out of my outlook. Hi everyone. Welcome to a new era for frontline fundraising and donor engagement. We're so pleased you could join us. Before we jump in, I just have a couple of very brief housekeeping notes. We are recording this webinar and we'll share that recording with all registrants after the events. For those of you who would like to follow along with the slides, they are also available for download in the same place that you found your link to join today. I will pop that link and instructions into the chat in just a moment. If you have questions, you can pop those into the chat or the Q&A box. And if we have time at the end, we're going to go ahead and take a few of those. And with that, and without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Kestrel and Dan to get us started. Thanks, Christy. And hello everybody on this fine Wednesday afternoon or morning, depending on where you are, or if you're watching this on the recording later, some other day in the future. I'm Kestrel Linder. It's great to have all of you with us today. To start us off while we give people the chance to flood into our room, we've put a QR code up on the screen. If you're interested in taking the gift officer personality quiz, it's just a few fun questions. And as a reward for answering those questions, you will learn whether you are the Oprah of outreach, the Einstein of strategy, the Taylor Swift of personalization, or the Mark Cuban of transformative opportunity. So I encourage you all, you can just scan that QR code and perhaps learn something about yourself based on your responses to a few fun questions about the way that you practice the art and the science of frontline fundraising. As I said a moment ago, my name is Kestrel Linder. If I don't know you, hello, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Give Campus. I'm very excited to be with you today together with someone who's become a friend, my co-host, a longtime partner of ours at Give Campus, Dan Fresa, Dan. Excellent, thanks Kestrel, and good to see all of you. And hopefully those of you that are watching after we record. Hi, my name is Dan Fresa. I'm the chief advancement officer here at the College of Charleston and the chief executive officer for the College of Charleston Foundation. I've been here for about a year and five months now. And before that was at the alma mater of the nation at the College of William & Mary for almost 12 years. Thanks, Dan. We've got 57 minutes with you today, and we have a lot of content that we're gonna try to pack in. So we're gonna get started. Our topic today, as you all know, if you're here for something else, you're in the wrong place. Our topic today is frontline fundraising. And some of the leaps forward that are happening right now in the practice of frontline fundraising, including some of the ways that technology and artificial intelligence are being used around our industry to streamline many of the day-to-day activities that fundraisers carry out so that they can build more pipeline, book more visits, and close more gifts. Before we dive into that, though, Dan, I thought it would be worthwhile to share with our audience today how you and I got to know one another and maybe give them a little additional context on the College of Charleston so they know where you're coming from and your particular perspective in your new role. Happy to do so. And I think there's probably two themes you'll learn from my background with Keschel. Partly is I think we're both entrepreneurial thinkers in some ways, but we also sort of clandestinely came together at a unique time. So at that point, over a decade ago, I was the associate vice president at the College of William & Mary. We were in the midst of going through a relaunch of a silent phase of a campaign. We had a new vice president, somebody who's become a mentor to me in many ways, Matthew Lambert, in how do we take a campaign that was historic in terms of the comprehensive approach to something more modern, which was a three-headed animal. We were focusing on growing alumni engagement, growing, obviously, our total dollars to a billion dollars, but tackling something that the industry, I think, long gave up on, alumni participation. At that time, our alumni participation rate was about 23%, and the national trend was far lower and declining over the last decade prior. And it was a pretty bold ambition for us to say that we were gonna try to get the 40% alumni giving by the year 2020. A lot of people thought we were crazy. Matthew and I consoled one another regularly, but we also put a pretty good sound plan into place. To achieve this goal, one of our largest strategies was to enlist an army of volunteers and to leverage them. And to do so, we knew we needed technology, specifically a new platform, that would make it easy for them to do so, and that they were easily able to accomplish what we were asking. And that's where our partnership with Kestrel came into play. And so I'll say the second way, the entrepreneurial side, with technology, you can't be afraid to learn and communicate your need. And I say this because that's how Kestrel and my paths crossed. Kestrel called for something different. And he caught me on a day where we were trying to solve a totally different problem, but he gave me 10 minutes and I gave him a next hour, and we talked about how we could solve a problem together using technology, and the rest is history. What happened afterwards was the development of a platform, and I'll say this today regularly, while Kestrel and I developed this solution together and give campus determined and ultimately unveiled this product, there were multiple products on the landscape that you could use. Just like today, what we're talking about, there are multiple products that exist. This was one that worked for us. But we were able to double the number of active volunteers by developing strong technology. It dramatically increased the volume of outreach and the volunteers carried out. And what this proved to me was the value of both efficiency and effectiveness. And I want you to remember those two words today because I use them regularly, and I'll use them regularly for this. You'll hear it from me. It paved the way for a more efficient way for us to manage volunteers, but more importantly, it provided a more efficient way for our volunteers to operate and do the work that we asked them to do. This both proved and provided effective results. It also provided an opportunity for them to have more enjoyment in the work that they were doing. When we look at all together what we accomplished, over a final five years of our campaign, we had an average of more than 900 volunteers under management annually. And they personally engaged 82% of our entire alumni base. And the alumni who were engaged by our volunteers were more than twice the likely to make a gift. So not only did we create an army of volunteers, we robustly increased our donor base and the strength of that pipeline. Thanks to this, we were able not only to achieve a billion dollar fundraising, but we also became the number one public university in alumni participation, I think it was in 2015. And that's still a metric that I think was held even to this day. Going from 23% to 30% just