Slate for Advancement: Cultivating Lifelong Engagement

Hello everybody, welcome and seeing all those people joining in today.

Welcome welcome welcome everyone is doing just fine.

As you start joining our web and are today and feel free to give us a shout over on the chat on the left hand side. Always interested in knowing who is here, where you're from, what the weathers like, Hello Advancement, Friends Hello hello hello. My name is Sean Kelly and I want to welcome all of you to our virtual conversations for this Lake community and beyond.

This session is delayed in that marks the end of a serious that we've been doing, called applied to alumni where we've been talking about managing that lifecycle inside this late. So we started with my colleague Erin talking about sleep.org and his counselors moving over to a missions, talking about ways to engage folks there last week. You may have joined colleague Ken talking about student success, and now we're taking things with a full circle at the end of things with advancement.

An alumni and we're going to be talking about cultivating lifelong engagement, so continuing that trend of talking to people looks like we have some people coming in here. There's people coming in from Portland, OR super Smokey there who see at night code out there right now. We get some people in California. 100 degrees.

Some some hot hot temperatures out there here in New Haven. It is. It feels like fault was able to wear my sweater today so we did have that break in the temperature. So I'm feeling very lucky for that. Especially for all your folks who are in the 100 degree weather. Not super fun.

Create looks like we have some more folks joining, so let's go ahead. Just some housekeeping to get out of the way at the beginning of this. Just want to let everybody know that this web and R is being recorded and will be made available for all of you afterwards. If you do need closed captioning up on the top right of your screen, there's little thisi button there. Feel free to go ahead and click that. And also in the upper right hand corner, you can make the screen full screen if you would like to do that as well.

And if you ever encounter any sort of audio or video problems, just refresh your browser and things will load back up again. We will be taking questions throughout this presentation, so feel free to chime in on the chat. Will be keeping an eye out there. I have a colleague on the call with me as well helping to keep track of those things. Make sure we don't miss any. So definitely chat and there also is going to be a section at the end where will take your questions.

That's the housekeeping, so let's go ahead and introduce our painless for. Today we have Gina Matrix who's the director of advancement operations over at Illinois Wesleyan University. We have Justin Harville, who's a CRM specialist who's calling in from Georgetown College today, and we have run. Who's with us from Clarkson University, so I thought we'd go ahead and get started. Let each of them introduce themselves. Perhaps if you guys want to share just a little bit about what you do, what your role is in the office, maybe how your office in structured.

Just to help frame our conversation a little bit later when we start talking about how you're engaging your alumni and donors. So Gina. Why don't we start with you?

Sure, thanks. Thanks for having me today. Like Sean said, my name is Gina were from Illinois Wesleyan University and believe it or not, it's actually relatively hot here today in central Illinois. Illinois Wesleyan is a small liberal arts college here in central Illinois with about 1500 full time. Students are advancement. Shop is about 25 full-time employees and that includes our alumni engagement office.

We've been on sleep for advancement for almost two years, and we utilized all the full functionality of slate and what it has to offer, including events, deliver, gift processing, reporting, querying, and data storage, as well as dipping a little bit and system of our analytics and segmentation for donors. So we're excited to talk with you guys a little bit about that. My team manages all of the data as it enters our system. The management of that data maintenance.

Exports as well as all of the gift processing and additional data points that are provided to our advancement office for assistance. So glad to be here.

Great, thanks Gina. Will hop over to Justin.

Hi, good afternoon I'm just in Harvel on this year in specialist at Georgetown where is small liberal arts colleges? Well, roughly about 1100 students and a graduate program of roughly one. We've got 150 students at a given period of time. We are in a shared instance within our advancement and admissions, and also our grad students come through application process through slate as well. So we are fully in compass.

You are the life cycle in slate for our current students. Through a long time and hopefully back for getting some of those legacies. So our staff structure is in our advancement office. There's roughly about six of us I am supporting or advancement staff. We have one single person that actually does majority of all the entry and things in nature for for us and then with our advancement with our admission side we have.

People time operation staff that support all these site operations and we're using everything in terms of slight functionality from application process for wearing importing just newly still print which is nominal. If you're not using it, use it. Really enjoying void switching over to that process so can't say.

Good, I think about flight right now.

Awesome, thanks Justin and run. Will head over to you.

Everybody from Clarks University where we're using slate in both our undergrad grad and our advancement offices we have so we have three different instances, parse them out, kind of segregated mall.

We've been on slate for admissions since 2017. We did our first fall cycle with our grad school removed undergrad admissions last year, and then advancement this past April, so we're relatively new in the advancement world that new in this late world, which helped us get it up and running a lot faster. Clark's in the way it works, are our Department kind of Man's the slave instances. It's one of our core systems, so we have three dedicated IT resources, one for each system.

And then we all help each other out. We do all the data integrations anytime we need something new going to and from PeopleSoft, or to the other systems we build them ourselves within our Department. We have access to all the data, so it's kind of one of the benefits we have been in the IT department, but we do. We do champion out and we let other people do work if they want to. So we do have folks in the grad school undergrad school in advancement that are kind of our power users that we let them do as much as they want to take off of our plate were OK with.

