The well-worn ruts in the advancement road are comfortable and difficult to leave behind.
Do you agree?
Enjoy the finale of my 6-part series on #AlumniIdentity with a look ahead to 21st-century alumni fundraising + take a chance at testing your own identity. Can it be used to predict your giving?
Read More“Wealth screening is amazing at filling our donor pipeline!” – said no fundraiser ever.
When it comes to prospect discovery and pipeline development, no two strategies are as tried and tired as wealth screening and RFM models. Here’s a case study on how alumni identity - as both tactic and tool - blows everything out of the water when it comes to predicting giving.
Read MoreVolunteers care more about your institution than anyone else. And you have more volunteers out there than you think.
Research into alumni giving has revealed the secret sauce - it matters not how institutions view volunteering, but how alumni volunteers think of themselves and their alumni identity.
Read MoreWhen it comes to new ideas, higher education is on the bleeding edge in the classroom and noticeably behind in advancement. Need proof?
Read MoreSome say that predicting donor likelihood is the most important application of data science in higher education advancement.
I think it’s only the beginning.
Read MoreAs any mathematician will tell you, counting something simply confirms its existence—nothing more, nothing less. Why is it, then, that when it comes to engagement, advancement is so obsessed with counting things?
Read MoreEvery graduate leaves their alma mater with a distinct impression of their time in school. Some will remember it fondly, others in a more negative light. At face value, there is probably little colleges and universities can do to change that impression post-graduation. But that hasn’t stopped institutions from trying and failing.
Read MoreAlumni giving is crashing and the culture of sameness in advancement is partially to blame. Why? Because colleges and universities simply don’t know their alumni very well, and in the networked age – where the battle for attention is primary to everything else – higher education is woefully behind in being able to demonstrate post-graduation value to alumni.
Read MoreAt some level, every fundraiser knows that alumni engagement is an important driver of alumni giving. At the same time, the advancement profession seems perpetually perplexed by how to measure engagement and apply those measures to increase philanthropy. Why is that?
Read More
