Hello. Hello. Welcome. I can see folks joining. Give us just a minute. We'll let everyone enter the room. All right, I still see some folks coming in, so we'll take another minute here to let folks join. As you're joining, please just drop a little note in the chat menu. Let us know where you're from. Be great to see who we've got on the call with us today. All right, I'm going to go ahead and get started and just cover a few administrative things while folks are still joining. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the CASE Insights webinar on Canadian philanthropy in 2023. My name is Deborah Trumbull. I'm the senior director of research at CASE, and I'm thrilled you could join us. Before we get started, I do have a couple of administrative notes. The webinar is being recorded and we will provide it to all registrants. There will be a follow-up email you'll receive after the event with instructions for accessing that recording. We'll also be taking questions on the call today. We do want this to be as interactive as possible. We have some polls that we're going to be launching, so there's a couple of different ways. We'll be keeping an eye on the webinar chat box, but also there is a Q&A function. You'll see an option at the bottom of your screen where you can submit questions using that Q&A. We'll try to answer some of the questions as we're going through if we catch it and we think it's related to the slide that we're on. But we'll try to have a little bit of time at the end as well to catch any questions that we might have missed. All right, so I am going to dive in. Hello and welcome, everyone. Let me just make sure I can get to the next slide here. No, I can't. Yes, I can. All right. So again, my name is Deborah Trumbull. I'm the Senior Director of Research at CASE. I've been at CASE for two years and I oversee a number of philanthropy surveys that we conduct in regions around the world. So not just in Canada, but some other areas as well. Prior to CASE, I was at Blackbaud for about 15 years working as an analytics consultant in their benchmarking program. And before that, I worked in advancement. I was at the Smithsonian Institution working in their central advancement office. So I've been sort of on the other side as well. I'm joined today by with Nick Campisi and Danielle Lamont from CCAE. I'm going to let Danielle introduce herself first. Thanks, Deborah. Bonjour et bienvenue à tous. I'm so glad to be here and to introduce myself as the new president and CEO of CCAE. I know I speak on behalf of the board and the team when I say how grateful we are for this longstanding partnership that we've enjoyed with CASE and the opportunity that that provides us to support the CASE Insights on Philanthropy Canada initiative. Establishing this comprehensive data source on higher education fundraising in Canada provides the Canadian advancement sector with a truly valuable tool for measuring philanthropic giving and strategies. So please keep that in mind when you get the invite to complete the next edition. So, Deborah, I'm going to turn it back to you and we can hear more about the 2023 findings. All right. Great. Thank you. And Nick, would you like to do a quick introduction before we dive in? It'd be great. Sure. Nick Campisi, data scientist here with CASE. I primarily work on all of the surveys that Deborah mentioned, our philanthropic surveys in all the regions around the world, as well as our alumni engagement survey, which will come up later today. And then finally, also are some of our DEIB initiatives at CASE and specifically around reporting and benchmarking and creating insights from all the hard work that you do to submit the surveys. Great, thank you. All right, so here are some things we're going to cover today. We're going to do a quick overview of CASE Insights just to help make sure everyone who's on the call knows who we are and what we do. We're going to spend the bulk of the presentation looking at some of the FY23 key findings and takeaways. Nick is going to show us some information on how to act on those insights. And we'll talk a little bit about some resources that are available to you from CASE. So I'm going to start real quick just by talking a little bit about CASE Insights. So, you know, here at CASE Insights, the work that we're doing through our Insights team really helps you move in a more strategic solution driven way. We provide you with the data, the standards and the research that you need as part of an integrated advancement program. So we provide benchmarks in a variety of areas. So we have benchmarks in philanthropy, as you know, this is the data we're going to be talking about today. But we also collect philanthropy data in the US, in Australia, New Zealand, in the UK and Ireland. We have a pilot program to begin looking at having benchmarks in philanthropy in Latin America as well. Our alumni engagement survey is a global survey, so we have data from that from all around the world. We have a campaign survey that we'll be launching in September that looks at completed campaigns. We want to be able to report to you all what's, you know, kind of how campaigns are structured these days and, you know, what kind of goals are being set and timelines, things like that. And as Nick mentioned, we also do work with our Opportunity and Inclusion Center on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. We're also excited to announce that we've created a task force to build a roadmap for annual benchmarks for marketing and communication. This is one of the areas in advancement that has been a little harder for us to measure because, you know, folks are collecting their