Good strategy, strategy there and just a brief reminder. We're seeing some things in the chat, so if just a reminder to get closer to your microphones as we go in just to be super helpful, but let's go ahead and dive in, I thought we'd start by just talking about just the current methods of engagement. How are you all currently reaching out to your donors reaching out to alums? Just really starting sort of that relationship or keeping that relationship going? Are there specific?

Methods that you're using or using emails or text or portals. Are you doing individual meetings? Just what's the sort of the culture there in terms of communicating with folks so?

Over once you go first, perhaps we really start over with Gina again. Will just circle back through there.

Yeah, sure, no problem. So we like we said we try to use all of the functionality that slate has to offer, so I hope that we're using it as robustly as we can. But the good news about slate is that there's always more that we can do, so our current methods of engagement first and foremost, we're always going to start with the liver. I mean, email communication is the easiest way to reach our constituents, and that's going to for advancement. Include our alumni, parents and friends. And so.

What we love most about slate will be on it as the query capabilities that that feed right into deliver that allow us to segment out our constituents so that we can more appropriately custom tailor those communications to them. We find that we're using deliver not only from the annual fund or engagement, but also from our major gift team as well. So there are ways that we can tap into deliver and personalized messages a little bit easier, but from an automated standpoint as well to our major gift prospects and everyone that lives in there.

Portfolios beyond deliver. We're also utilizing some of those tracking queries so that we can create some call centers so we are hosting our call center out of Illinois Wesleyan right now in person for the time being and our students will reach out and call different constituents or segments based off of how we've currently set them up from our queries, allowing them to call directly and then either accept gifts or even just have conversations and Mark how those went during our work from home.

Covid stay, we actually turn that call center into a staff outreach. So we had our staff calling all of those constituents segments and checking in see how they were doing. Getting their feedback from what, how Kovid was affecting them and their work style and their home life. And just you know, kind of doing some of those checkins for them, which is another way that our major gift and any other gift officer team is reaching our constituents so we have contact reports that are loaded up through forms. They're reaching out and calling and engaging with people weather.

It used to be in home or in person visiting on the road and now is really more a little bit more electronically. And we've also shifted most of our events out of event based or in person based gatherings and into some of the slight webinar forms exactly like we're on right now, and that's been a huge success as well. So we kind of trying to create a robust method of outreach for our our constituents and it seems to be going pretty well so far.

Yeah, and just a follow up your love, the idea of highly segmenting your different groups of folks and so are there other key data points that you're interested in or you are you doing it by giving levels or affiliations? I'm just curious how you're thinking through watch outreach somebody receives will just one person get one and not the other? And what is that based on?

When we first started in slate, it was very much based off of their giving history and they're giving behaviors. And now that we've got the ball rolling and have started to collect more information about how they're responding to what we they received from us, we can start to look at are they opening their messages? Are they clicking on those messages, or would be more likely to reach that particular person if we were to call or send something in the Mail? So we're looking at the actual methods and how they are receiving them.

What their reaction is to them and whether or not that's a good way to reach them. So that's been a really good way to do that. We also have had a chance to integrate the data of event registrations in attendance with our constituent records, and so now we can look at are they coming to our events? Are they responding or they RSVP ING, which is hopefully down the short Rd going to lead us to creating a larger engagement score for our alums so that we can take some of those things that we really want to emphasize and start scoring people based off of how they're engaging with us.

But those are the L. It like the elements of how we're creating some of our baseline segmentations so their donor records their constituent types, their donor behaviors or events, behaviors, engagement behaviors and then also time relevancy. So how long have they been a constituent with us and how long has it been since we've reached out to them last? So that those are some of the more broad things that we're using to segment them.

And it kind of creates a feedback loop, right where you know, as you reach out your getting more data, which you then turn, turn and feed and then sort of reach out again based on that. To really to really help get at the folks who are probably more likely to be engaged, and perhaps make a gift. Which is pretty awesome.

Justin, curious to to what's happening in Georgetown in terms of how you're reaching out to folks there.

Yeah, so obviously I didn't mention this, but we we went live just after Thanksgiving last year, so we're still relatively new in building our processes and things in nature. But, and we're trying to do a lot of the things that doing is doing a lot of. I'm sure things that Ron is going to talk to you about, but one of the things that that we are really trying to do better with is filtering out or not really filtering. But focusing on our message groups so that when we do send those deliveries.

It's it's it's giving the people what they want based on solicitation codes, how they want to receive our our communications. And then we're going to. We're at a luxury so we're a small community tight knit group of alumni as a graduate level. I'm not, you know of doors down, it's it's work tight knit community so we picked up the phone and we do a lot of things by phone and get connections and keep in touch with our our constituents that way.

One of the other things that we're doing is we're going to be kicking out live our fall phonathon, and that is going to be completely automated almost to allow us to completely go through our students. Being able to submit a gift and take a gift online through E check or credit card, and then they're going to be able to also add that pledge to that record, and then the following day through delivery is going to automatically send out an email and say, hey?

Thank you so much for your for your pledge. Here's here's the direct link and have it all populated for them to submit their gift and then really all we're going to ever touch is if it's based on a designation because those annual gift funds are going to write to annual fund, so it's it's. It's really nice to be able to give that personal touch to our constituents. Now. What we didn't have that before it was it was a. It was a.