over a period of five years, which again, not only placed us number one publicly, but put us inside the top 20 of private universities across the country. One of the biggest outcomes and things that I learned in this experience, which I think informs a lot of what we're gonna talk about today, is that the right technology can play quite meaningful roles in improving our fundraising operations and results. Again, it provided efficiencies for not only us to engage and manage volunteers, but more importantly, for our volunteers to be more effective in the work that they were doing. We know that when we're willing to experiment and try new things in pursuit of ambitious goals, we're able to accomplish outcomes that sometimes surpass our expectations. Dan, I love that story for so many reasons, including what you said about the power of the right technology, but also because you underscored how in our industry, you can achieve things that seem wildly unlikely if you try new things like increasing the rate of alumni participation during a span of time when it was going down everywhere. After your 12 very successful record-breaking years at William & Mary, you moved a bit farther south to take the helm at College of Charleston about a year and a half ago. You're off to a fast start there. Your first year fully in seat was the most, correct me if I have this wrong, the most successful fundraising year in the college's history. But I know from our one-on-one conversations that you're just getting started. Can you tell the audience today, and this will really frame, I think, the rest of today's presentation, a bit more about the college and the growth opportunity that you see there? Absolutely. Partly when you inherit a 254-year-old university, we like to say we're the second oldest university in the South, you inherit a lot of good practices. You also inherit a donor base and a pipeline that is what it is. And so I was more than ecstatic by what we as a team accomplished this year. We raised nearly $27 million, which was about a 30% increase over the last year, and it is the single largest fundraising year in the school's history. But my team has heard me say this, Kestrel alluded to it, we need to be a 30, 40, and eventually a $50 million-a-year shop. Our president affectionately refers to us as the Gonzaga of the East, a single basketball powerhouse mid-major based in a liberal arts university in a place that's probably punching above its weight in many ways. And so hitting at 27 million this year, but focusing on a 30, 40, and then eventually a $50 million-a-year run means we have to grow the mentality that our team is going to be as effective and as efficient as possible. Our pipeline is squarely in our focus, and the cadence and the way we approach our work is going to get us from the 27 this year to ultimately that 30, 40, and 50. Yeah, no comment from me, by the way, on the basketball note you made, because I may or may not have selected College of Charleston to go very deep in the men's basketball tournament a few months ago and paid a dear price for that. But that aside, Dan, you reached out to me about a year ago now, you shared some of those big aspirations with me, you told me, I'm here at College of Charleston, we could be raising a lot more money, and you boiled it down, and I hope I don't oversimplify this, by saying that coming out of COVID, one of the very first things you felt you needed to do at College of Charleston, was simply start getting in front of more of your alumni. You didn't need to split the atom, you didn't need to cure a disease, you just needed to book more visits, pretty simple. And I was immediately struck by that, Dan. I know it's not the only thing that you are focused on and that you've been focused on since you arrived in Charleston, but can you say more for our audience about the opportunity you see, particularly in this area for your team and institution? Yeah, it actually is quite that simple. I think there are two programs that look differently in advancement. There are those that are a 90-10 or the 97-3 rule, where they're focusing on a much smaller portion of their pipeline to yield the larger fundraising totals. We're more of a 60-40, which means that we have to look and attract and engage a much larger percentage of our pipeline, so we do need more visits. Part of it is staffing. You need to have enough people, enough boots on the ground to engage enough individuals, but a lot of it also is how inefficient we may have been in the way we're approaching our work. And while not always the case, it was meaning that when I got here, we were seeing, I hate to say it, a meal-oriented approach to programming. Not that we were only having meals with visits, but we were focusing on three square visits a trip. I quickly began to set the tone for what weight of productive trips would look like, looking more at five visits per trip before you would actually go and make the trip and the balance of those trips both being in discovery and stewardship. So that might mean that you have some anchor visits, some portfolio-focused visits, but you also pick up some discovery or qualification. We began to discuss really big goals and what it would take to achieve them here, and this is what I think got the team's attention. We threw out there the number that we have to close 1,000 major gifts from 1,000 donors over the next several years. And that scared my staff quite a bit early on until they began to quantify it in a way that looked at, there's a pathway there. It's about X number of visits per Y number of months that yield a Z number of returns. And so the question became not, are we going to book more visits, but how are we going to book more visits because we had to reach that 1,000 donor, 1,000 major gift goal. And it didn't take long for the reflection in the program for us to figure out that it wasn't just as simple as that, but certainly our biggest solution would be to get more visits. And it looked at what's the difficulty in securing a visit, something that I think many universities focus on and also struggle with, one of which is the distraction of a gift officer. We put too many different responsibilities on our fundraisers' plates these days, but we also burden them with work that can be far more efficient. And others are due to either pipeline readiness or the reality that both the pipeline is too weak and the gift officer is too distracted. And to what Kestrel mentioned, we can only tackle some of these in certain doses. And one of which would be, how do we make this as far more efficient for our staff? For example, to plan a trip, a fundraiser has to do all of this manual work that exists today. They're copying and pasting between their email systems for a visit. They're juggling either a spreadsheet or their CRM. They're toggling through Google Maps. They're using their phone, their laptop. And then they've got to find a way to actually reliably track all of that work, even if it's a sound CRM, to make sure they're not duplicating visits or to make sure that they're not fatiguing their outreach. It's exhausting. And I want you to remember that and the importance of that today, because having a fatigued staff and a fatigued donor base is the recipe for failure. And