Enhance institutional advancement and fundraising capabilities with data and AI
Enhance institutional advancement and fundraising capabilities with data and AI.
Within higher education, institutional advancement and development offices are vital in advancing the institutional mission and the overall sustainability of colleges and universities. Institutional advancement and development teams support fundraising, grant-writing, alumni relations, analyses of institution-wide data, and many other vital activities related to engaging and stewarding relationships with donors throughout the lifecycle below.
We’ve shared examples below of ways your institutional advancement and development offices can leverage data and technology to engage and cultivate donors and alumni relationships over time.
Learn more about the solutions proposed here. Check out our modern culture of data video series and assess your organization’s data maturity.
Lay your donor data foundation
Your data is a precious resource waiting to be harnessed to its full potential. So, ask yourself, how mature is your data foundation? Is your data sitting in silos across multiple sources and systems? Do you have proper data governance in place that balances the needs of security and ease of access? Have you invested in mastering your donor data to create reliable golden records? Do you have a donor data platform that provides a 360-degree view of each individual throughout the donor lifecycle?
Accelerate to insights with predictive analytics
Building on your data foundation, you can leverage modern tools to visualize, predict, track, and automate the way your team moves donors through the steps of Identify, Qualify, Cultivate, Solicit, and Steward. With the right systems in place, you can reduce manual efforts, errors, and time spent on reporting while increasing insights, prioritization, and results.
Supercharge your engagement with AI
Imagine if you could write each donor a truly personalized email that showed your understanding of their relationship with your institution, background, giving history, interests, and core values. How might that optimize your ability to convert occasional donors into making recurring or annual gifts? Amazingly, the latest advances in GenAI allow you to do just that, along with many other promising use cases.
Donor lifecycle opportunities
DYNAMIC PROSPECT QUALIFICATION FOR MAJOR ARTS INSTITUTION
To meet ever-increasing fundraising goals, major gift departments are always looking for new prospects to build their pipeline. Typically, this work has largely been manual—initiating bulk wealth screenings, combing through data, and identifying indicators of ability and propensity to give. Research practices can be time-consuming and often result in static data that loses value over time, requiring additional manual updates. And since major gifts can take years to cultivate, it’s crucial to focus on the right opportunities, which dynamic donor data can best inform. This dynamic prospect qualification tool allows fundraisers to identify a pool of major gift prospects with accurate real-time-capacity data, allowing for a quicker turnaround from research to gift officers.
Such a solution was recently implemented by Slalom at a major arts-and-culture institution. The real-time-responsive scoring system puts the organization far ahead of its peers in maximizing fundraising efforts. It allows them to diversify their outreach beyond already-known major gift donors.
Machine learning provides a huge opportunity to gift officers with pre-vetted information to target their outreach and uncover the next group of key university donors. This would improve the quality of the prospects that are identified and allow fundraisers to focus their efforts on the individuals most likely to give, thus improving and maximizing their existing donor conversion rate. By strengthening their major gift pipeline, fundraisers will be able to significantly increase the chances of securing the next generation of major donors.
Learn more about how higher education can use AI/ML on Slalom.com