Send a piece of paper and send check back and this is giving us a new new level of connection. An automated process for them and real in real time. Get them notice that thank you. Thank you for your gift and thank you for your support.

Yeah, it sounds like that sort of the personal touch you might think of as being something that is heavily involved and requires a lot of human effort and capabilities and time and energy, but I love that you're just sort of automating a lot of that in streamlining it through the combination that sounds like.

Yeah.

The call list forms and sending things out through delivered that just sort of connects the dots for you without having to de manually get on the phone or open the Mail or then enter something in it. Just it just happens.

Ron, what's going on in Clarkson? How do you guys reaching out to folks right now?

Primarily we just started 'cause we just got up on April, but we we switched from we had a different program called by modules. You converted everything over, got all of our mailing list we've been doing our newsletters. They've loved the feature of being able to embed peoples information into those newsletters. Hey, here's your address that we have on record. If it's different, please fill out your update your information form, so integrating those right into the newsletters and each month they've been able to cycle different data points so that they can kind of see him. We haven't.

We haven't done the donor portal yet, so they can't go in and see all of their information, but we're going to kind of a slow pace.

But we've we've done. Reach out through deliver. We've done direct communications. They love being able to just click a persons email, send that message right through the system and have it logged. So we're taking advantage of that. And then the major communications we've been doing right now are our credit cards at a bounced or not. But I'm sorry that have expired, so we had a different. We have different payment processor and we're trying to get over this late payments, so we've been using this as a thing, saying Hey, by the way, we have new features and we took him directly to a pledge portal so it.

Only shows on their active pledges that aren't that have a balance on him and they can just make the payment right there. It kind of had the added benefit of vacancy any previous pledges they haven't fulfilled, so I'm not that we're trying to get guilty dollars. But if they see, you know, hey, I forgot to pay $50 last year. You know we've had, you know, a couple of people pay that balance off too, so that's the first portal we did. We didn't want to give him all their information and get him lossed. I really wanted that. You know that payment captured and get it updated and then.

Get some updates on the reoccurrences let's communications were using so far in the advancement world.

And it's it's kind of neat because you're almost. You're letting the donor sortof engage you in a lot of ways by actually taking that action and going to the portal. So you're sort of bringing him closer by making something available and sort of putting content there that's directly relevant to them. That's really cool. I wanted to take a step back and sort of think.

Sort of a little bit bigger picture here in terms of We're talking bout engaging donors and engaging alumni and sort of often at the time that they're making a gift or we want them to make it gift. But I want to back up a little bit because this series is talking about sort of what that life cycle looks like. I want to post the Commission to all of you of when do you actually start that engagement process? When do you actually start reaching out to people? Do you wait for them to make the gift you written, wait for them to come to you?

Do you wait for you or do you not win at all? Do you reach out to them when they were current student? What's that sort of initiating data point or strategy behind when you're reaching out to people? Justin, I know you're kind of in an interesting position because you're working in a shared environment right now, so you have this sort of Longview of data that you're looking at, so maybe would toss the question to you first, and then we'll let run in Gina chime in.

No, I think I don't know that there's any good answer.

'cause it's it's all going to depend on the granular level of that individual willing and being morning to support their school. So give me offer opportunities for our current students to give drive day of giving 100%. Yes, we will get our organizations on campus involved in that way. You know it might be a project that they want done to help support and if they donate to a certain Greek House then.

Your project is completed and they get an extra bonus because of a matching gift being made, so there's there's always that opportunity to to solicit or our current students in terms of graduation. And you know the the flip from current students to our alumni. There's always the ask at the end of the end of the year for our students to donate their glowing deposit instead of receiving that back. Would you like make a one time gift and purchase your?

Think with brick for on campus as a memory. To say that you left your your final final step on on campus. So there's always that opportunity for us to immediately selected within. From there on out. It really depends on what you know, what the ask is. Do we wait and not?

Solicit those first year alumni. In some instances, yes, in some instances know. So it just depends on what the task is for and what what the details of that solicitation or.

Gina or run. Any thoughts on this?

I've got a couple of thoughts, so for us you know with advancement. Once somebody engages and becomes a part of your system and part of your your records there there from start to finish and you know they become a student, they become a donor and then there within our system for for their lifetime. Theoretically, because at some point they engaged with us for a reason. So we want to engage back with them for a reason. So we're keeping their data points over their lifetime.

It's great for a long time. We can start them off as students. So as we talk about soliciting them as students, but also what they receive in terms of impact from the University. From a stewardship standpoint. So for those students who are receiving scholarships once they get into our system, they become a part of our record base. Then we can start talking to them about sharing their stories with our doms in our other alumni constituents so that they can really feel they can share their stories in their impact with them overtime.

We do we. We reach out right at the kind of at the admissions level out to the parents so our alumni office does a spirit pack to little backpack, little couple trinkets and stuff. So we solicit the parents and say, hey, do you want to get this pack for your children or you know, for your students, not their children at that juncture, but but so, so that's what we do. So we reach out at the parent level right off the get go and then we start doing. Now it's out to the students for typically there.