data in different ways. It's very, you know, it's spread out across their institutions. And we're eagerly looking forward to this task force giving us some guidance on the kind of metrics that they feel like advancement offices can provide. And then, of course, all that work we do is guided by our case global reporting standards. I'm going to be talking a little bit later about the standards. They are not just they're not just there to provide consistent ways of counting and measuring, which is primarily how we use them in Case Insights. But they also provide, you know, a foundation for, you know, the principles of practice and advancement. There's ethical considerations. There's guidance on campaign counting and donor control. So there are, you know, a really, really useful, you know, really useful guide for all of the business of advancement. And we are. All of you who are case members will get or do get a one digital subscription to the standards as part of your membership. Of course, you can always get additional, you know, additional subscriptions as well. One of the things we did with this global set of standards is we did create a digital version of the standards. And we did that on purpose because we didn't want there to be so many years in between updates. It had been a pretty long time, more than a decade, I think, before the prior year updates. So this new digital version will have the ability to provide updates. And in fact, there will be some coming soon. So that's just a little a little heads up. We'll talk about that a little bit more. All right. So before we dive in and look at the data, we're going to put a poll up on the screen and we just want to get a sense of who's joining us today. So if you could let us know what your primary focus area is within advancement. That would be great. We'll get a little read here on who's with us today. All right. So advancement services, major plans giving. Are you a fundraiser? Let us know. And then my colleague, Shalia, will share when she sees we've got some good responses coming in. All right. Let's see. There we go. All right. So I don't know if you all can see. Can everyone see that pop up? Got advancement services at 26 percent, the highest percentage, 30 percent is alumni relations and annual giving. We've got folks in major and planned giving at 22 percent. All right. That's great. Thank you. All right. So let's jump in and let's take a look. So today the data that we'll be walking through comes from the Case Insights on Philanthropy Canada key findings report. This survey has been conducted since 2018. So this is the sixth year that we have conducted this survey. We have 42 participating institutions in FY23. And I want to say there was a decline in participation this year. We have I think we were closer to 50 in the prior year. We have heard from a lot of you that there was staff turnover, that there were just a lot of challenges in getting your data submitted. I just say all that to let you know that, you know, when we're looking at these trends, having consistency of participation makes a really huge difference. So you'll see that last bullet point on the screen shows that we had 24 institutions that participated across all six years. So when we look at trends and you'll see this throughout the presentation, the graphs, a lot of those graphs will say that there are 24 institutions included in that graph. And that's because we are trying to keep a consistent cohort when we look at trends. I also say that to keep in mind that 24 is a pretty small number. So when we look at these graphs, sometimes the swings could look really big. We try to use medians as much as possible to to try to smooth things out. But just keep in mind that some of the segments are pretty small. And then, of course, that's my plug to say, please, please, please participate and participate every year because it does give us a much stronger data set to work with. All right, so five key takeaways that we're going to walk through today. The first is that giving declined in 2023. That came after two years of increases. So that felt a little disappointing to see, but it is still higher than the lows that we experienced in 2020. And of course, I'm going to show you graphs on all of these. With that decline compared to last year, there was a decline across all sources except other organizations. The top purposes that were funded this year were student financial aid and research programs. A significant share of giving comes from a very small percentage of donors. This isn't something that changes much from year to year, but I did want to highlight it because we're collecting some great data around donors and the giving levels that they are contributing. And then we want to talk just a little bit about the importance of fundraising staff and maximizing efficiencies in your programs. All right, so let's talk about the first one, giving declined in 2023, but was higher than pandemic lows. All right, so this graph we're looking at, again, you'll notice that the N, the number of institutions in this graph, is 24. So this is that consistent cohort who gave us data every single year. We started collecting funds received in 2019, so we have just five years of data on that. And you can see where there were obviously some big increases in 2021 and 2022. And I know when we first got these graphs, I thought, oh no, it's come down in 2023. But, you know, we do know that last year there were some outlier donations, there were some really large, significant commitments. So you have to keep that in mind, it's going to be really variable over the years. But that dashed line that you see across the