At the Kansas State University Foundation, scale and complexity (thousands of funds, stories, and potential touchpoints) made it hard to put the right “products” in front of the right people. Over the past five years, we built a governed, tagging framework to capture what donors care about (29 interest tags) and why they give (seven motivation tags), powered by first party surveys, declared preferences, observed behavioral engagement, and select third party data. We operationalized these tags across our CRM, content planning, reporting, and campaign segmentation to personalize journeys and improve the donor experience.

This session covers how we designed the framework, collected and validated data, set up data governance, and embedded these tags into everyday strategy. Plus, what we’d change if we could do it all over again. Leave DRIVE with a playbook for immediate action: tagging strategies, governance guardrails, and impact metrics.