Events that are student based that our advancement office host to try and kind of get them use are named. It used to seeing us in those communications and then and then. From there we really don't hit him until their senior year. We hold off communications for the most part and then we start doing a we as an example we do a senior gift. You give $25 but then also commit to a four year pledge right? So so don't get a lot right now but also sign up with this pledge.

So we try and kind of get you engaged for those next four years as a as a as a given that it puts you into one of our giving levels immediately because of that. So so you end up on a membership for your giving level and you get communicated to a bit differently.

Much easier to sort of once they've started that process of giving to sort of keep them going from their senior year all the way through. As Gina said through the end of their life, right? That sort of engagement continues through that whole lanja tude nehl just very long period of time, so that's great. Curious to know if you've noticed any changes in how those folks like to be communicated from the time that they are maybe a senior in about to graduate, and if that style of communication.

Maybe changes in how you're tracking just what someone's preferences are. They interested in receiving text messages? Or Justin? You had mentioned your very personal, hands-on with the phone calls and sort of. Are you looking at trends in terms of having them influence how you're reaching out to different people?

Yeah, I mean in terms of you know texting, it's a obviously they have to opt in so everything in terms of the arts, late forms that we have in terms of you know alumni. Update your information. We now have to opt in box things in nature, but we also give the option for them to choose what they want. They want newsletter? Do they want only phone calls? Do they do not want both on calls? Do they only want these certain elements? So yeah, that's 100% what we've done in our instance.

And getting tracking those those data set data points to give them the luxury of of that.

Functionality so they receive what they want.

When they want how they want.

God centered idea, right whatever they want, we're going to help them figure out how to to meet them with whatever it is that they need. That's that's fantastic, but I think what this where this conversation is kind of going is this idea of strategic changes, right? That you may be having to make in your office in terms of how you're choosing which method to engage people, or when, or based on their preferences and so thinking especially within the past couple of months. With all that's been happening with kovid.

I think in a lot of ways it's forced people to rethink how they engage or how they reach out. So I was hoping that we can just get a little bit insight from the three view in terms of how your office has shifted. Jeannie sort of started out talking a little bit about sort of the transitioning of things from in person, perhaps to online. Curiously, here how that's going. Or you know, if there are still challenges that you're trying to overcome or or things that you found that were successful. And if you can share just what's going on with that.

Sure, so it's interesting 'cause muzzling had a very interesting experience over the last six months with kovid not only with kovid but with some of the changes that were happening internally in terms of academic affairs. You know the decisions that are trustees were making about how we would be structured and what are universities priority would be moving forward. And as you can imagine, that was received.

Positively and negatively from our alumni based and during that time we were struggling with how to communicate with those with our alumni base at a time where they didn't want to be with us in person, we didn't have a chance to meet with them in person, so we really leaned very heavily on our instance so that we could disseminate that information. And what I really liked about that was that we could classify some of those messages so that we could figure out who was receiving them in positive and negative way by a combination of interactions and posting interactions on peoples records based off of the responses of our deliver we also have.

Only used forms so that once a gift officer or any representative of the University was reaching out to someone, not just someone in our advancement office, but anyone reaching out to alums. Based off of what was happening. Whether it was code related, curriculum related within the University or even related around some of the social justice issues, they could manually enter in an interaction on the record without having to really have too much interaction within our own system. And then from there we looked at the positive and negative responses based off of the different categories that we received and then we started crafting our follow up messages based off of that.

So it was a really good way for us to see. OK of the people who positively responded to XY ursi topic, they increase their giving over this amount. They started attending our webinars. They started having more than one communication with us and in the opposite was true as well. How much did we lose in terms of some of the negative correspondances? And it was an opportunity for us to explain to the leadership of the University how the messages that they were putting out there to our alumni into our alumni base where.

On the right path where they on the right path where they giving them the right information, etc. In terms of responses for the way that we adjusted in from in person visits and into calling, emailing and texting, it seems to have gone really well. We've had a bigger chance at being able to access into touch our people in ways that we hadn't before, because honestly the data is a lot more accessible, so being able to push data out to our gift officers by just sheer slight functionality, whether it's in a tracking report in a call center, type of report.

Or they're just able to run their own queries to find their own constituents that are assigned to them. They've had access to data that they really had before, so that was a really good way for them to be able to in a more timely manner, reach out to people as soon as they've responded. So when somebody registers for an event, then there alerted, or when somebody gives a gift, then there'll ordered, or when one of those negative responses comes and pops up on an interaction or record, then someone is alerted and they can reach out to them. So it was a really good way for us to keep.

Better track of the responses that are alums in our constituents were receiving at the time.

Now the big question to follow that that's fantastic. The big question to follow that is, do you think those type of changes or sort of this immediacy or varying responsiveness is here to stay?

Since coming so moving forward, is this something you're going to continue to do and you know over long it takes for things to be back to? Quote Unquote Normal?

It will, you know, it's been pretty interesting to see the ways that our engagement teams have reimagined the way that engagement looks. And so I don't know that it will ever go back to 100% normal, but it will only be better as we move forward. And a great example of that is our Titan athletics virtual golf outing. So you know, a golf outing that couldn't previously happen before can now, and whereas before it was an in person golf outing happening right here in our own town of Bloomington, IL. Now we're telling them.

