Welcome, everyone. The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is pleased to present this online webinar. Best practices in managing and stewarding Donor Funds. My name is Anne Weller and it's my pleasure to introduce our speaker today. Aaron Rouse is the director of Fund Stewardship and Management at the University of Nebraska Foundation. Aaron is responsible for all fund management and stewardship activities for UN s 10,000 plus active funds. This includes establishing and maintaining fund coding guidelines, serving as campus liaison for fund management inquiries, providing various reporting services to campus partners and donors on the status of UN FS, donor funds and management of all internal fund related processes and controls. In addition to supporting hundreds of campus partners across the university system, Erin also works closely with a large number of foundation teams, including accounting and finance development, General Counsel, Advancement Services, Foundation Relations, marketing, communications and donor relations. Welcome, Aaron. Thank you, Ann, and greetings, case colleagues, and welcome to this CASE webinar on best practices and managing and stewarding donor funds. During our time together, I look forward to sharing some of the work we've been doing and the lessons learned around donor funds, stewardship and management. This is an area of advancement work that I've spent several years in, and from this webinar I hope you can discover a few helpful hints to enhance the work your institution is doing in this area. And if your institution isn't doing any fund management and stewardship work, maybe this conversation will spark some ideas on how you can incorporate it into your advancement operations. Before diving into this discussion. I want to take a few minutes to introduce myself and share some background about my role as an mentioned. My name is Aaron Rouse and I currently serve as the director of Funds, Stewardship and Management at the University of Nebraska Foundation. I'm just beginning my eighth year at Nebraska and have been in my current role for the past five and a half years. My previous role at the foundation was a prospect Information manager, working closely with a team of approximately ten development officers on portfolio management and prospect identification immediately prior to working at the University of Nebraska Foundation. I spent two years as the donor relations manager for Omaha Performing Arts, Nebraska's largest nonprofit performing arts organization. In this role, I oversaw all donor relations activities and the annual giving campaign. Before that, I was with Hastings College, a small, private liberal arts college in central Nebraska at Hastings. I worked in a variety of areas, including annual giving alumni relations, phone athon management, donor stewardship and advancement services, just to name a few. I've been very fortunate to have had experience working in many different areas of the advancement field, both front of line and behind the scenes, large and small institutions and educational and non educational organizations. As I mentioned, I currently work for the University of Nebraska Foundation and I'm based in our Lincoln office. We are an institutionally related foundation and serve as the philanthropic partner for the University of Nebraska system with a staff of over 203 offices spread across the state. The University of Nebraska Foundation manages over 11,000 active donor funds in fiscal year 2020. We were supported by 53,000 donors who committed more than $320 million in philanthropic support as the philanthropic partner to the University of Nebraska system. The foundation supports four distinct campuses spread across the state. These campuses are the University of Nebraska at Kearney, which is a residential educational hub for rural Nebraska, with an enrollment of over 6000 students. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is the system's flagship land grant research institution and is home to more than 25,000 students. The University of Nebraska Medical Center, located in Omaha, is a premier academic health science center with an enrollment of 4000 plus students and the University of Nebraska. Omaha is a metropolitan university experience located in the heart of Nebraska's largest city. More than 15,000 students are enrolled at UNO. In addition to supporting the four campuses of the university system, the University of Nebraska Foundation also provides advancement support for multiple university institutes and affiliated organizations. To kick off this discussion. I think it's important to define what fund management and stewardship is and share some thoughts on the role it plays in its successful advancement shot in its most simplistic form. Fund stewardship and management is the work of taking care of donor established funds. If you want to dive into that a little deeper, I can provide some of the specific work we do at the University of Nebraska Foundation that falls under this Funds Management and Stewardship umbrella. This includes taking ownership and monitoring all aspects around donor funds, including making sure the fund is coded correctly, adhering to the established fund coding standards. We set, making sure that campus partners have access to view the funds available for their use and auditing and reviewing donor funds to ensure they are managed in accordance with internal policies, lessees, procedures and practices. It is important to note that the fund management and stewardship role is not responsible for investment and endowment management or accounting processes. We also serve as the liaison for internal staff, campus partners and donors for all fund related questions and concerns. As a central contact, we help troubleshoot, fund issues and reach out to other colleagues when needed. We ensure that campus partners are utilizing donor funds and spending them as they intended by the donor. We continually monitor fund utilization rates, identify opportunities to educate campus partners on the importance of utilizing donor funds and help develop spending plans to address those funds that may need some additional attention from campus. And finally, we provide open, accurate and timely information to donors on the status of the funds they've