"When CASE released the white paper on the Alumni Engagement Metrics (AEM) project in 2019, our team jumped at the chance to begin tracking our engagement in more ways than just alumni giving percentage. Thankfully, the framework CASE created helped us get started.
We began to identify and track each touchpoint we could in our CRM, Raiser's Edge NXT. From there, we had to have a way to report on this information. Over 100 queries were developed in Raiser's Edge to supply the information necessary for the AEM survey. This worked well for an annual survey, but in order to use the data to strategically guide our work, our team needed to see this information more frequently. So, a custom report had to be created. Originally in Excel, the report contained our metrics by month and by mode, compared to previous years. This quickly became untenable as it required significant staff time to update manually each month.
With the recent partnership between Microsoft and Blackbaud, we were able to leverage Power BI, Power Automate, and Blackbaud's SKY API to pull data from multiple sources and create an interactive, real-time dashboard containing the AEM data we needed to see. This has freed up valuable staff hours from manual updates and allows for a deeper look at our data across other dimensions such as gender, ethnicity, geography, class years, and more."
From the Judges
This submission is an innovative way of measuring engagement tied to the CASE Alumni Engagement Metrics. A substantive entry supporting data and analytics that has much value to others looking to establish their own metrics and visualizations.
