Following last year’s police murder of George Floyd, Santa Clara University issued a statement pledging to make the Jesuit institution “a place where all feel respected, welcomed, and safe.” It also acknowledged that its leaders didn’t have all the answers, saying: “We cannot change what we do not know or understand.”

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Sharise Harrison, senior director of prospect management and analytics in the university’s advancement office, had already been working from that very premise for more than a year. Harrison had previously helped lead a discussion at a national meeting of prospect-management officials about how diversity, equity, and inclusion applies to data crunching in fundraising. Tempting as it might be to think that such data was free of bias, she knew that wasn’t true.

Even before the summer of 2020, Santa Clara fundraisers had begun to de-emphasize wealth screenings, which research suggests may lead development professionals to overlook donors of color. Harrison and her team instead were putting more weight on a person’s job title, affiliations, and connection to the university. The more holistic review, she says, “makes us look past the next check” and take a long-term view of the relationships fundraisers cultivate.

As the university wrestled with questions of equity, Harrison considered how the advancement database, though it warehoused acres of information, didn’t record race or ethnicity, sexual orientation or preferred gender identity, disabilities, or other keys to a person’s identity. “If we really want to understand our full constituency, there are certain things we should know,” she says.

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Since then, Harrison and her team have been working to add such critical information from student and parent records, alumni surveys, and other sources. Membership in, say, a student or alumni affinity group for Asian Americans isn’t proof of someone’s ethnicity, but it is an indication of that person’s interest.

The effort is extensive, but Harrison is realistic about the result. “We’re never going to have all this data for everyone. Just like with prospect research, you can never find everything,” she says. “But we have to fill in as many gaps as we can and paint the best picture that’s available to us.”

With a critical mass of information, Harrison will shift the fundraising team to examining its work and communications for bias. She will look, for instance, at whether fundraisers make a similar number of outreach efforts to different racial groups or whether an email campaign falls short with a given audience. “If we’re using these metrics,” she says, “we’re not really blaming anyone. The message is more: Here are things we’re noticing.”

“Ultimately,” she adds, “we want to make sure the experience with Santa Clara, particularly its fundraising arm, is equitable across the board.”