so when we looked at this, and it's just the planning and booking of visits, but similar challenges arise when it comes to preparing for the visits themselves. So not just toggling between getting the visit, but then the preparation for it, looking at past contact reports, for example. It's all way too cumbersome and it's too time-consuming for a staff that 90% of their time should be focused on relationship management, making the visit, booking the visit, engaging the visit, following up from it. But more importantly, working with the donor to facilitate what their ultimate generous outcome should be. If I want my team to be in front of more donors, I knew that it would take us, we'd have to create an opportunity for them to be far easier, far more efficient. And it's something that we couldn't wait weeks, months, or years from. If I'm talking about a thousand major gifts closing over several years, just like a pipeline requires readiness, our staff also need that runway. And if we waited two years for a solution to make this more easy or more efficient, there's impossible to have the reality that we would actually close a thousand major gifts. And I want you to hold me to that and check in in several years. But ultimately that's why when Kestrel and I began the talk, I reached out and thought about, okay, our volunteer system 20 or 10 years ago was the same exact purpose. We were managing 200 volunteers. We had the aspiration to manage a thousand volunteers. Our volunteers that were currently being managed said it was too cumbersome. They were working off of spreadsheets. Our staff was working off of Google Docs or we were using archaic off-the-shelf products that allowed no flexibility or ability for a university to tailor or cater their needs. Same thing. We have a major gift team that now has a thousand number as their focus. And we also have a major gift team that says things are too cumbersome, too difficult. And our donor base is beginning to become fatigued as they're getting cross-referenced in outreaches from different gift officers over different periods of the same time. And so it made perfect sense to remind myself of what we did with the volunteer management system, the partnership with technology, and here's where we are today. Dan, I know it's rarely any consolation to hear that you're not alone, but over the last year, we've been collecting data from frontline fundraisers and we now have data from more than 2000 people in frontline roles. And what we've found is that the challenges you just described as facing your team are systemic across our whole industry. You talked about the challenge and the process of planning a trip and booking visits for a trip. We've found in our surveying and data collection that an average trip for a frontline fundraiser today is two and a half visits, which I think you talked about being at three and wanting to get to five, because I think we all know that two and a half just isn't enough for us to grow, certainly in the way that you're talking about and aspiring to grow your program at College of Charleston. We've also found that in terms of preparation, half of frontline fundraisers say that they only have time to read one or two contact reports before a visit. That's basically what they're able to make room for in terms of preparing for a face-to-face meeting or interaction with a donor or a prospect. I think we can all agree that's not ideal either. If we do all the hard work and spend all the time and energy to get the visit, let's make sure we find the time or make the time for ourselves to do the preparation for it. And last but certainly not least, when it comes to important things that we have to do in our profession after the meeting, we found that on average, and this is self-reported data, frontline fundraisers say that they take more than seven days on average to submit a contact report, most human beings, even the best of us have forgotten at least a salient detail or two from that meeting. The common refrain we hear from frontline fundraisers is that these sorts of stats are a function of them being faced continuously with really difficult trade-offs. They're being asked to do a lot. At many schools and institutions, they're being asked to do more with less than they've had perhaps in the past. And they have to choose. Do I take the time to be more personal with one donor or do I use that time to reach out to more than one donor? Do I write a thorough and detailed contact report or do I submit something pretty short and sweet but do it very quickly? These are the types, just two examples of the types of trade-offs that people in frontline roles face every single day leading to some of the stats that I shared. And I think some of the stories, Dan, the anecdotes that you've already highlighted. The good news, and this is turning to really the purpose of today's webinar, is that with the right technology and tools and systems applied in the right way, Dan and I are here to tell you that we think these are false trade-offs. And that's what we're gonna be spending the rest of our time today illustrating for everyone and sharing some of the stories from College of Charleston. We're gonna talk about ways to engage large numbers of donors in more direct and personalized manners, meaning no trade-off between your volume and the degree to which you're personalizing your work. We're gonna show and illustrate how you can be both detailed and fast. We're gonna show how you can build more pipeline, book more visits, and close more gifts. Dan, your team has already started. You're a change agent, and in the, I think you said year and five months that you've been at College of Charleston, you've been shaking things up together with a small and mighty team. Can you take a moment to talk about how you've been saying farewell to some of these false trade-offs and how it's going so far for you all? Yeah, absolutely. The progress we've made has been really exciting and I think encouraging. I actually like the Kestrel set of small but mighty team. I have represented both sides of the house in terms of the industry in my career. I was at a place that was resource abundant, that was pushing the limits of, I think, one of the largest advancement shops for a school at size in the country. And I'm here at the College of Charleston now, I think, in what's more of a normal shop, a shop that's got less than 60 members in their advancement operation, but still has a sizable alumni base of nearly 70,000 to work within. A year ago when I arrived here, one of the things that struck me being a more modest and normal shop is just how much manual work was being done. It would take roughly eight hours for a gift officer to send 50 emails that were personalized in terms of outreach. And I know from experience, and I'll discuss this more a little bit later with an antidote, but I believe in being personal. And I believe in being as extremely a personal to the more cultivated the relationship. And the more personal the relationship is, the more personalization is demanded. Yet discovery visits and qualification visits also require some level of personalization. And sometimes this presents a challenge for a gift officer to really look at. It's a game of numbers and