Hey, we've created a portal. You can log in. You can see who's winning, who's not you have a month to go out player for some wherever you're at in the country, you can still win these prizes. And here's the videos that are embedded that will show aready, you know, giving shoutouts to AB or CL, Amor giving shoutouts to this person who had the worst shot. You know that type of thing, so that's something that we will now always include as a part of that event moving forward and the other part of that too is that from the flip side, where we may have had some of those negative responses, whether it was kovid related of.

Hey, please don't call me. I'm really bad spot etc. We were able to lean very heavily on the way that sleep stores data in terms of some of those entities where we can turn and rules and turn people's communication preferences on and off, and so if they're saying Don't call me anymore, then we can say, Well, you're only 18, you might wanna hear from us another four years so we'll just do a rule where that is going to end in about four years. So from that perspective, I feel like we've been able to give our lungs the A more customized experience with us that they normally wouldn't have had.

That's yeah, that's pretty awesome. And I love the idea of like it. It brings up ideas to sort of expand the reach beyond what you may have done right. This idea of virtual golf events? That's incredible, right. People don't necessarily need to come to Bloomington to be able to do that. It can happen anywhere, so that's that's really cool, Ron. Curious to hear your thoughts on any changes that have been made and sort of the other kind of unique perspective being in the world where you're seeing. Sort of.

Admissions instances as well as advancement instances and seeing how they're sort of setup and changing during this time.

Yeah, I think with us the big part was it was taxed heavily. Just trying to make the adjustments from the University as a whole. Plus trying to figure out what we do about emissions. We do out advancement so in in some ways some of our routes were dictated by slate and slate capabilities. We kind of benefited that's late, was moving pretty fast on getting the web and our capabilities up and running to track that attendance. So we took advantage of that. Said hey look, do you know we could just do a web and are now and it will capture attendance and they said oh let's start doing some.

So we were able to jump on that right off the get go and in that help dictate some of the things we did. We weren't sure what we were gonna do something for our reunion. Virtually 100%. Sure we set up a lunch with your Department. Virtual lunch with Department captured all those attendance. You know the people who showed up so it helped us see. Was it successful? Was it not? You know, could we do it again in in those instances? OK, maybe there's a way we could do a physical proponent plus a virtual proponent, you know, in future years.

With the ease of how it is to capture, hey, just set up a zoom session.

Connected to your event. Let people register for the digital version of it, so, so I think that opened up for us a gateway to capture audiences that maybe they wouldn't normally be able to participate. So same thing with our our admission side or virtual events. We did virtual tours so we did different windows of time where you can. It's alive thing you can comment and zoom session you'll get your questions answered but you can join a tour. So now there's no reason why we can't do a virtual tour and do a physical tour.

And get those people that can't travel right to see the school. So so I think it made us made us start realizing that we could have been doing this all along. We just also didn't have the ease of the technology to make that happen. So now that it's all part of the same data set, it's all part of the same system in every is already used to making events. It really wasn't any added work for hosting it. So so we had the benefit on the advancement side of going live. Kind of while this was happening to adjust on the fly, but I think a lot of this is here to stay.

Yeah, and any other thoughts adjusting? Perhaps that you may have.

Not just the the ease of just to hit that home is how easy The slate situation is is to be able to be on the fly. And you know immediately.

Events canceled, you completely get com out immediately provide those updates changes smoothly and easily.

Which kind of segues nicely to our final topic here before we move into questions, which is sort of leveraging slate right and leveraging sort of the totality of slate, I think we've hit on almost all the different features that you can use in Slayton. Just brief conversation, but I'm curious to specific things to see if you guys are using them or plan to use them to help with all of this. One of these ideas is the idea of an engagement score and sort of taking all these data points and crafting something that is then.

Useful by perhaps your gift officers or by your researchers to be able to go back to it to segment your donors in your alums in two ways that make sense for your particular institution. So any thoughts on doing these type of calculations or leveraging the data in any sort of unique ways that are going to help you better cultivate and engage with folks?

From over to Ron first.

Yeah, we've we. I didn't know anything about an engagement score till we started doing the so. One of the nice features Leslie community advancement computing meets every other week. Lot of the users are on a call and so you get to kind of see what they're doing and we saw that in a very first meeting here and we saw that engagement score. I'm like, oh what's that? So like, I 100% want to do it. I have no clue like we just don't have rules in place. It's not something we've done, so we want to start doing that once we're ready to go to start figuring out, because that's.

You know who do you phone? Who you you know who's on your phone and call list, right? Those those scores? How dictate that here these people are more likely to engage, so why don't we get ahold of them? You know, start with them first, 'cause you're likely going to have a better outcome. You know with those folks. So we, we've been seeing a lot of the technology that other folks have already. You know, you slate four, and I think it's a constant pace me, that briefcase me that briefcase, 'cause we're just trying to steal each others code. You know, wherever we can just cause a lot of folks have have some great stuff up.

I.

Great and Gina. I don't know you. Sounds like you're doing a lot of things to look at. Interactions have been participation emails since I'm sure you have a way of looking at this data that is helping you out, Yeah?

