What your advancement data is missing about donors and alumni
In college, I was an orientation leader, attended nearly every campus activity, and was even elected homecoming king. Fast-forward 20 years, and I suspect my alma mater’s advancement team doesn’t know any of this. How could they? Even if a documented visit note included valuable information about my student experience, it has likely been buried under a mountain of data overlooked by an understaffed team.
Saddled with fragmented data, many advancement shops struggle to stand out to their constituents amid perfectly curated content from Big Tech on every platform. But personalization has become table stakes for engaging donors and building relationships: in fact, 80% of donors prefer to receive at least one form of personalized content.
Just having a record for someone doesn’t necessarily mean you know much about the person behind it. Important context may be scattered across multiple systems or buried within years of notes and interactions, making it difficult for advancement teams to see and use the full picture. Here’s some of the context you might be missing.
1. Their experience as a student
By graduation, many alumni will have spent years involved on campus, volunteering, and pursuing their passions. With data about them spread across different systems, such as enrollment and student success, advancement teams only have access to a small amount of basic academic and biographical information.
Working to break down data silos across campus can help to combat this. When information is siloed, so much useful context gets left unused. What causes did they support? Were they involved in the band, Greek life, athletics, or other campus organizations? Which experiences shaped their connection to your institution? These details can help explain each alum’s connection to your institution in ways that degree and demographic data alone cannot.
2. The motivation behind their giving behavior
Giving history shows you when someone donated but might not show why. For instance, does someone give every year during the excitement surrounding fall sports? Or maybe they give in the spring after seeing so many seniors graduate. Do they give repeatedly to the same scholarship, program, or cause? The reasoning behind their gifts provides valuable insight you could then use to personalize outreach.
Understanding donor motivations requires more insight into their behavior over time, which can be difficult when giving data and engagement data live in separate places. This context can help advancement teams understand what keeps someone connected. Without it, each gift is viewed as an isolated transaction rather than part of a broader relationship.
3. A full picture of who they are today
An alum’s interests, priorities, and relationship with your institution can change significantly over time. For instance, even if you have information on what their major was, they could now work in a completely different field that more closely reflects their current passions.
Your team likely has more current information hidden in contact reports that capture years of staff conversations with donors. Collectively, these reports may offer valuable information about donors’ evolving interests, motivations, and priorities. But that information is only useful if it can be effectively synthesized, and most teams don’t have the bandwidth to go through contact reports manually.
Connect the data behind each relationship
Fragmented or unusable data can leave advancement teams with incomplete insight into the audience they are trying to engage. But imagine you had access to full student experience data about your alumni who are now in a life stage where they have capacity to give. You could leverage this to meaningfully reengage them and likely make a significant impact on your fundraising goals.
Connecting data across the constituent relationship can reveal experiences, motivations, and context that an advancement record alone may miss. The most direct route to centralize this critical data is using a full lifecycle CRM, like Navigate360, which brings enrollment, student success, and advancement data together, giving teams a fuller view of each constituent and the insight they need to build more personal, lasting relationships.
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