With stories from Nokia to Netflix to the oracles of ancient Greece, Tricia Wang demystifies big data,  identifies its pitfalls and provides insights into how to make the right business decisions and thrive in the unknown.

When the MIT Alumni Association wanted to create a mechanism to hear broader alumni voices, it established an opinion panel comprised of alumni who've opted in to provide the Institute their feedback and insights. At this session, attendees will learn about the MIT Insights Forum, and how it has become a tool for campus groups to gather data from alumni. This presentation will cover the creation of the Forum and its structure, the experience of working with campus partners and stakeholders, maintenance of the panel from a database perspective, writing the individual surveys, and presenting the responses in a way that they are actionable and direct.

Our constituents are telling us what they care about. They are doing so through their social media posts, their event attendance, their philanthropy, the emails they read, the links they click on, and many other activities. As Advancement professionals, we need to be better at capturing this deluge of information and extracting meaning from it.

In this talk, I'll provide a high-level overview of some very useful tools emerging from Data Science that allow us to leverage natural language processing to better understand what our constituents want, what our organizations have to offer, and how to connect them together. While this kind of data science is often portrayed as esoteric and difficult to master, I'll demystify how it works and provide a demonstration of some real-world use cases.

With a legacy system at the core--and a conversion on the horizon--UF needed a systematic approach to providing reliable and consistent data in the current environment while also building a framework to drive the successful implementation of a new CRM. To this end, UF launched Data Management--a comprehensive approach to project management, documentation, and data quality. Comprised of six implementation teams and a steering committee, the Data Management infrastructure ensures that all projects have a defined scope, established roles & responsibilities and rules of engagement to drive outcomes. This structure also provides the framework for broader data governance across UF Advancement. 

Upon return to the organization, participants will be able to:

1. Provide an example of a framework for data management and governance that can be right-sized to their team and aligned with their culture;
2. Develop templates for standardizing communications and documentation that lead to more reliable and consistent data;
3. Discuss the importance of data management with organizational leadership and gain critical buy-in.

What does junk food have to do with ethical AI? In this session, the co-founders of The Data Nutrition Project (DNP), incubated at MIT and Harvard, will present their work around tools for building ‘healthier’ artificial intelligence. DNP produces the equivalent of food nutrition labels for datasets, to encourage more responsible use of data when training AI models. Their presentation will give a primer on AI, including what all the buzz (and concern) is about, discuss the primary issues of bias and injustice that DNP is addressing, and describe their working methodology, insights, and takeaways from their first two years of development. The presentation will also include an in-depth analysis of the current landscape of tools used to help improve AI, and a deep dive into their Nutrition Label for datasets. This lecture will be interactive, with several short activities and time for questions at the end. Come with your questions about data quality, and be prepared to participate!

Analytics and Data Science in fundraising offer a comprehensive approach to understanding “what” may happen, but very little into “why”. This session will present philanthropic activity, as merely outcomes and expressions of engagement. Engagement is the “why” people do or do not support, and Behavioral Economics provides the framework to understand, and measure.

From the elephant and rider in annual giving to applications of this approach at a major and principal gift level and the concept of the “two yeses,” this session will challenge attendees to approach a new way of thinking about constituent activity, and new opportunities to have a measurable impact on key outcomes.

Have you heard these complaints from users? "Why do I have to keep track of so many links?  If I'm looking for a report, how do I know whether it was written in Cognos, Tableau, PowerBI, or SSRS?  Where is the policy or procedure I need?  Why can't I seem to find anything!?!"  In response to these pain points, Pomona College developed an innovative platform entitled "ConnectTo," which builds upon traditional intranet concepts by not only providing a one-stop shop for policies, procedures, training videos, and other materials needed by staff, but also by deploying reports using a variety of business intelligence tools - including Tableau, Cognos, SQL Reporting Services, and PowerBI - via a unified portal. No longer burdened by the dangers of adding one more tool to the mix, they are now free to create visualizations, management reports, executive dashboards, list reports, and other data-related deliverables using the most appropriate tool for the job (as opposed to the one tool users know how to access). Join this sesion if you are  battling reporting and dashboard chaos.

Come and learn about CASE’s new annual Alumni Engagement Metrics (AEM) survey. This bold, new initiative establishes key standardized definitions and inputs along with a framework for measuring alumni engagement globally. In addition to a walkthrough of the survey itself, the session will also provide you with some initial findings from the inaugural survey. Ample time will be devoted to Q&A so your institution feels prepared to take part in year 2!