Yeah, so one of the things we have yet to actually establish our engagement score, but that's what we're working toward. And the the point of that is to take everything we just talked about and try to create a nice summary of how engaged a person is or is not with the University. And that's one of the great things about slate I alluded to this earlier about just being able to push information into the hands of people where they haven't had it before, so we've been able to customize all of our dashboards to give these brief summary snapshots on things. That great example of that is.

Taking the donor search data that we received back and their scored from one to A5 in terms of their likelihood to give. So that's what they get officers were looking for when they look on these records to see if this is a prospect who could potentially be somebody who would give back to the University if they see a 12345 then they can make a determination. That's what we want to get to with our engagements. For same way as we're looking for. Whether that's a volunteer or somebody would sit on a committee. But then also somebody who could sit on a development committee where you're taking those two scores and then making a determination from there.

So the idea is that eventually these two datasets are. These two metrics will help us determine what that population is, who's more likely to be apart of the University and move it forward, make progress for us. But then the flip side of that is that we can create additional metrics and goals for our engagement team to broaden our engagement spectrum and say, Hey, these people are likely to be engaged, but yet they haven't done anything with us for how many years? So it's making sure that we can get farther and wider with less than what we have right now. And that's really what we're aiming for when we get to that.

Like I said, we take those interactions the messages, the event registrations and just try to summarize that so that we can get to the bigger picture.

Yeah, and not only is is really helping you sort of move things forward, but it helps you prioritize right? And figure out how are you going to best utilize your time and resources, right? Imagine we're doing these separate scoring. Is that taking all these different things like consideration? Now we can start to sort by that, and if you're ever equivocating between do I reach out to person hey your person B.

There's now some metrics to help guide you that actually you're going to get more bang for your Buck by reaching out to person B versus person a. So when you do have your gift, officers submit this call list right? And they're going through and they're fetching next and then the next one you can. You can sort that and have them actually go to the people that it makes the most sense to go too, so that's really cool, Justin. What about you over at Georgetown?

So you know one of the things with us being in the shared instance that we're looking at is is, you know how many touches between Advancement Animations. So you got current parents that are in the system. That might have an alumni that's already graduated, their second child is now a current student, but you've also got those alumni that are sitting out there with the 14 that 17 year old.

They are viable options to attend groups town, so that's one of the things that we're looking at leveraging here in the coming weeks. We're getting ready to roll out, revamp alumni website, and that's going to include an opportunity for alumni to add simple relationships of child, parent, grandparent, you know anything that would make a connection that we might not have made for that legacy track of of? Well, maybe that was an Ant that that's pretty cool.

We don't realize how broad the family is in doing sound and things that nature, but that thing going to give our admissions counselors an extra touch to say we're actually we've actually got a admissions counselor that is going to be moving into a position here in the coming weeks. It's their only focuses legacies, so that's outside of her own territory, but her she's going to have all legacy, and that's one of the things that we're going to use is identifying those 14 and 17 year olds so that she can.

Get those parents a little bit of extra love moving into their son or daughter's senior year, but then be able to capture that information on the forefront and have both offices working together to know you know how many touches that personality getting are they getting bombarded by admissions emails? Is that going to entail?

Then what's likely to solicit and give the gift that month or or Whatnot, so those are all things that were taking into account here moving forward.

Yeah, in and sort of love that 'cause I think that there is this idea of where we're living in an old man advancement word. All of our sort of minds are focused on what happens after somebody graduates. But when I love that you're doing is you're looking at sort of the other revenue center on campus, which is tuition dollars coming in right? And can we connect sort of those two things together right to help move things forward?

The.

Yeah.

China is on. I want to add on there 'cause we talk about data visualization. Voyager is one of my favorite tools. I think if I can just spend all day in there. That's why I spend most of my time on. For those not familiar, blazer is the ability to kind of map the data on the actual physical map and one of the benefits we've had with that is you can run a report saying give me all the people in New York, give me all the people in Maine give me all the people in the United States, but you don't really have a visual of what where your along that basis or your student base. Even so, when you start looking at that data in Voyager.

Being able to see why we got this big pool of inquiries in one area or applicants in one area. What can we do in that area, right? Because instead of making them come to us, maybe we can go to them and have better bang for a dollar there. Both are both on the advancement in the emission side, so being able to having all the data in one spot within slate allows you to build those data points that are just a great component for it.

I'm curious to if any of the three of you are are sort of helping craft strategies that combine them. I know Justin, he said you have a person starting for this sort of legacy idea, but are is there any thought to pairing that with sort of your when we eventually have traveling back again? You know your gift officers if they're planning sort of a trip somewhere, is that coinciding with any missions trips? Or are they sort of looking at joint things?

Run you were just talking about sort of looking on a map and seeing you know on the mission side where inquiries are. Prospects are in sort of. Are you thinking about leveraging?

The other side of the equation, your your alumni and donors.

In that process, where you're sort of combining the two.

We did one way so far. We've moved the majority of our alumni data into our mission side and what we do is we use that as a tool for people inquiring people that are applying. Hey, here's how many alumni are from around your area, right? So what kind of base you know if it's all go Clarkson, what kind of base is there for me for support to continue that? If I were to stay living at home or if I were to move to a different area? So we've built a data set. One way we have not gone the other way, Yeah?