tenacity. You have enough time in the day to engage enough individuals. And so when I first arrived and saw that it was taking almost a full day to engage 50 individuals to try to get to that five visits per trip, it became difficult. Today we're personalizing our outreach far more than before, and we can send personalized emails to 50 alumni in just one hour. And I can say that from experience, and I'll share an example of that later today. I can choose to keep some emails entirely personalized. I can also find ways to shop out to the machine ability to work. One example that I'll share quickly is in June, I was responding to one member of my portfolio's email in Richmond, Virginia. Then I said, I need to get there anyway and take a trip. Normally I would get to work the next day and schedule three or four hours just to pull the trip together. From the comfort of my couch, I sent out 42 emails inside of 15 minutes, all personalized enough, just stating that I'm going to be in Richmond between date A and date C and asking if there's any ability for a conversation. It also provided me the ability to follow up. So now that example, plus what my staff have done, we've reduced the time it's taken to provide outreach. We've removed that burden, that false trade-off of the staff is too busy planning for the trip they're planning for to think about the trip they've got to plan for a week or two later. And now we've reduced that time of outreach by almost 90%. Instead of eight hours, we're now less than an hour to provide the same amount of volume. This provides time to focus on the trip itself, which I think is critical to the work that we're doing. And? Surprise, surprise. What you've seen is the lovely 85% number. We saw an 85% increase in outreach from our gift officers this year, meaning that they had more time on their plate to reach out to individuals. That's why I say it's a numbers game. Even if you're the most hardest working gift officer, the smartest, the most analytical, the most seasoned, you can't combat that there's only eight hours in a single workday. And you also can't change the number of hours that our donors are awake and responding to email. So it's a numbers game. And so having 85% increase in outreach was critical for us. And it led to us having a substantial increase in the number of major gift conversations this year. We raised at the College of Charleston this year, the levels of activity at every gift, $1,000 and above. And we had our single largest principal gift year on record. And I think that came down to the cadence, our ability to be more engaged. It means that we were touching twice as many College of Charleston alumni as we were 12 months ago. And again, a numbers game. If you're trying to reach a thousand major gifts closed over a period of years, you got to find a way to most effectively and efficiently use those eight hours a day. And the result is that we're starting to book more visits. And those visits are going to book more gifts. And we are finding time to not only be prepared for those visits, but also have a larger runway for the next line of visits that come forward. Another trip or the following up strategically to the visit we're on. So a gift officer now is not consumed by one week of one visit. They can start a week by planning a visit, finish that visit as far as the preparation for it. And they can actually start on a Friday thinking about maybe 60 days later, I'm going back or where I'm going next. Hmm. Well, those are pretty awesome statistics and incredible progress in a short period of time. And what's probably most exciting from my perspective is that the fruit that this will yield actually is months and even years down the line, right? You're doing more outreach. It's more personalized, booking more visits. Those probably haven't even begun to produce even a fraction of the gifts toward that thousand major gift goal that you have in a material way, at least. Let's dive a little bit deeper now and show how you and your team are achieving that kind of progress. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna try to bucket planning and booking visits. Sort of the, you know, one of the early thing that you do, preparing for the visit once it's booked and it's about to happen. And then we're gonna talk last and certainly not least about following up on those visits. So the first area is to give a glimpse to our audience of today, what it looks like to conduct outreach in order to plan and book visits if you're a frontline fundraiser at College of Charleston. We commented earlier on the fact that an average trip today, according to survey responses from fundraisers themselves, includes 2.5 visits. Dan shared that an underlying reason for this is that doing the outreach, tracking your plans for a trip, that's tedious, that's time consuming. It requires a lot of cognitive load. And so we're just not doing it as well as we would like to, but there is a brighter future ahead. And in fact, that future is here today. Today, Dan, your team is using new technology that's specifically designed for frontline fundraising, which means it includes dedicated functionality for the day-to-day work that your fundraisers are doing, including things like planning trips. So rather than all of the manual back and forth and the copying and pasting between multiple tools and systems that you described earlier, someone at College of Charleston, a fundraiser at College of Charleston, can now see a map of all constituents of the college in a given geographic area. They can search and filter all of those constituents based on things like, how long has it been since this person's last visit? What's their donor status? What's their lifetime giving? How nearby might they be to someone I'm already meeting with during this trip? Which is important, especially if you're traveling to a large city where traveling two miles might actually be a 90-minute exercise in the middle of a rush hour. They can review the full CRM record of each donor or prospect in that defined search area, meeting those search criteria. And then with a click, they can generate and send, as you described earlier, a personalized email to each of them, inviting them to meet while you're in their area. And then when people respond to that invitation, your gift officer can track each response and add those who confirm a visit to an itinerary for the trip. That itinerary syncs with their calendar, so they're not copying and pasting things. They're doing all of this from a single location rather than jumping between different systems. Every single one of those jumps takes time, introduces the possibility of an error. Dan, trip planning I know is a pet area of focus for you. It's an area where over the years, you've had lots of ideas, you are very entrepreneurial, and you're thinking about what the future of this part of our profession looks like. Can you talk a little bit more about what's different for you and for your team today in this one area and why that's been so important and will be more important moving forward? Yeah, thanks, Kestrel. This goes back to my old annual giving days. For those that either use ReHER or Target Analytics, both of those platforms for an annual giving stance put the power of data