Realigning your data and integration tools after years of inconsistent management can seem overwhelming at best and impossible at worst. To meet the demands of today’s tools, expectations, and analytics, it’s a worthwhile investment to strategically improve your data quality and accessibility. Whether you’re preparing for a CRM conversion or just trying to get a better handle on managing your data, this session will take you through UC Berkeley’s initiative to create business and technical solutions to increase transparency, governance, and data intake while decreasing customizations and confusion for stakeholders.

Have you ever wondered how you could use machine learning in your fundraising initiatives? We were in this same position a year ago. However, after a few months, we have our first working ML model. Now that we are past our initial learning curve, we look back at some of the important elements and would like to share our experience. In this presentation, we will be discussing: How to find and recruit a strategic, collaborative partner? How to define the task and scope of an ML problem? Other elements include dataset curation, technical specifications to consider, as well as model validation and deployment strategy.

Interested in intentional, integrated planning across advancement disciplines to increase experiential and philanthropic engagement? We’ll show how the University of Virginia uses the CASE AEM modes to envision new collaborations with real-world UVA examples for each mode. In this interactive session, we guarantee you will talk to ten new people and get concrete ideas for increased engagement. Using Liberating Structures (liberatingstructures.com), we will share our evolving thoughts, hear what you are doing, and facilitate discussions that will spark ideas. The Senior Directors of University Annual Giving and UVA Clubs Global Network from UVA’s Office of Engagement will lead the session.

Ever wanted to do complex analysis for free?? There are a lot of fancy tools out there that organize data, analyze, visualize and predict - but they all cost valuable financial resources. In this session we will review and introduce the various tools that methods available that will allow you to conduct complex analysis and visualizations on your own. We will explore Anaconda, Spyder, Python, Pandas DataFrame, and Plotly data visualizations. We will review simple Python scripts, analyze data quality of our CSV & Excel files, analyze metrics of the constituents; visualize constituent location; analyze philanthropy; and complete simple predictions.

For almost 20 years technology has promised to revolutionize engagement by connecting alumni via online platforms. Today, while this vision is still largely elusive, institutions like UC Berkeley and others are still striving toward this goal. In 2022, UC Berkeley partnered with BWF to conduct a needs assessment focusing on building a single, comprehensive online engagement platform for the entire campus. An extensive benchmarking project was conducted with 24 peer institutions across the US and Canada. Together we'll review the results of this benchmarking effort and offer insights into the current state of online alumni engagement in advancement?

We need to drive strategy based on data. It’s time to go beyond our assumptions to see what the numbers tell us. We’ll offer a review of answers to some key questions, like: What actually drives record giving days? Will people actually give via Venmo/Bitcoin? Do diverse alumni respond differently to gift officer requests? How does an email contact move a major gift forward vs. a visit? Is participation really down? How long does it take to book a principal gift? These questions and more will be answered in a fast-paced review of CASE, institution, and platform data.

The more a constituent engages with your philanthropic brand, the more likely they are to donate— right? Learn how the Kansas State University Foundation tested this theory through an engagement score model. At Kansas State University, there are many areas for philanthropic investment across campus and a myriad of mass communications showcasing the need for support. To capture this effect on donors, the KSUF created a method for tracking donor engagement across all areas of communication and then used this model to identify key target markets along a donor continuum. In this session, understand how to build and use modeling to determine if your mass marketing efforts are effective and to find your prime target market.

Our organizations have more information on our constituents than we know what to do with. We can track who opens an email, who attended a recent event, and who made a donation via our direct mail appeal.

However, with all of this data, we often have different versions of the truth, resulting in competing visions of a constituent's "Why".

In this session, we'll define what Master Data Management is (and is not) and walk through how the University of Chicago used it to empower better decision-making and more accurate reporting by enabling a 360 degree view of our constituents.