But the intent there is that what one of the things they want to do is leverage alumni ambassadors in those areas. Hey, we have a bunch of applicants from this area. You're there, you know. Would you be willing to go have a you know? Godot, Tim horton's and set up a coffee day or something? You know, go go from that way.

Yeah, and that's also kind of a nice way to just engage those alarm, right? Who may not have the ability to give financially, but maybe they can give through Titan right? Another way to bring them closer to the University by allowing these volunteer type of opportunities.

I wanted to so we're getting closer to the point of asking questions, so I'm going to move over to our questions slides so folks can have the chance to start typing things into the chat. That maybe you want to ask our panelists. And while those questions are coming in, just pozal pose the question to the three of you. We have somebody who's any sort of standalone database, the shared database, and then ran you over there looking out at sort of separate databases on campus that you have and so thinking about sort of the decisions that you guys made institutionally, and sort of why you chose to go the routes you did.

And sort of what your reasoning is behind that. I think it's all that question coming from folks in the chat earlier, so perhaps we'll start over with you, Gina. Just talking about being in a sort of a standalone database for advancement.

Yeah, so when we first talked about going over to this late for advancement in our admissions office had already been on there for many, many, many years and it just made sense for us at the time to have two separate instances. We have not gotten to that point yet where we're sharing information back and forth as easily as we can, but that's the plan. Down the road. I also do like it because it allows us with a layer of security. We keep information about our constituents that needs to be private. And there's the flip side of it. The same as admissions as well, and.

It's not something that I pay attention too often because we have the two separate instances, but I do know that you guys have created some great levels of security and privacy so that the shared instances can have the necessary security that needs. But for right now it seems to be working pretty well and we are sharing information back and forth as it relates to the parents of the incoming students, and that's been a really good way for us to make sure that we have a constant relationship between US and admissions. And I also like it too, because we all we have other advocates on our side for.

Feedback posts

Maybe just if you want to talk just a little bit about sort of the shared world that you live in every day.

Yeah, so obviously user permissions is a big big pop it there because there is a lot of where we've got, you know, financial aid officers in there from the emission side, but also admissions counselors being able to not see it, advancement records. And now we're getting into those granular components where we're going to have somebody that's going to be in our admissions office. That's going to need to see Advancement Records as well, so.

They're not going to see the giving, but they're gonna see to see that Advancement Records details on a link relationship basis. So we started the conversation on the missions back in 2016 and and have gone through on the mission side and then started the conversation last June for advancement. Switch over and.

A lot of the the talking points that I talked about within the shared instance of, you know, identifying information that we can share was a major component in. In moving into a shared instance, but also obviously there's always that cost aspect to it as well. It plays, it plays a part in it, so it was just kind of a agree to disagree. Maybe in like the final decision was on there, but there's definitely some advantages to it. The biggest disadvantages.

Is figuring out those universe user permissions and thinking through that process and thinking through it holistic Lee? Because what you do to impact one records ability to view 1 users is going to impact the rest of the users as well. So it's always something to think about.

Enron, you're over there with maybe from the IT perspective looking out at multiple different instances that are out there so.

I am all for segregating the data and I was pushing that right from the beginning. We are undergrad admissions. We did do our summer camps in there the last two years and we just.

You know folks don't do the right filter on their mailings, and our summer camp students who aren't actually inquiries yet but eventually will be. We're getting emails that they shouldn't or they were setting out summer camp and it was getting fresh missions. Lot of moving parts. We just had a lot of folks doing mailings so it proved to us, at least in our area with what we want over. See if we can do it. We want to keep it split so we're actually even looking to do a fourth instance. You know for our non advancement, not admissions entities we have.

We love using the forms we love using the events. The payment, you know, providers, things like that that we're actually looking at potentially adopting a fourth instance as well. So so we're all for segregation of data, but I do come from the world and it's very easy to make the changes when you're only affecting one area 'cause you just want approval. Hey, we want to do this in the prompt. We want to do this new thing. We want the URL to be called this.

You can barely do undergrad.clarkson.edu if it's only an undergrad instance, and then if you name it that and now you also are doing advancement. It doesn't doesn't make sense so, so that's that's where we came from on it in. Luckily it was from a budgetary standpoint it was a very great price point to be able to do it, and we were able to do that, but I think saved us a lot of headaches.

Yeah, and I think what this conversation is showing that ultimately it really goes back to sort of what's it like on your campus, right? So for Rodan, makes sense to have things make sense for you. To separate things out versus there are some cases like Justin where it makes sense to have a smaller operation and makes sense for things to be a little bit kept together there. There is a question that came in looks like from Nate talking about student call centers, providing phone numbers to call from. I see that Gina and Raymond have replied.

You can certainly do your call list directly from fleet. There was a feature that was announced called telephony that is still in the works, so be on the lookout for that coming out which will allow people to call directly within slate. Not out yet, but on the way.

We're sort of winding down here. I wanted. Ask a fun question to the three of you and it's going to be. What is the favorite thing your most favorite thing that you've built in slate that has helped either either has helped a lot or you just think is really fun. I think it's kind of a fun way to sort of start to closeout this conversation, but either something that helped out all your alums or donors, or just you think is really cool and leverage to bunch of slate functionality so surprising you all with this one. So maybe we'll toss this one over to Gina 1st and.