middle, that's the median of the five years, and this year is right at the median. So still above the lows of 2020, and still above 2019, which was, you know, really truly pre-pandemic. When we look at new funds committed, we can see a similar trend with at least between 2020 and 2023, where there was growth in 21 and 22, and then a drop off in 23. I'm going to pause for just a minute and just talk a little bit about these two different ways of counting, these two different ways of giving that we're looking at. So just a reminder that when we look at funds received, which is the graph I just showed you, we're looking at monies and property that are coming in during the year. So that's cash received, it's properties received, it's securities received, it's all the money that's come in during the year, pledge payments, all of it. When we're looking at new funds committed, we're looking more at some outright gifts are in here. So those donors that just spontaneously are giving you a $500 donation, that's going to show up in new funds committed. But when it comes to those larger commitments, we're actually counting five years of the value of pledges that are coming in brand new this year. So just to remember, these are two very different lenses of looking at giving, but sometimes we can see some pretty similar trends across these two different ways. What's nice about new funds committed is that it's really a more direct measure of the performance of your advancement team. Because it's the work that you're doing now, it's the work that your fundraisers are doing now, to get and secure those long-term commitments that are really setting up that future cash flow. So when we look at new funds committed, you can see that we did have two years of increases after that low point in 2020. And new funds committed has come down since then. Again, this is a consistent cohort of institutions. When we look on the right, we've broken down new funds committed into the four institution types that we ask you to categorize yourself in, according to McLean's. And then, of course, we have the colleges and institutes as the fourth category. What I want to point out here is if you look at the medical doctoral institutions, notice that big spike in 22. There were definitely some sizable commitments in the 2022 data. So, you know, again, this is at the median. You can see where that number has come down in 2023, but it's still an upward slope over the last six years. I also want to point out further down, where I've drawn a little circle there, is look at that little spike up on the green line. That's colleges and institutes. That segment also had some big commitments in 2022. And again, similar to medical doctoral, while that has come down since 22, it's still much higher than it had been in prior years. All right. Something else that we've been trying to add to our reports is some calculations that make it a little easier to benchmark against each other. You know, often when we create these graphs and we look at grand totals, or even when we split apart this data into these four institution types, it kind of always looks like medical doctoral is doing the best because they're the biggest and they bring in the most money. So I just wanted to show this view that we've added to the report this year. It's looking at new funds committed on an enrollment level, so as a per student view. And I think what's interesting here is you start to see what your performance looks like at a more comparable across these different institutions. So medical doctoral, those institutions are still up there, right? They're still at the top. They're raising the most new funds committed per student. Again, see those spikes in 22 for both medical doctoral and colleges and institutes. But what I do want to point out is look at colleges and institutes. What is coming in on a per student basis? There's been some real progress there in the amounts that are being committed at that student level. So even with that spike in 22, which brought that line way up, and yes, it's come back down, but still some pretty strong numbers there. All right. So since we just sort of talked about overall giving and overall dollars coming in, I wanted to do a second poll here to get a sense of what your FY24 looks like. I know some of you are done or almost done with your fiscal year 24. So hopefully you have a pretty good sense of how things are going in terms of dollars and donors. So pick the one that makes the most sense to you. All right. I'm getting the question about if 44 schools participated, what's the breakdown by medical, doctoral, comprehensive, undergrad, and colleges? I'm going to answer that while you all are taking your poll. So I will say that when we are looking at the trend views, it's almost equally distributed. It's somewhere between 8 and 12 in each category, because that's a pretty small, that's only the 20, what did I say, 24 institutions? No, that's not right. Sorry. Of the 44, it's between 8 and 12 in each category. So some of them are pretty, pretty small numbers. So you've got to take it with a grain of salt when you look at these trends. Okay. All right. So poll number two, how are we doing? There we go. Okay. The largest 29% is flattened dollars, flattened donors. Okay. Okay. That wasn't what I was expecting to see, but okay. That's all right. That's not bad. Our second highest is, let's see, we've got 14% increase in dollars and donors and 14% saying flattened dollars, increase in donors. Interesting. All right. That's good to know. And there's another 14%, 14% decrease in dollars, flattened donors. Okay. So it's pretty mixed. It's pretty mixed across the group. Pretty