and efficiency in the hands of the annual giving professional. I watched and I also experienced how you could access information that used to take weeks or days because you had to wait for somebody to pull a data set. Then they had to analyze it for you. You were able to do all of this on your own with the effectiveness of sound technology. So for me, trip planning is an example of that because that provided more efficiency for annual giving professional to actually do the work they need to do. And we watched our participation increase at two different universities because of that. Here, trip planning is no different with our gift officers. Back to that burden we talked about, as I alluded to earlier, I speak from experience that one of the things that I think can be fatiguing on preparing a trip is that it's so exhausting just to even get to the point of asking for the visit. And so the Richmond from my couch example I shared, now that Kestrel showed a little bit under the hood, this is what happened. I received the email. I immediately went and looked at a map feature. I was able to look at pipelines both under assignment and not. And I could put together the 50 or so people that I thought would be likely for me to get in front of. And I sent an email out. And again, email took 15 minutes to craft for all of them. The backend research took 15 minutes. And within 30 minutes, I had my first stage of a trip. What's different today is exactly that. We can find and reach out to more people efficiently. I can send a personalized email more effectively. I can build an itinerary more readily. And it's all in one place. And that's keeping the ability not just to be fatigued, but also synergy that we're able to do all this while our mind is thinking about the purpose, before the mind is confronted with four other problems you've got to solve. And I would say for the chief advancement officers on the call, our principal gift fundraisers, those managing school and units where you've got those competing priorities, that's one of our biggest catalysts for challenge is that you end up with, you've got your focus, and then you're distracted not just by additional work, but by competing priorities. So finding and securing those visits earlier is helpful. More importantly, I'm more focused on the work, I'm less fatigued, and I'm more energized to do it again. Dan, I love the emphasis you place on the mental load, the mental exhaustion, maybe even the physical fatigue that a lot of fundraisers face trying to do this work and do it really well. In part, because if you're tired from just doing the outreach and trying to plan the trip and book the visits, the likelihood that you're gonna be on your A-game when you're on the trip and when you're actually having the visits and the meetings I think we can all acknowledge gonna be lower. So the next area where I wanna just spend a few minutes touching on is some of those challenges, some of those trade-offs that fundraisers face when it comes to finding the time and as Dan's underscored, the energy to prepare for their visits. Being less exhausted at the start is definitely helpful. Having more time is definitely helpful, but we still will have lots of other competing demands. And from my perspective, there's really two things that frontline fundraisers need to do well for a visit to be productive and therefore for a trip to be productive and worth the time and the investment of going on a trip. The first is to learn about the constituent, especially if it's somebody new to you or new to your portfolio, understanding who are they and what is the history of their relationship and their past interactions, if any, with the school. The second is to find the time and the energy to design a good, a thoughtful strategy for the visit. What's my objective? How am I going to achieve that objective? What topics should I raise? What questions should I ask in order to surface valuable information about this person, including information about their values, their philanthropic interests, and where maybe those align with our mission and some of the fundraising priorities that we have named at this current time or might have in the future. Doing those two things takes time, and often that stuff gets crowded out by all of the other requirements of the job. And this is another area where, Dan, you and your team are using new technology to get some help and to do this better. One thing that you're doing at College of Charleston, and that I know is front of mind of a lot of people across the industry, is you're leveraging artificial intelligence to generate concise, up-to-date summaries of every constituent in your database. Those summaries are synthesizing every past interaction, every historic contact report, the donor's full giving history, and all of the other data about them in the CRM to provide the gift officer with a baseline understanding of who is this person and what is their relationship with the institution. And this information is being surfaced in real time in a matter of seconds, saving fundraisers from either having to spend hours reading past contact reports and or the exhaustion that that activity might provide, just the tiredness of doing that. You might not have that time, even if you do, if you have to read 72 contact reports written by 12 different people over the last 15 years, you're gonna be tired after doing that. So we wanna save fundraisers and package this together for them. The other thing is that artificial intelligence can be used to provide gift officers with a suggested objective for every meeting and a prioritized list of information to share and questions to ask during the meeting. If you're meeting a donor for the first time, that donor's a monthly donor to the music department, you might wanna ask them about their passion for music or maybe their involvement in a student group related to music. If you're meeting with an alum who received a scholarship, you might wanna consider asking them if they ever met with their scholarship donor, and if so, how did that experience influence the way that they think about scholarships and about philanthropy? These suggestions are designed to do the things that frontline fundraisers do very well when they have the time and energy, just to make sure that even if you don't have enough time or don't have a full tank of gas, you're able to be prepared for every single meeting, especially given the work that you've done to get that meeting in the first place. Dan, this audience now knows you're big on using technology to find efficiencies. What's your perspective in these two areas on using artificial intelligence specifically to help gift officers prepare? Yeah, not to beat the preferable horse, but first is no one likes preparing for a meeting in the back of an Uber because they're still planning for the next meeting. And so anytime you get a headstart is helpful. And the second is, well, folks get a little bit afraid of the idea of artificial intelligence thinking for the human. It's important to note that the human element will still and always will and ought to always still exist. This is all about providing a headstart. Or some have heard this, it's a push not pull environment. It's allowing our gift officers to