Curious to hear your thoughts.

Alright, so it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with engaging our constituents, but from a back standpoint, being able to manage our data. The one thing I love the most is about managing our funds in that database.

Translate and being able to customize the information that we see about funds on some of those pages is been tremendous because you know, a fund itself is a reason why someone gives, and so there's a lot of reasons, and it has to do with people so we can always connect people to it. Whether it's the donor, it's the person who started it. It's the recipient of it, or it's in memory of that person, etc, etc. And all those things exist on the outside in their own records, and the fund has been the one place where it all comes together in a central spot. So using those dashboards and leveraging that page to display that information has been.

So key angest investigation of of donor intent and stewardship and donor relations. And that's really been fun for us.

We love portals. We just like to do them. They're fun. I mean it can't lie. There are a lot of fun will do more.

Portals portals are fun and maybe I'll throw the question over to run next. 'cause I know over at Clarkson and you specifically you love portals too, so maybe that's your thing, maybe not, but curious to know what you are. Your favorite thing that you left so far is.

Yeah, I'm not the portal person. I love him, but I haven't been able to spend the time that are my colleague Janessa's been able to do. She's been making some pretty amazing portals and that she just pumps out all day long. I am going to go back to Voyager. We built, you know, to get our alumni data set to visualize it and say here's our chapters. Here are the people who are a member of that chapter where our alumni moving, you know where. Where have the the population shifted? Where are some of our younger ones living so we can start maybe adjusting our chapters?

Not we were never really able to visualize that without you know, exporting it in, doing so much fancy stuff with maybe some Google APIs, but the ease of that and being able to the datasets at slate provides for that to overlay, you know what's the income areas based on census data. On top of that? So OK, great. We've got this. This pretty pretty high income area where we have a huge population of alums that we weren't ever really visualizing because we're stuck in our ways of, well, we got it. New Hampshire Branch. We've got a New York branch. We've gotta main branch, but maybe we don't have a Dakota branch. And now there's a lot of folks.

Living in Dakota, right? So, so that's that's my fun is taking that data together in making a visualization that is useful for them to make decisions on. So because I'm not using it daily, it's fun for me and it might not be as fun for them.

Moment and Justin? What about you?

Probably I mean obviously the least amount of fun that I've had since we started working with. I started working this late. Was the data cleanup from razor's edge over? So getting that mindset of wanting to find the Cleanest and most efficient way to get new data points in cleanly, are you know the process that I just built out for our alumni to share stories, upload materials, upload that new? You know the new birth certificate or.

Make sure the baby and things that nature to have that be able to immediately be posted to our gift officers to know that that came in and and they're willing to have that shared on social media, all those small little data points come in and it be cleanly, but it allows us to engage with our alumni and our alumni to then engage with their their peers. I think that was the most fun process that I've built out through multiple forms and entities to track that information and how's that information?

And then allow the reporting back to our staff to be be lot. So the minute they came in they immediately got notice that this this came in from our night to share some news which is really neat.

That's cool, so sort of elevating that data in a way that's immediately accessible. That then, if you wanted to, you could share the birth of the child, or give a call to congratulate or something like that.

Yeah, call the craft. Congratulate condolences, whatever it might be both both.

Both ends of the timeline.

Great.

I think a big part of the 2 to add is the How many systems. You move away from so we moving our advancement system. We went from 6 different things. Doing different elements between mailings and our data sets and are giving and R&R and R migrating down to one. So our folks one of the things are getting used to right now is actually having all the data at their hands being able to develop custom stuff. We manage all of our scholarships now, so the student scholarships are managed in our.

Advancement slate so they can now see how a fund is being used which they never had that connecting piece so how much money is coming in how much money is going out who's getting that you know, then they can generate reports of it. So they are still getting used to the fact that they don't have to keep these ghost systems. These Excel sheets on their on their shared drives where there manually manipulating all this data, but that was a big a big win. I think that they'll start seeing as years to come is is being able to run a query directly to a Mail merge.

You know without having to leave the system is a huge.

Huge component.

I could not agree more and Katie Bolton also agrees she's clapping for you here. I mean just the amount of things that we got to ditch because slate could do it not only surpassed our expectations, but like hurtled over it. We got rid of several vendors that we never expected to get rid of when we moved over to sleep, just because once we got in there and we figured out what it could do, we were able to do that and it was amazing.

And it does it better than some of our other vendors too. It was so I that could not agree more. That's one of my favorite things.

Great and well, I think that's a perfect way to sort of wrap up this weapon. I want to give a big thanks to our panel is thank you, Gina. Thank you Justin. Thank you Ron, really appreciate that. I'm sort of sharing the knowledge that you have with the rest of the group or really appreciate it. And also a big thanks to the folks who joined it in today. Thank you for your time as well. And if anyone wants to continue this conversation, I invite you all to join into the community forums. There's an advancement section right there, so feel free to to.

To chime in and start a conversation. I know the three of you all here are very active in there and I'm sure other folks who are in the chat and joining us right now are as well. So I look forward to seeing you all again there and thanks again, but enjoy the rest of your day. Everyone take care.