mixed. Okay. All right. Thank you. That's very helpful. All right. So let's talk about giving by source. So which sources, which donors, which constituent types are making these donations? So I focused here on new funds committed, and we're looking at the total new funds committed by the source of the donation. So a couple of things to point out here, I know there's kind of a lot going on. You have to take a look at the legend and see what each color bar is. The first, the one source where there was an increase was other organizations. That is that dark blue and Navy line. You can see it had dipped down in 21 and is working its way back up in 23. For some of you, what could be in here are, you could have donor advised funds in here if you don't have the ability to break them out. I think that's where we've been putting them. If we don't have a breakout, you could see things like any kind of organizations where there's sort of a consolidation of giving, you know, whether it's a sororities or fraternities, or I know here in the U.S. like United Way and things like that, those kinds of organizations fall into that category. A couple other things, but you'll see declines in all of the other categories, right? Trusts and foundations is down, corporations is down, alumni is down. A couple other metrics I just wanted to add here is that trusts and foundations do provide the bulk or the majority of the funds that are committed. They represent 35% of new funds committed. Alumni are accounting for 19% of new funds committed. They do make up 50% of the donors, however, so there is a large volume there of alumni, but they tend to be giving at a little bit lower level, so they're not quite making up as much in terms of the giving. All right, another question we ask is what purposes is the money designated to? So, those commitments that are coming in, how is that money being designated, and for what purposes? So, I've got two graphs here. If you want to take a look at the one on the left first, here we're looking at, this is a median new funds committed by how it's designated. I highlighted the things I want you to pay attention to because I realize there's a lot of lines on this graph. So, if you look at the very top line, we're looking at that dark orange line. That is restricted for student financial aid, and, you know, we really saw during the pandemic and in that first year following the pandemic that support for student financial aid went up quite a bit. We saw the same thing here in the U.S. You know, people really stepped up and provided that financial aid. So, the commitments coming in to that area have gone down from that peak in 21, but still, it is still the highest, you know, it makes up the most. It's the biggest amount of new funds committed when we look at all these different purposes. The second line to look at is that middle kind of blue line that I've highlighted there, where you see that big spike up from 21 to 22. That is restricted for research programs and partnerships. So, we saw a real surge in giving their post-pandemic. So, those guests that sort of, those commitments that sort of went away during the pandemic, I'm sure as, you know, as economies stabilized, you know, some of that funding is starting to come back up. And again, down a little bit this year, but still way above what it had been in the past. And then the last one I just wanted to point out is the darkest blue line that just shows that restricted for other purposes has gone up this year. Okay. And that's, when I say other purpose, I mean not research and not capital. So, that's basically any other restricted purpose. Well, and student financial aid, which we talked about. Okay. So, anything, any category other than the ones that we've covered. I do want to point out on the right, the graph on the right, however, that, you know, those research programs and partnerships primarily affect comprehensive and medical doctoral institutions. No surprise there. There's a little bit there in primarily undergraduate and a tiny little sliver in colleges and institutes. Okay. So, that affects a little bit how we interpret some of these trends and some of this data. So, think about the cohort that you're in, think about the institution type that you fall in, and keep that in mind. All right. Now, we're going to talk about the amounts that donors are giving. So, the share of giving based on the size of the donations or the size of the commitments. So, this first graph, we're looking at funds received by gift bands. And you'll see on the left are donors, and on the right are the dollars coming in. So, this is the percentage of donors and the percentage of funds received based on these gift bands. And you can see in the legend there, the lowest is $1 to $999. This is all Canadian dollars, by the way. And you can see all the way up to a million plus. This is really what we see pretty much everywhere, right? A very, very small percentage of donors are making the largest donations. So, one stat here is that if you look just at donors that are giving $25,000 or more, that's less than 2.6% of donors are giving at that level, but they are contributing 90% of the total funds received. I did want to add in that one third of the donors contributing a million or more were Trusts and Foundations. That's not on this graph. I pulled that from the report. 