have that headstart that's necessary to be far more ready and prepared, but strategic. Sometimes that's providing a headstart into thinking deeper than otherwise they may would have, or it might give them the headstart to actually tackle a problem or a new opportunity or direction they would not have had the time to do. So for me, it keeps coming back to efficiency for me. Yeah, thanks, Dan. I know there's probably lots of folks listening in, watching today who are thinking about maybe trying artificial intelligence. We are gonna try to have a few minutes for Q&A at the end. If you do have questions as we go along, please either drop them in the chat or drop them in the Q&A box on Zoom, and we will do our best to address any of those questions as we go, or with a few dedicated minutes at the end of today's session. I know AI is a hot one. We definitely wanted to call it out and hit on it in this area as one of several areas where Dan and his team are already leveraging it in some pretty exciting and innovative ways. The third area that we wanna touch on today, now that our gift officers are booking more visits, now that they're showing up to every visit more prepared, we wanna talk about after the meeting. Dan, I've heard a lot of frontline fundraisers joke that the reason they got into fundraising was because they were passionate about writing contact reports. What's your perspective on what I will refer to as a very important and very unloved part of the job? I'd put contact reports up there with having minor dental surgery, and I'm a bit of a research nerd myself. I actually do enjoy them, but the reality is nobody enjoys them because while they're helpful, they get in the way of what's more important, either following up with the visit, securing the gift, or thinking about the next. They're a lot of work, but yet they are super important to the university, and they have the ability to create a record of interaction, especially as relationships grow beyond multiple fundraisers. And in a world where the average fundraiser is in their role for less than three years, in some instances, it's important that we cultivate these relationships with our donors now and record interactions so that those relationships remain undaunted over a period of years, because their lifespan with the university is going to certainly supersede that of their gift officer, even their chief advancement officer. This allows the donor to be seen and heard, even if they're assigned multiple relationships over the course of their partnership. But I will say the struggle is real, it was real. In life, we repeat experiences which we enjoy or find satisfaction in, that's just the nature. Prior approaches created fatigue to the way gift officers were and resulted in the work that they were doing, resulted in reduced energy over time. If you're not enjoying that work and that energy is reduced, it's gonna make it more cumbersome in the future. Maybe not the very next trip, but it eventually will catch up with the gift officer. I can say from personal experience at the end of a fiscal year, my tank is far lower than it was at the beginning of the fiscal year and I know it impacts work. But from planning visits to preparing to the cringeworthy follow-ups, I believe that the efficiency that we're creating is creating less fatigue and it's also therefore enhancing the effectiveness, which is therefore developing a higher sense of energy with our staff. I can say from that Richmond from the couch example, I was already thinking about my next visit, my next trip in a totally different region because I was excited by how less energy it took to actually tackle, prepare and be present for that trip so that I was ready to go ahead and do it the second time. That's awesome. And Dan, one thing I wanna underscore that you hit on there is this idea that the contact report, as much as it is a tough part of the job, it's really important as stewards of our institutions that we are creating a detailed and thorough record of the interactions and the conversations that we're having with donors and prospects because even if you're capable as an individual of keeping all of that information in your head while you're managing a relationship and building a relationship with somebody, at some point, someone else is going to take over accountability and responsibility for building and continuing to cultivate that relationship. And if all they have is a dozen contact reports that say, had lunch with Dan, great talk, and we've all read contact reports, but that's about all it says, we're doing a disservice to the institution and to the furtherance of the institution's mission. So I think that's a really important one. And one of the reasons why I personally get very excited about making this part of the job much easier to do well here's the experience of following up after a meeting and what that looks like for frontline fundraisers today at College of Charleston. They can get into their Uber or their Lyft and they can just start typing or dictating their raw notes and reflections from the meeting while they're still on the go. Those notes don't need to be polished. They don't need to be in full, grammatically correct sentences. They don't even need to be ordered in any sort of chronological or structured sense. The gift officer can just focus on downloading, getting out of their head, all the things that they remember from the meeting, from the discussion, including any ideas they have for what they should do next. And then Dan's team relies on technology to do the rest. Artificial intelligence, this is another place where College of Charleston is using AI. Artificial intelligence takes those raw notes from the fundraiser and transforms them into a polished contact report that is structured to match the college's preferred contact report format. It highlights the most pertinent takeaways from the meeting as well as any next steps that the gift officer called out. And it turns all of that into full, grammatically correct sentences, the type of poetry and prose that you would be proud to show off and have people five, 10, 30 years from now reading as a report that you wrote. One thing, Kestrel, just for the fundraisers to hear the importance of, having a framed way to document contacts is critical. And I think it's something that our industry is just now beginning to think, and I think we'll all appreciate a decade for now because how many of us have actually read past contact reports? I bet you there's far few hands that would ever raise their hands. But those that have, it's sort of a chronological discovery of the way different minds work. Now, I'm happy to say that when I'm gone 20 years from now, the next 20 year of contact reports will have some consistency in the way we're capturing what information, framing it, and what our next steps are. Yeah, thanks, Dan. The next thing that happens for Dan and his team, and this is another area where artificial intelligence is being leveraged, is artificial intelligence takes that contact report and the other context it has on the meeting that occurred, and it generates a suggested set of follow-up tasks for the frontline fundraiser. Those include anything that the contact, sorry, that the gift officer specifically