At the University of Iowa’s Center for Advancement, more than 70 staff members raise money for a sprawling university system that includes 10 colleges, a statewide academic medical center, athletics programs, a performing-arts center, a museum, and more.
Created in 2017 when the University of Iowa Foundation merged with the University of Iowa Alumni Association, the center consolidates the university’s efforts to get friends and supporters to give and get involved. Before the organizations joined forces, foundation leaders suspected they could better use data analytics to inform their development strategies. A fundraising consultant hired in 2016 confirmed those suspicions. “Our data analysis was a little disjointed and not strategic,” says the center’s prospect-management associate director, Janet Weimar.
Some were managing as many as 120 donors or prospects. ‘Trying to keep track of that many people is beyond out-of-control.’
Last September, the center created a data-analytics team (four new hires, nine people from in-house), led by numbers-cruncher Brad Cunningham, who came from the for-profit world. After unearthing little-used collections of data, the team helped revamp the university’s prospect-management and research strategies.
Though fundraisers held fewer visits with donors in the first six months of the new approach, the average gift size increased. The team’s analysis — and real-world experience — show that overall revenue growth depends more on gift size than on the number of donor visits. In other words, quality trumps quantity.
Among the team’s recommendations:
Optimize fundraiser portfolios to be “smaller but smarter.” Before he started higher-education fundraising, Cunningham, the center’s vice president of data analytics, read Managing Major Gift Fundraisers: A Contrarian’s Guide. The author, David Lively, is a development officer at Northwestern University who believes most fundraisers’ portfolios are too large.
At the University of Iowa, some development professionals were managing as many as 120 donors or prospects. “Trying to keep track of that many people is beyond out-of-control,” Weimar acknowledges. To get a handle on the workload, the team first analyzed five years of giving data (focusing on gifts between $50,000 and $5 million) and catalogued individuals in one of three ways: “qualified,” “actively cultivated and solicited,” and those being stewarded for gifts already made. They determined that there was a lot of deadwood on the lists and culled about 1,700 names. Some fundraisers’ portfolios shrank by two-thirds.
Find and exploit untapped “data goldmines.” The university’s 1,800-seat Hancher Auditorium hosts Broadway shows, dance recitals, orchestral concerts, and lectures, yet years of ticket-sales data had never been analyzed.
Cunningham and his team sorted several years’ worth of sales data, categorizing ticket buyers by number of performances attended and the amount spent. For example: Did they pay more for front-row seats versus in the balcony?
Many of those who frequently bought premium tickets also gave generously to fundraising efforts. “This ticket data was really somewhat of a lead indicator of how much somebody was giving,” Cunningham says.
As a result, some names were added to prospect lists, and some were dropped. Now, as the team interacts with various university entities, he says, they look for people “sitting on an Excel spreadsheet” or any other untapped source of information on public engagement with the university.
Reward revenue results, not activity, for a “less gameable” approach. “Our previous system [for evaluating fundraiser performance] was really based on activity versus productivity,” says Weimar. “The new system was intended to build some consistency and create baselines and metrics related to productivity versus activity.”
The approach, which uses data analysis to assign revenue targets to fundraisers, no longer rewards staff based merely on activity. “We took away some of the things that were completely gameable,” Weimar
says. “Someone could say, ‘I had 400 contacts last year,’ but if they’re calling people who are clearly not at home during the day and counting it as a contact, then that’s a way to game the system.”
Develop a “talent pyramid” so the right fundraisers are seeking the right gifts. Conventional wisdom suggests that senior fundraising staff should pursue the largest gifts. The new metrics-based system formalizes this alignment creating a five-level “talent pyramid.”
At the base of the pyramid, associate directors pursue gifts of up to $50,000. At its tip, vice presidents focus on gifts between $1 and $5 million. “We didn’t just draw these numbers out of the wind,” says Cunningham. “We were actually looking at historical success rates.”
Build flexibility into the pyramid. Each job title within the five-tier pyramid includes five different goal levels. The levels allow for variables such as tenure and whether someone fundraises full time or also has academic or managerial duties. The approach accommodates temporary adjustments, such as family leave or other personal issues.
Maintain a collaborative atmosphere, but eliminate the “clown car” effect on a large gift. No fundraiser is an island, and raising money is a collaborative activity. But the university’s new fundraiser-evaluation metrics more clearly define everyone’s primary responsibilities and goals.
“Everyone is provided with a lane they should swim in,” Cunningham says. Getting credit for a “secondary solicitation” is downplayed but not eliminated. That change has less to do with hard-and-fast rules and more to do with a “culture shift.” It’s designed to prevent multiple fundraisers from “attaching their names” to a large gift outside their area of focus, he says, especially when they only sat in on a few meetings or took the odd phone call.
“We wanted to be thoughtful about how we define primary and secondary solicitors so that we could maintain a team culture and also make sure that people were focused on the right solicitation,” Weimar says.
“If a fundraiser is talking to a donor and they find out that that donor actually doesn’t even want to give to their area, they want to give to something else, we want them to park the car. They get out of the car and let the right fundraiser drive that car,” she says.
“This is a brand-new thing for us. Yes, you have worked with the donor and have moved to qualify the donor and moved them toward a solicitation. But at the point at which it becomes clear that they’re not going to be driving the solicitation, we want them to move on to the ones that they should be working on.”
Always show and tell. Changes such as these require a lot of meetings. A lot of them. When driving a “culture shift,” in which data informs development strategies, it is best to keep staff informed throughout the process. Make sure at meetings that you both show and tell staff members what’s being developed and considered, says Weimar
.
“You always will want to go to meetings with something staff can react to,” Cunningham says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. Just giving them something to react to is a good way to start a conversation.”
Weimar agrees: “Yes, it’s all about being incremental. At every meeting, we should walk away with something incremental that we can build upon and get into a cycle of testing and learning from each other.”