15% contributing that one million plus were alumni. And Nick, I'm going to tease up something I think Nick's going to show. Nick, you're going to show some gift band changes, right? Yeah, I see him nodding. All right. One other thing to look at in terms of large gifts or large commitments, this view is looking at New Funds Committed, and it's looking at the single largest, but not a bequest gift as a percentage of New Funds Committed. And I just want to point out for colleges and institutes and primarily undergraduate institutions, you can see 48% and 40.5% of New Funds Committed is coming from one single large commitment or gift in that year. So, that's a pretty high reliance on those large donations. Obviously, large donations are important. We want them. We want as many of them as we can get. But you also want to be thinking, do you have a nice, good, broad base of support at lower levels as well? Because when we do have challenging times when, I mean, gosh, it hasn't been that long since we've sort of come out of this pandemic, or when there's economic challenges, you really need that strong base of support at the bottom as well. So, if your percentages are particularly high, and you're really overly reliant on those very large gifts and commitments, that's something to pay attention to. Now, granted, you might have one extraordinary gift in one given year, and that percentage will be high that year. So, you really need to look at it over time. All right, and then we're going to talk just a little bit here about fundraising staff and maximizing efficiencies of your program. So, when we look here, this is a, you can see there's a correlation. There's a strong relationship between new funds committed and the number of FTE fundraising staff. Something I want to point out on this graph that might not be apparent is that the axis at the bottom, the x-axis that says FTE fundraising staff, that is fundraising staff per student, okay? Because I know, I don't know, I looked at it and I was like, 2.5? Surely there's more than 2.5 staff. It's because we're dividing it by the number of students. And like the graph I showed earlier, that's to allow us to make a better comparison across all these institution types that are different sizes. And you can see, for the most part, those institutions that do have more staff are raising more money. Now, granted, this is not, this, you know, correlation is not causation, but you can see it is one of the factors that can affect performance. And you can see how folks are, you know, performing. You've got some, obviously some medical doctoral institutions are up there with a lot of money coming in and, you know, kind of middle-level staffing if you look at this whole group. But you can also see smaller institutions, even like colleges and institutes, where, you know, they're bringing in 2 million in new funds committed with, you know, a much smaller staff size than maybe some other institutions. And this just leads to a discussion about how are you measuring your investment? How are you looking at your, you know, your expenditures, not just in staff, but in, you know, all of the things that are part of fundraising, your, you know, advancement services team and your systems and your mailings that go out. Here, we provided a table that looks at, this is 2023 data, looking at cost per dollar raised and return on investment. The cost per dollar raised here is based on all expenditures across all functional areas. The return on investment is looking at just the fundraising expenditures. Okay. And, you know, one thing that's interesting to note here, I'll, again, I'll highlight some of these colleges and institutes. Note the ROI down at the end, that 2.47 for colleges and institutes is the second highest return on investment. Medical doctoral is the highest at 3.93. So, you know, it isn't, it isn't just about the size of your institution. It's about how you are working with the resources that you have. I do wonder a little bit as institutions hit a certain mid-size, there is something about a smaller institution where you might have some more flexibility, whereas a more mid-size you might not have as much. But, you know, those are all things to consider as you're looking at this data. All right. So, I've got one more poll here. I want, I'm curious, what keeps you up at night? As you're managing your programs, what are the things that are on your mind that you're most worried about that you feel like you're having to put all your attention on? I'd love to hear, love to hear from you all. I know we just did this poll, we just did this poll a couple of weeks ago with our U.S. webinar, and I'm curious if you all have some of the same concerns. All right. We'll give it another second here. Let us know what's on your mind. All right. Here we go. Yeah. There we go. 46% declining counts of alumni donors. Yes. I know this one definitely was high in our U.S. poll as well. 31% keeping up with expectations of campus leadership. Yep. What else do we have here? And then we've got sort of equally distributed finding and retaining talent, future of the campaign, data governance. Okay. But the two big ones, campus, you know, we've got a lot of students who are looking at, you know, okay. But the two big ones, campus, keeping up with expectations of campus leadership and declining counts of alumni donors. You are not alone. Those come up in other polls as well. Great. Thank you. All right. All right. And before I hand it over to Nick, you know, I just want to sum up a little bit, some things to think about as you're looking at this data and as you're looking at your own data. You know, you want to look, first of all, look at your own internal benchmarks. What has changed year over year? All right. You know, take a look at what's going up, what's going down. Where is there an area of opportunity? Where is there an area that you're doing fantastic? Can you repeat that or replicate that in some other part of your