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Looking to the Future: Development Best Practices
Higher-education institutions have experienced record levels of donations in the 2017-2018 year. However, the reason for this is not what you might expect. These campaign successes were driven primarily by major gifts, and alumni engagement at large has declined, particularly in comparison to recent years (source: CAE’s 2017 release). We wanted to know why. So, we took an in-depth look at the industry to understand what successful development departments were doing differently to find and engage with past alumni, ultimately increasing contributions.
Contact information for alumni changes frequently, and the complexity of online communities shifts even faster. This can pose problems for your development team as new communities rely more heavily on these online networks, as younger alumni change their phone numbers and addresses. Many organizations have reported this trend, noting that connecting and engaging with alumni through traditional means poses an ever-increasing challenge. Moving forward, major gifts will likely remain the largest percentage of the donations pool, and managing the low contributing majority will present an ever greater challenge. This will impact organizations of all sizes, whether their alumni total five thousand or five-hundred thousand.
The most successful campaigns have accepted and adapted to this complexity. Not only do they utilize social media platforms to promote alumni engagement, their network of alumni information is consistently and accurately curated. Additionally, these universities and colleges focus their intention and efforts on community building, rather than simple direct outreach.
This means not only is aggregating accurate, clean data important, but utilizing it in an effective, efficient way is critical. The institutions who build large annual giving campaigns outside of the major gifts departments recognize the importance of not only reaching out to their alumni, but consistently arming themselves with the best and most accurate information available.
Accurate data helps the development team to navigate the shifting landscape of alumni relations, building and fostering relationships, saving time and resource, and increasing donation returns.
Alumni Unite’s verified data solutions provide a thorough and accurate picture of each alum, allowing you to grow and connect with your community. While past alumni feel passionately about the institutions that educated them, no contributions can come from the disconnected and lost. We bridge the gap between you and your lost alumni, combining unparalleled accuracy with all the information you need to conduct a successful campaign.
The No. 1 Way the Alumni Industry will Change in 2019
Development teams spend vast amounts of time and money on prospect generation tools to grow their donor databases. However, the days of filling a system with alum names, calling and emailing them, then seeing a flood of responses are gone. This change is only speeding up, shifting the way organizations need to address community engagement and retention.
There are many software companies that promise to accelerate growth and build your donor network. It can be overwhelming to consider the myriad benefits and faults, and different data providers have as wildly different results as they do ROI.
Let’s take a closer look at these services with regard to a simple metric: e-mail campaigns.
With the advent of AI technologies, it has become easy to scrape the web to gather contact data. Services such as Blackbaud’s Data Enrichment can offer additional insights, trolling through social media and consumer information alike. These can be very effective tools, particularly when casually updating or searching for information. However, it has also become harder to distinguish between good and bad data, to maintain e-mail deliverability, and to ultimately track improvements in campaign results.
For many development organizations, mail – e-mail or residency – remains a cornerstone strategy for engagement. Whether it’s a handwritten “thank you” note, or simply an e-mail subscription to a newsletter, these channels remain a relevant means of connecting with donors. However, one of the largest shifts in recent years lies in the inaccuracy of alum contact information. While major giving continues to rise, annual giving and community growth are harder than ever to maintain.
When inaccuracy plagues your database, bounced emails and disconnected phone calls are not only inefficient – they cost your institution valuable opportunities to connect with future donors, and may engender poor relationships with incorrect information. Productivity, then, is key.
“We’re obsessed with productivity,” says Heather Morgan, CEO of SalesFolk, a premiere e-mail campaign generation company. “As a former economist, I’m always thinking about efficiency and opportunity costs. When evaluating tools for my team, I try to make sure that they will be able to work efficiently, but I’m always monitoring final results because just having a smooth [user experience] isn’t necessarily going to have the best email deliverability. And without that, the effectiveness of email campaigns will be bottlenecked.”
True to this self-reflection, Morgan’s Salesfolk decided to conduct an experiment. The objective was to take the results from a traditional data source, using append services and databases, and compare that to a solution which claimed to better fit these changing environments: a research-verified option.
Salesfolk set up the test as follows.
- Organized a campaign with 8 e-mails to ideal prospects
- Created two separate targeted lists using the same prospect criteria, one using a research-verified service, and the other using a traditional data vendor.
- The traditional vendor’s list contained 782 prospects.
- The research-verified list contained 200 prospects.
- The lists were manually curated to ensure an equal playing field for data entry.
- This campaign was shipped out over the course of 7 weeks at equal time intervals for each vendor.
- The primary indicator of success was set as “positive response rate”, but all metrics were tracked to gain a comprehensive understanding of data quality and results.
So what were the results?
The research-verified data crushed the traditional dataset across every single touchpoint of SalesFolk’s campaign: from positive replies, to qualified prospects, to open rates. Even though there were more than 3x the amount of prospect contact info from the traditional vendor, the research-verified set yielded nearly 10x more positive responses on the first touch.
- The research-verified data was 5x less likely to bounce
- The research-verified data was 2x more likely to be opened
- The research-verified data yielded a 4x higher positive response rate across all 8 touches
In all, the results were clear; research-verified data, in the modern world, reigns supreme. This report builds on a growing body of research demonstrating that data in of itself is not enough. With change permeating every facet of the data world, the development industry is feeling the effects ripple throughout. The influences of new technologies and AI have only starkened this distinction. While the tools available to today’s development professional offer more information than ever before, the accuracy from many of these sources remains sub-prime or outdated. This research suggests that successful campaigns will need to focus more on data accuracy, alongside its application or messaging, rather than volume of contacts.
We can help. Alumni Unite’s verified data solutions provide a thorough and accurate picture of each alum, allowing you to grow and connect with your community. While past alumni feel passionately about the institutions that educated them, no contributions can come from the disconnected or lost.
In the words of our co-founder, Brad James:
“We bridge the gap between Educational institutions and their lost alumni, combining unparalleled accuracy with all the information you need to conduct a successful campaign.”