When budgets and expertise put tools like Python, R, and Tableau out of reach, integrating data analytics into our everyday work can seem like an impossible goal. Learn how to use Excel as an entry to analytics for your organization. Find out how to develop descriptive and even some predictive statistics in Excel, acknowledging its limits while exploring everything it can do to help drive valuable data insight.

From debates about whether or not to score alumni engagement to developing a comprehensive framework for measuring engagement, alumni metrics is a hot topic. Join colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, as they present a case study highlighting their Alumni Impact Dashboard. Learn how to collect and measure what’s really important, how to present data in a way that will support and advance your efforts, and a few strategies for deepening volunteer commitment to data collection and data sharing.Discover how to interpret the data and engagement metrics to inform strategy, programmatic priorities, and decision-making across the unit and find out how this data can help advance stewardship and fundraising efforts. 

Improving constituent engagement and personal outreach requires more than just having data on a dashboard. How do you get the right view of information to the appropriate team members for them to be more efficient with their time and resources, and close important knowledge gaps? Find out how the University of Alabama at Birmingham is leveraging CRM Advance to deliver persona-based dashboards and real-time reporting to drive change across how their team is using data more comprehensively to better personalize connections with their potential donors.

Data can provide new, powerful ways to engage audiences. Interactive data visualizations - what journalists often create to display data elements from their stories - are an untapped opportunity to capture the imagination of your faculty, students, staff, and alumni in an entirely new way. What if you could create an interactive graphic that allows readers to take control of the content and change the data view based on their interests? Data visualizations do just that and give audiences deeper levels of engagement by allowing them to find the story in the data that they care about. How do you distinguish your institution or programs beyond the same annual benchmarks for success? Adding an interactive graphic can create 'stickier' audiences, better retention of information by readers, and the coveted chance for content to go viral. Learn how to approach this new opportunity in visual communication using nothing but a spreadsheet and simple drag and drop software. Together, we will walk through real-world use cases for a wide variety of areas, including diversity, branding and marketing, news, recruitment, events, and affinity-building. 

Mass email communication is common practice in higher education marketing. While effective in communicating with large audiences, mass email generally does not allow for the affordance of personal relevance. This presentation compares survey results, open rates, and click-through rates between segmented and unsegmented audiences within the Cornell alumni community through an A/B test. The data collected from this A/B test confirms the hypothesis that hyper-segmenting large audiences into groups based on degree and giving history leads to higher email engagement rates. Attendees with leave the session with strategies for email personalization within their organization and study results that emphasize the additive nature this personalization can have on their own audience's engagement.

This session will discuss healthcare-focused data visualization and public reporting trends in the nonprofit sector. The session will draw largely on examples from the Commonwealth Fund’s State Health System Performance Scorecard, including demonstrations of several derivative interactive data visualization tools. We will discuss how data for these tools are collected, analyzed and curated for online public reporting, as well as provide examples of how the data and tools are used by the media and policymakers.

How can we empower every team member to participate in data analysis and health? How can we afford time to thinking about what the data we see each day mean? How can we structure ourselves and reward team members to participate? What’s in it for everyone else? What metrics and outcomes can we expect in a more strategic environment?

Fulfilling and implementing a data analytics project with internal or external partners can be an uncomfortable, fraught and even Sisyphean experience. Often the data disappears and then the results are returned, sometimes without discussion of the process. This session explores the ways that ongoing, continual project planning and feedback improves the planning, execution, and implementation of an analytics project in exponential ways.

The data analytics team at the University of Texas at Austin has developed an artificial intelligence capable of analyzing written contact reports. Several layers of deep learning and natural language processing algorithms allow the team to detect problems in contact reports such as prospect disqualifications, prospect disinterest, negative sentiments, and more. Despite a deep learning approach, their A.I. can explain its decisions and can be trained with limited computing power. Learn how the A.I. works, how the research team uses it to assist prospecting efforts, and how you might go about building your own.

You know how it works. You shop for a rug on Wayfair and the next day, the site suggests chairs and table lamps to match. Netflix rearranges itself based on your viewing habits. It’s a consumer-driven era, where companies work hard to build relationships by using what they know about us — our likes, dislikes, habits, engagement levels, and demographics — to push us toward action. Advancement must do the same. We have access to more constituent information now than ever, whether stored in our database, tracked in social and digital engagement, or unlocked by new technologies. We can be there, right in front of our best prospects, presenting offers when we’re top-of-mind. Join us for a conversation on how William & Mary is using analytical models that identify new leadership and major gift prospects by tapping into digital engagement, the behavior and demographics of similar constituents, past philanthropy, and more to prioritize outreach and put fundraisers in front of the right people at the right time. 