called out in the contact report. So if you dictate, I should follow up in two weeks on XYZ subject, AI will turn that into a task for you. It also intelligently generates other suggestions based on the broader context of your engagement and relationship with that donor, and puts them in a system where you can easily track them together with everything else that you're doing. Finally, and this is maybe if the contact report is everybody's favorite application of artificial intelligence, this is definitely a close second place, AI drafts a follow-up email for you. This follow-up email that's drafted by a machine, it's not perfect, but it's reliably 90% of what you probably wanna say, and it gets generated for you in an instant, saving you time, saving you the mental sort of load of thinking about and needing to figure out what am I gonna say? It says, here's probably 90% of what you want and should say. You can edit it, personalize it a little bit more, make it your own before sending it to the donor, enabling you and empowering you as a frontline fundraiser to be much more timely, not only with your contact report, but with the follow-up that you send to a donor. Because I can tell you as someone who gets visited from time to time by a frontline fundraiser, the difference between hearing the next day and the next week is a really meaningful difference when somebody thanks and follows up with you that quickly. And that's the win for me, Kestrel, because I think everybody can at least acknowledge this. The first five minutes it takes staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank screen, figuring out what I wanna write, how I wanna frame it, sometimes gets in the way of how quickly you actually could accomplish the task. And so what I have found helpful is we're able to get that headstart. We're already there, we've missed that blank time, and now we're just editing and making it sound more like us. Yeah, thanks, Dan. So those are a few examples, just a few, of how technology can help streamline some of the day-to-day work of frontline fundraisers like Dan and his ambitious team at College of Charleston. I'm sure everybody listening and watching with us today is thinking about other areas. There are indeed many more areas where we can improve, where technology can help us. Dan and I firmly believe, as we said earlier, in rejecting what we called false trade-offs in service of building more pipeline, booking more visits, and closing more gifts. Some of the early progress, Dan, that you and your team are seeing certainly is evidence of that. And I wanna thank Dan for joining me today as my co-host. We do have a few minutes for Q&A. I think some folks have popped a couple of questions in the Q&A box or in the chat. Please, if you have other questions, type them in, enter them in now. We'll spend the next seven or eight minutes answering your questions. I will kick us off, though, with a question maybe that'll kind of put a bit of a Dan Frese bow on the last 40, 45 minutes or so. Dan, I think based on some of the comments I'm seeing in the chat, people are kind of eyes wide open. Wow, like, this is pretty cool. I saw somebody comment that this was kind of like a therapy session, hearing us talk about some of the common challenges that are, and struggles that frontline fundraisers face. To start off Q&A, Dan, what best practices would you recommend for an ambitious frontline fundraiser or leader of frontline fundraisers who's thinking about ways to change the way that they work, invent new ways of doing things, try new things, maybe even leveraging new technology? Yeah, I would say first, embrace discomfort and seek to understand it. I'll use an athletic reference here, but if you choose any sport that existed 25 years ago in 2000, you'll find today that 25 years later, that even finely tuned athletes have found ways to embrace new technology, understand how to leverage it to the fullest extent, all for elevating their game. And it's no different in advancement. Embrace the discomfort, seek to understand it. I think once you get to that part, you'd find yourself being far more open to what to do with it. Yeah, good. All right, let's take some audience questions. Christy, I saw you pop back into the video. I did. If you wanna help facilitate, that would be great. Yeah, we have a few really good questions. Just for clarification, because there were a few questions about what CRM you're using and how the AI sort of integrates with that. If you could just touch on that briefly, how the systems all sort of work together and which CRM you're using. Yeah, so we're using Blackboard, Razor's Edge, or NXT. I know another university that is partnering is on CRM. And Kestrel, remind me, I think if I'm correct, this type of technology, it's less about the database you're using. It's understanding the object, the fields, and ultimately writing a sound integration plan with whatever you develop. Yeah, that's right. So some of the things that we talked about today, which again, it is not a comprehensive survey of everything you can do, but is a combination of whichever underlying CRM or database you have. And in Dan and his team's case, that's Razor's Edge and NXT with a frontline fundraising platform at Give Campus. And those two systems sync so that all of the data from the CRM is synced into Give Campus where frontline fundraisers can use it for purposes like planning trips, like conducting outreach, like doing their own research, like taking advantage of some of those artificial intelligence features and capabilities to synthesize donor records, to draft emails, to draft followup, to get suggestions on meeting strategies. So it's really the intersection of those two things. But the frontline fundraiser capabilities that we touched on today and highlighted today are totally CRM agnostic. Perfect. Someone else has a question I think probably is on a lot of people's minds as they navigate AI, which is how are you using these AI tools and keeping this constituent data and personal information secure? Hmm. Yeah, that's a very important question. And we thought someone would ask a question like that. So we actually, after our thank you slide, we actually have a bonus slide here. And Dan, I'll ask you to share your perspective as well, speaking for College of Charleston. But at Give Campus, you know, as we're leveraging artificial intelligence for a variety of purposes, including a lot of what we talked about today in partnership with Dan and his team, we're trying to keep three core principles in mind. The first is about enhancing the humanity in frontline fundraising, making sure that we're not turning into robots or relying, overly relying on robots and machines to do things for us. Another is about being open, being curious and being cautious because artificial intelligence is very rapidly evolving. And third, certainly not least important, is to keep the security, the confidentiality of donor data at the front of our minds at all times. So we practice a number of tactical things very intentionally at Give Campus with respect to how the data is stored, how it's transmitted and the rules by which it can be, or in most cases cannot be accessed or leveraged or stored by any other third parties as part