacies to bring a shared experience to a virtual trustee meeting in 2020.

Advancement professionals share stories of data in action. They are using the metrics and insights that come from participating in CASE’s industry-leading surveys to set strategy and goals, benchmark against peers, target constituent groups, enhance programming, meet campaign goals, and add new staff.

In fall of 2016, the CASE Commission on Alumni Relations created the Alumni Engagement Metrics Task Force to address the need for an industry-wide framework to measure alumni engagement. The result was the Alumni Engagement Metrics survey, CASE’s first truly global survey. Now, with results from three years of AEM, advancement professionals who work in alumni relations are benefiting from measuring their results in four areas: volunteerism, experiential, philanthropic, and communication. The ability to document positive outcomes is already elevating the profession. In this article, we hear from CASE members who participated in AEM and how it is changing their work for the better. 

Many agree that collecting, storing, and analyzing qualitative data is vital to advancement’s growth and an important balance to departments’ continually growing quantitative data capabilities. But is there a method that’s scalable? How can advancement professionals work with data that is, by its definition, difficult to measure?