Target and Amazon know alumni better than we do. Why? Because colleges and universities are notoriously awful at gathering and maintaining accurate data on who alumni are today - their interests, behaviors, and identities. Many schools face the dual challenge of outdated alumni information and declining alumni participation in giving, but it doesn't have to stay that way. Join this session for a hands-on experience working with real data from liberal arts institutions. Learn how new approaches to determining a graduate's level of connection can be used to measure engagement and predict giving. You'll leave with concrete strategies to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your data analytics, including: calculating alumni identity, tracking digital engagement, and forecasting donor behavior.

Last year, City of Hope raised $43 million in planned gifts in a single year. Learn how we’re going to reach our $50 million goal a year in planned gifts in the future. This presentation focuses on how we distilled planned giving prospects from more than 3 million constituent records to find the best donors. Discuss how machine learning was used to find the best marketing and event prospects. Find out how statistical models helped create a workable moves management system for prospect management. Discover how data visualizations are being used by upper management to understand the program’s health and see progress toward goals.

In fall 2020 CASE will be releasing new Global Reporting Standards and Management Guidelines. This session will provide an update on anticipated changes and additions to the standards and some of the implications for your fundraising and campaign reporting. Participants will be invited to share their feedback on the proposed changes. Come prepared with your questions and suggestions!

Improving student retention is no easy task. One place to start is by reaching out on social media to students who are struggling, but how do you find these students? Mining social media data, like Twitter, and analyzing sentiment for emotions like anger, anticipation, sadness, disgust, or fear can help. I'll show the tools I use to mine large data sets and talk about the ethical concerns of using public student information. 

The core of artificial intelligence and data strategy starts with the human. Oftentimes we think organizational partnerships and technology are unconnected and, we think current technologies will not influence partnerships or do not apply to them. This case study shows how design thinking propelled an effective use of technology that bridged the silos of a large organization and developed a strong partnership between development and advancement services, and furthermore, how this partnership is driving organizational strategy.

Today, mission-led organizations are growing increasingly sophisticated in their use of data. Our digitally-enabled world makes both new and previously unknown metrics available, and these metrics are a powerful tool for attracting, engaging, converting, and retaining audiences. But many organizations still struggle to capture the right data, discern the relevant insights, and communicate the learning effectively. For the lessons learned from data to be assimilated, they must break through “filter bubble” -- the set of dominant inputs and assumptions that can prevent data from being acted upon. This talk will focus on practical ways for organizations to derive and deliver insight from data to advance their strategic objectives -- and to burst internal filter bubbles.

Imagine if your nonprofit could predict the future and see who would make the best donor. Predictive Analytics through AI promises to give every nonprofit development officer this power. This session will separate truth from hype and cover what is predictive analytics, what can it do (and what can't it do), when a nonprofit can (and should) implement it, and how a nonprofit can implement predictive analytics for fundraising --- all with a minimum of technical jargon.

Every day, practitioners in the Professional Sports arena go to work performing many of the same tasks we undertake in Higher Education. From constituent engagement to data analytics and predictive modelling, our peers are tasked with increasing fan engagement, driving ticket sales and developing models for growing revenue from their constituency--sounds familiar, yes? In this unique panel-discussion session, we'll hear from colleagues representing two of our conference host cities’ most famous teams, the New Orleans Saints and the New Orleans Pelicans--as well as industry professionals from both the Sports world and Higher Education Advancement. Together we'll explore the mutual challenges we face, the techniques we're currently using, and the trends we are seeing for the future. So, whether your job entails driving alumni engagement or fan engagement--sharing our respective learnings will be both interesting and informative. You never know what innovative tips and tricks we might glean from each other's experiences!

Data scientists can mine massive amounts of information to better understand human behavior. So how can marketing teams use the principles of "big data" to drive greater ROI? Children's National has created an analytics program to understand how marketing and fundraising touchpoints work together so that they are worth more in coordination than the sum of their parts. This modeling leads to a decrease from 83 cents to 7 cents of the cost per dollar raised in a single fiscal year by focusing in on moments and touchpoints that matter. This session will cover the theoretical concepts to the actual building of the product as well as the multi-year road map of where Children's National is taking this technology. Learn how to leverage advanced marketing analytics to generate more revenue with less investment.