program? Right. So look at your own data year over year. Then take a look at the comparison data. So look at those key performance indicators and trends compared to your peers. Nick's going to talk to you about some of the ways you can do that with Case Insights. You know, see where you are compared to your peers. Are you falling behind? Are you ahead? And keep in mind, you know, think about what your strategy is because obviously we all we want to celebrate the wins and we want to fix things that aren't working properly. But remember that sometimes seeing a number go down isn't necessarily a bad thing. It might be it's just a reflection of your strategy. Maybe you purposefully have changed the way you're contacting a particular group of your donors and you would expect to see some decline. So it's really, really important as you look at all of this data that you add that layer of understanding your own strategy and how it's going to affect those numbers. All right. So I'm going to hand it over to Nick and Nick, you can just let me know when you need me to change the slides. OK, brilliant. Thank you for outlining all of those wonderful things. I think we all understand how important it is to benchmark, not just against ourselves and where we have been over time, but then other institutions as well. Really what I'm going to talk about today is how CASE can help you do that. We're all busy, we're all short on staff. Some of us, like Patrice, are spending all day in a new CRM and having to learn new technology. There's always something that's taking us away from that future strategic plan orientation. Sometimes it can be difficult to communicate that data into that strategic plan and have something really informed and really useful. This is where CASE comes in. We understand that you spent all of this time submitting the survey and you should get the most benefit out of it, even if you don't have the time to do that or the skills at your institution. Sometimes just data management and data wrangling in our CRMs takes a long time, so doing separate analysis on that can be even more time that we just don't have. Right here in front of you, you see two screenshots from our benchmarking reports that we generate for our institutions in Canada from the philanthropy survey. On the left are what are called our summary benchmarking reports. You may be familiar with these. These were sent out to your institutions or point of contact from the survey there. These were sent out last month, so if you don't have this or don't know what this is, please do reach out and contact us and we will get you this report. I think that this report is an amazing way to not only summarize your data, but then also check in on what other institutions from your reporting group and then also Canada as well have been doing over the last few years. It provides that extra context into the findings report where you can contextualize your institution and your performance against the things that you read in the findings report and those big numbers. With that on the left, what you can see here is we take five metrics and we compare you against what we call the case peers. In this instance, it will be Euler McLean Group, where we roll those up into a median aggregate in order to provide some quick and easy benchmarking for you. We do this, like I said, for five different key indicators, but then on the right, the strategic benchmarking reports, these are more of our service side where we discuss with you, who do you want to compare against? Do you want to compare against some that are in your McLean Group, some that are in your same province, or others that are similar to you in other ways, whether that's similar to you now or similar to what you want to be aspirational. In the strategic benchmarking reports, you get to pick the 10 peers that you benchmark against. Then I think the other key benefit here is that in the strategic report you can see each of the institution's responses. In my screenshot here, these two very similar charts for the commitment, you can see that on the left, there are only three lines for each of the groups, but on the right, we can get this almost spaghetti with every different line for all the different institutions. You get to see that in-line data and have a better perspective of that benchmarking. Other than that, the biggest thing from the strategic reports that I'll highlight today is the expansion. If the summary reports on the left only have five indicators, these strategic reports on the right have over 30. There's a lot more data. We're really trying to utilize all of that hard work that I mentioned that you submitted to the survey to have that back for you to use. Deborah, can you go to the next slide, please? Yeah. Thanks. I just want to highlight some of the three concepts we go through with the strategic benchmarking reports. Typically, we will not only have you select your peers, but then we will have multiple calls with you in which the first call may look like a data check, learn about what has been going on at your institution over the last few years. What are your plans for the next few years that are coming? Then we start to talk about how does the pipeline and your ROI fit into what the data is telling us and what the plans are. Then the second call of which is, of course, a presentation where we summarized all of that, write it up into an executive overview, and then give that presentation to your stakeholders. I just wanted to show you an example of what the information that we get into for the pipeline. For instance, here we saw, as Deborah mentioned, some gift band data. Rather than showing some fake