of this process, to make sure that we are taking the most conservative approach possible that still enables some of the magical things that Dan and his team are taking advantage of. Yeah, I'll add two quick things. One, this concern has existed with every piece of technology that's evolved over the last 20 years I've been in the industry. And I'll even go back to when Castro and I first crossed paths around the volunteer management system, the real fear of not just securing 900 to 1,000 volunteers was actually more so 900 to 1,000 volunteers having access to some semblance of our database to do the work we needed them to do. And so I hate to be overly simplistic that these things work themselves out, but I think we've gone through these barriers so many times that we all understand what's at risk. And I think we're asking the right questions or working through it. The second piece is, I had an interview with a journalist this morning about a different AI product that we're working on or a project we're working on. And I reminded them something very simplistic with my daughter. She reads, choose your own direction books. And ultimately the publisher determines what that story is, but the reader has the ability still to interact within it. Much of what we're doing with AI in our industry right now is predetermined by the technology. It's not open living AI in a sense that they're making their own decisions and they're choosing. And it's still up to us in terms of the human element to review and proof. And so you heard Kestrel say this, I said it multiple times. To me, it's about a headstart. It's about getting us that advantage to have less time with our wheels and gears spinning and more time doing something with something that was output. So we're not creating a contact report or an email with trust of AI. AI is giving us a headstart to review it, to start it and then to actually finish it, but not necessarily trusting it entirely in its direction. Right, perfect. A few people asked specifically about the program or platform. And I just wanna confirm Kestrel for you and Dan that this is all being done through the Give Campus platform? Correct, that's correct, yep. All right. Someone asked sort of a technical question about the map capability. Does it show all constituents in the area or prospects in the area? And if it shows all constituents in the area, are fundraisers reaching out to constituents who have not been vetted as a major gift prospect yet? Yes, this is one as a fundraiser, I definitely wanna tackle because it's all of that. And the importance is the user has the ability to filter what they want. And so for instance, that Richmond from my couch example, I first started with my own portfolio. As a chief advancement officer, my portfolio is not the largest and it is far sporadic. It's not central in one area. So I'm often dipping into portfolios of my staff or being a good behavioral examples. I'm also qualifying and I'm discovering prospects. So I use that map first on myself, but then I could filter to all constituents under assignment and I was able to look at when their last visit was, when their last gift was, what their cumulative. And so I could refine my search ultimately down to I got to my qualification aspect. It became an hourglass because then I widened it again and I was looking for folks that were not assigned, that had not been visited, but maybe had some propensity to give, had a high wealth rating. And so it allows you to look at all of those things within the parameters and that made it incredibly helpful. Something that 15 years ago would have required me to put a request into my data team just for me to think about a trip 30 or 40 days out. Yeah, and the only thing I'll add to that, we focused a lot of the examples today on what I'll call sort of traditional major gift officer work. The capabilities that we highlighted are all, are designed for any type of frontline fundraiser, whether that's a, so that could be a digital gift officer or an annual giving officer who would want to be doing much more of what I'll call prospecting activity into a larger population of people. We wanna make sure that's just as easy and can be done in just as efficient and a personalized manner as Dan trying to find, probably folks with higher capacity, maybe folks who are assigned and to the question asker's point, have been vetted as a strong major gift prospect. We're trying to serve that full spectrum of need. Perfect. That Richmond example, I quantified this while we were going through it. I think it took me less than three total hours to manage that trip from the mining, the mapping, the email, the managing itinerary, and then the followup, which is something that I think would have been unfathomable to me a year ago. That actually, and we're almost out of time, but that leads sort of naturally into one of the last questions we haven't gotten to yet, which is someone wanted you to elaborate a little bit on how you did the 50 personalized emails in an hour and how it's, so if you can just. So it actually works quite well with the mapping piece. So for instance, you have the ability in the system to plan your itinerary. So I had my anchor visits, folks that I knew that were in my portfolio. One of them was the individual that sent me the email that prompted everything. I sent them personal notes through the system. They, I didn't use a template. Everybody else I was able, because I didn't have a relationship with them. I was able to use a template that was created that basically said, and I was able to doctorate some, I'll be in Richmond between this date and this date. I don't have a clear calendar yet, but I'm looking for interest if you're willing to have a conversation about your alma mater. And I sent it off. Then I was able to follow back up with that same group, not having to reinvent the wheel. And I did this over three iterations and I ended up getting, I think, 16 responses from cold prospects that were unassigned to have a very fruitful three-day trip. And so using a template, using our system feature and having it all tracked in one hub made it incredibly easy for me to do so, rather than going from my Outlook back to my CRM. Perfect. I think we are out of time for questions. Kestrel, do you have any final words you wanna end us with? No, just a thank you to everyone for joining us today. We hope you'll learn more about how technology can and is reshaping the practice of frontline fundraising. If you'd like to learn more, I'm kestrel at givecampus.com. I won't give out Dan's email address without his permission. There's also a QR code on the screen that you can scan to learn more and get in touch. Dan, thanks for co-hosting with me, sharing your wisdom and your stories. I look forward to hearing about many more record-breaking years at College of Charleston in the future, no pressure. And we will have to come back in two years or three years from now and do a webinar on your 1,000 major gifts and check in on that. Thanks so much, everybody. And thank you, especially Dan. Take care. Thank you, everyone.

AI

fundraising

College of Charleston

frontline fundraisers

Give Campus

donor data security

contact reports

trip planning

personalized outreach

fundraising success