CASE Insights Survey

CASE Support of Education Survey, Australia and New Zealand

Register for the Survey

Key Dates

  • Data Collection Open

The CASE Support of Education Survey, Australia and New Zealand collects detailed information about fundraising and donors to measure the philanthropic performance of higher education institutions. It also provides an estimate of the overall impact of philanthropy on the higher education sector.

This survey of philanthropic giving uses the methodology used by the CASE-Ross Support of Education Survey, UK and Ireland adopted by UK universities. It is an important tool for institutional leaders, development and alumni staff who work at education institutions as it allows them to be more rigorous in benchmarking, more confident in accountability and more persuasive in relationships with alumni and other donors. This survey is a key source of information on this subject, enabling institutions to compare themselves with similar universities.

 

Why participate?

Participating in the survey benefits institutions and the overall fundraising profession. The survey findings will help:

  • Raise the profile of philanthropic giving within the sector
  • CASE lobby on behalf of universities, especially in the area of fundraising
  • Measure the impact of policy interventions
  • University teams measure and monitor their progress
  • Universities, and other stakeholders, see the broader trends in fundraising

In addition, the survey findings, and ability to easily compare results to previous years, help university teams set objectives, assess performance, make informed investment decisions, lobby senior management for investment and improve overall departmental performance.

Universities that have participated in the survey will have access to an online toolkit to benchmark their performance against other universities and their previous submissions.

 

What do survey participants need to provide?

The survey asks for data on specific fundraising variables:

  • Number of fundraising staff and the team's expenditure
  • New funds secured and cash income received
  • Number of alumni from the university
  • Number of people donating to the university
  • Information on the university's fundraising campaign(s)

How to Participate

When the survey is open, the first step in the process is completing the Survey Contact Form. We will use this information to provide you access to the survey. Your information will be stored on our database and you may get other information from CASE from time to time as well. Once the contact form is completed, a member of the CASE research team will reach out to with the survey link and instructions for completing the survey. Please contact Fiona South at [email protected] if you have any issues

Once you have received the survey link and documents you can begin filling-in the survey. It is possible to start the survey, save responses and resume the survey later but be sure to use the same survey link on the same computer and browser.

We have created three documents to assist with survey completion:

The first two are the Guidance and Reporting Rules for Advancement document that contains definitions, counting standards, examples and question-by-question guidance. Please review this document carefully before you gather your data and complete the survey.

The third document is a Survey Validation Worksheet in Excel for use in assembling and checking the data prior to entering it on the online survey platform. The Excel sheet performs some automatic quality checks on your data. For example, it checks that ‘the value of the largest cash gift received by your institution in the survey year’ is less than ‘total cash income received’. It is highly recommended that you complete the Survey Validation Worksheet offline before entering any data on the online survey platform to minimise the risk of errors and to support data checking.

Before the completed survey is submitted, we require that the senior most Advancement Professional/Director of Development reviews and signs off the reported data. You are also required to sign the Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) – this has been embedded within the survey itself. There is no hard copy required to be signed this year. The DSA is in place to ensure participating institutions do not share results outside of their institution and guarantees that results are only used for benchmarking purposes.

CASE conducts additional validation and may follow up about any perceived discrepancies. The data is run through rigorous checks to ensure that the data submitted is free from errors and as robust as possible. Once the data is validated, CASE will open up access to benchmarking capabilities. In addition, CASE will conduct data analysis and write a report on the findings; this will be distributed to participants and posted on this webpage.

Once the submitted data is validated, CASE will open up access to benchmarking; more details about this will be shared at a later date.

Previous year’s data (from 2012 till 2021) will continue to be available on the CASE Benchmarking Toolkit. The Benchmarking Toolkit How-To-Guide provides a click-by-click guide to help you navigate the toolkit while benchmarking. Please use either the Firefox or Internet Explorer browsers to access the CASE Benchmarking Toolkit as some features of the toolkit are not compatible with the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers.

Please note that access to the CASE Benchmarking Toolkit requires a CASE account. If you have previously logged into case.org, please use the same email and password to access the CASE Benchmarking Toolkit. If you don't have an account you will have to create a new account. If you're not sure if you have an account you can look up your account here.

If you’d like to update your institution’s data for 2020 or 2021, please email Fiona South at [email protected].

Tags

Asia-Pacific Higher Education Research and Data