institutions, we just went with today the different classifications of institutions. But all of our charts are interactive where you can hover to find more data, you can click on certain items. For instance, if you want to just focus in on the higher level major gifts here, we could look at those that are only a million dollars and up, and look at where does your institution benchmark against those other peers. We talk and start to dig out this idea of pipeline a lot throughout our reports, not to just say how has your pipeline served you to get to this point, but how do we create a sustainable pipeline going into the future? I'll get into that in a little bit about our alumni engagement data. I'm very happy that all of our alumni relations friends are here today because I think you'll find this really interesting. Next slide, please. As I mentioned, we talk a lot about strategy. I think the declining staff, not just in the last year, but over COVID as well has really hit everybody a lot. We need to talk a lot about how are we allocating our resources just to get through the day. If we are soliciting more alumni, but alumni donors are decreasing, where are we allocating our time and our strategy in order to reverse the trends that we're seeing compared to our other peers, but then also the trends that we are concerned about at our institution. Next slide, please. Lastly, the return on investment. This slide here, funny enough, looks very similar to what we saw before with the new funds committed and the fundraising staff. But again, because I love my alumni relations people, I want to discuss a little bit about that staffing component and that ROI of the human factor with our alumni donors. Here, instead, we're looking at the alumni donors and the alumni relations staff. While the chart only shows the latest data from 2023, this top line finding at the bottom refers to times, trends over time from 2019 to 2023, aggregating all of that data to get a bigger picture. Of course, it makes sense to me that institutions for each additional alumni relations staff member, they're going to probably have more alumni donors if they're a larger shop, if they have more streamlined or efficient or longer running strategies and techniques to engaging those alumni. But what we'd like to do in our strategic reports is take a step back, do some deeper analysis on those metrics and really dig into them and uncover them. For instance, here, while one additional alumni relations staff, FTE, is related to 66 more alumni donors, we took out all of those factors using regressions about institution size, campaign status that can impact, or even those solicitations. We're really trying to ground all of the data into reasonable metrics that make sense and get rid of some of those major outliers that Deborah referred to earlier. We do a lot of that standardization. Next slide, please. This is just summarizing everything I've just said. But our marketing and communications team put this together, and marketing and communications, a new staff category that we collected in 2023, an invaluable part of the team, even if they're not directly in our department. On the left, you see the summary benchmarking reports. This just summarizes what I've said. Then on the right, the strategic benchmarking reports, including those calls. But the new thing we've introduced this year are the benchmarking reports without calls. Well, I think the calls are incredibly valuable and I highly recommend them, especially if this is your first year ordering the benchmarking reports. We wanted to introduce this option without the calls for those of you who have been ordering for multiple years and give this to you at half the price. You can take this and you can use it, and later on without us, we trust you. Next slide. I went too far. There you go. My alumni relations folks. As I mentioned at the beginning, I also work on our alumni engagement survey. This is a global survey, so institutions in Canada can and do participate. But then we also have that same benchmarking aspect that I was going over before for the philanthropy survey with the alumni engagement. We really try and dig these together and I find that institutions who order both the alumni engagement reports and their philanthropy reports, get that idea of the pipeline. How are we engaging these alumni early on and in easier ways and moving them along the pipeline of alumni engagement and eventually into donors? Next slide, please. All right. I'm sorry. I just wanted to mention as well, because I don't know if it's on this slide, but our alumni engagement cohort, if you're not entirely sure how to use the alumni engagement data, because this is a little bit nascent, the alumni engagement survey has only been running for about five years. We do also have our alumni engagement cohort, which essentially is a group of about 15 institutions who all come into the room together, talk about the data, talk about the strategies, and talk about how do we engage our alumni both in an ethical way, as well as in a sustainable way. This year, it will be in June in the wonderful US state of Colorado. Last year, we had a few Canadian institutions who participated, some of which are coming back. We would love to have that greater North American representation. That's all I'll say. Great. Thank you, Nick. Then in terms of what can you do next? If you haven't looked at the findings, please read the key findings. They're available on our website. That is a narrative report that we publish that goes through all those overall graphs that I showed earlier on. There's a lot more information in that report than we're able to show today. Definitely, please take a look at those findings. If you participated in the survey, as Nick mentioned, review your summary benchmarking report. If you haven't received it or someone else at your institution received it and you need to get more information on it, you can contact our Insight Solutions team to get more information. Then if you want to purchase the strategic report, take part in a cohort, bring someone from our team on-site for further training. We have a number of different solutions available, so that is also reaching out to our Case Insights team. If you would like some follow-up or if you'd like to hear from us about some of these next steps, just respond to that poll question that you see popping up. I do have one more slide after this, so hold tight because we're going to talk about the upcoming survey year before we wrap up. But definitely, let us know if you'd like to learn a little bit more about some of these reports from the case team. I'm going to give folks just a second to respond to that. Here we go. Now, we're at the end here. I did want to talk about the upcoming year of the philanthropy survey. There are a couple of things to know. One, the survey opens in June. That's when we open it every year. I don't have an exact date yet. The reason I don't have an exact date, it's usually middle of June, but we are rolling out a new survey platform for 2024. We're really excited about this. Those of you who've been doing this survey for a while, know that we moved it into Qualtrics at one point, and Qualtrics is just not that easy for this type of survey. It's not great for longitudinal studies. I know it's confusing for users because you're not sure when you're entering data, is it really saving it before you go to the next screen? Just know the new system that's coming is wonderful. It will be a system that you log into. You'll be able to enter data anytime during that open season that you want. It's going to be fantastic. There will be more details obviously coming soon. We're very, very deep in getting things set up now. Just be aware that that's coming. The survey itself is not undergoing any major changes as a result of this change. There shouldn't be some major impact to you. I think it'll just be a much easier system to use. There is one area, however, where there might be a slight definition change, and that relates to my first bullet point here on the global reporting standards. As I mentioned earlier, we specifically, we purposely created a digital version of the standards because we wanted to be able to provide updates. We knew even when we published that first global standards in 2021, we knew that we were going to have to provide some additional information within a couple of years. And here we are. So there are going to be some changes to the standards. Most of them are not giant changes. So this isn't going to be some massive overhaul. But I do highly recommend you attend the webinar that we're hosting next week. It's next Wednesday. It's going to be in two different time zones to accommodate lots of folks. And it is being recorded. So even if you can't attend that Wednesday, definitely sign up so that you can get the recording afterwards. One change that could affect the Canadian Philanthropy Survey this year, and I would love to hear from some of you. I know I don't want to go into a 20-minute conversation now, but we are looking at or we are, we have reviewed the new funds committed definition and our committee, we have a task force that worked on these updates. They're from all over, all over the globe. They are recommending and we're going to be changing the criteria for counting pledges. We in the past have restricted pledge counting to five years of the pledge value. So if a donor made a pledge that was going to be paid out over six years, we restricted you to only being able to count five years. And it was pretty complicated because you'd have to keep track of that extra year and report it later. So what we are doing now is we're actually eliminating that five-year requirement. I think, I hope, I suspect it will make it easier for you to provide this data. But if anyone is concerned about that change or thinks it's going to be a big hardship for you, please reach out to us, please reach out to me, let me know. We're trying to make some decisions now about whether we require that change in the Canadian Survey this year. And I think, I suspect, like I said, that I think it'll be a nice, easy change for people. You know, it opens in June, you have until September to submit it. So there's kind of plenty of time to adjust reports if you need to. But anyway, I welcome your feedback. And that is all I have for you all. I don't see any questions in the Q&A, but if anyone has any last questions they want to ask, please let us know. And otherwise, that is what I have for you today. So I'll give folks just a minute. Thank you so much for joining. I really appreciate it. Deborah, while people put in their comments, I just wanted to say a huge thank you to both you and Nick for all of this wealth of information you shared today. And be advised, your email will be coming in June to remind you that the survey is open. And we look forward to seeing next year's results. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you so much, everyone. Thank you, Danielle. We're very, very pleased to have you here today, too. All right. Well, thanks, everyone. I don't see any other questions coming in. Thank you for your time.

Canadian philanthropy

webinar

CASE

Deborah Trumbull

Nick Campisi

philanthropy survey data

fundraising trends

benchmarking reports

global reporting standards