established. If at least annually, if not more frequently, as I have discussed the role of fund management and stewardship with colleagues around the country, I I've not yet met any organization that has structured itself in quite the same fashion as the University of Nebraska Foundation. Some organizations have created roles like foundation accountants, stewardship specialists or fund auditors, but each of those roles tends to focus on one specific aspect of fund management and stewardship. At Nebraska, we have centralized almost all fund related activity into one department with fund management and stewardship identified as a top priority for the University of Nebraska and the University of Nebraska Foundation. Creating this centralized hub to manage and monitor donor funds helps us stay on top of any issues that may arise with the particular fund and be more proactive rather than reactive in our efforts to solve problems. As we look to grow our annual philanthropic support, having an efficient system in place to manage these donor funds, we hold will be a crucial step in our long term success. So the title of this presentation is Best Practices in Managing and Stewarding Donor Funds. As a disclaimer, I want to say upfront that the takeaways I'm going to share during our time together are things that have worked well for us at Nebraska. What has worked well for us may not work well for your organization the way we are structured may be different from how your advanced ESOP is structured. The availability of resources you have may be more or less than the resources we have dedicated to this endeavor. All that to say is my hope for this presentation is that it will introduce you to some new ideas and practices that you can learn from and take back to your advancement shots and adapt as needed. During this presentation, I'm going to walk you through some of the funds, stewardship and management processes we have developed over the past six years and provide you some specific examples of things we have done to address the challenges we faced. These are our best practices and you will need to develop the best practices that meet your institution's needs. So I want to start this presentation with a question for you. Think about all of the donor funds managed by your Advancement shop. Of those donor funds, what percentage are currently considered underutilized? I'll get into how I define underutilized a little later on. But for now, I want you to come up with your own definition and calculate your answer. I'll give you a couple of seconds to think about it. Okay. Do you have your answer? If we were in a room together, I'd ask you to share your answers and how you came up with that number. Was it difficult to calculate? Was it something you'd ever even thought of? Was your definition of an underutilized fund? What is it? Trust me, there's no right or wrong answer here. But it's always interesting to hear how others define that measure and what their answer is. About six years ago at the University of Nebraska Foundation, we went through this exact same exercise. We hadn't thought about underutilized funds up to that point, and we certainly had never defined or measured it. But something happened that did make us start thinking about it. It wasn't one of those aha moments, but rather a pattern of questions and encounters that made us think that maybe there was something going on here. Specifically in our case, we were beginning to notice these recurring questions from donors about why the funds they had established weren't getting spent. Sometimes that would be in response to an annual donor fund report that had been mailed. Other times it was a donor declining to make an additional gift until their previous gift had been put to use. There was a noticeable trend that we were becoming attuned to, and that's when we decided we needed to dig in a little deeper to find out what was going on. So this was our starting point. We've got a pattern of donor concerns. We realize something is going on. So we ask ourselves that question. How many of our donor funds that we manage are considered underutilized? Little did we know when we started asking ourselves that question that it would become the guidepost for years of work that lay ahead. Okay, so we've asked a question of ourselves and we need to come up with an answer. And that's what we did at Nebraska. The first time we measured our underutilized funds, 36% were considered in an underutilized status. This brings me up our first step in establishing a fund management and stewardship program. Define the measure. What is it that you want to measure? Why do you want to measure it? How will you measure it until you know what you're looking for? How can you be certain you're addressing the issue? Throughout my professional career, I've been a firm believer that data tells a story. It can be used to show what progress you're making. It can reveal things you had no idea were going on. Sometimes the story is hidden in the numbers, but if you look hard enough, you will find that story being told there. We wanted to tell a story and that story was how effective are we at utilizing our donors funds? We were going to tell that story with our data and to do that we needed to define our measure. As I mentioned earlier, I would tell you how we define underutilized funds at the University of Nebraska Foundation. And here it is. A fund is underutilized if it meets one of the following two criteria if it's a permanent or quasi endowed fund and it has a spendable balance that is two times or greater than the estimated annual endowment distribution or if it's an expendable fund or sometimes called a current use fund, it has not had an expense or transfer request charged to the fund in the last 24 months. That was it. Two criteria. Using the fund data we already had available to us with a few simple calculations. We knew what we were going to measure and how we were going to measure it. To illustrate this measure in action, I'll give you a couple of examples. So let's say we have two endowed funds. Fund A generates $1,000 annually and currently has a spendable balance of 1500 dollars. Fund B generates $1,000 annually and currently has a spendable balance of $3,000 using our defined measure fund, A would be considered utilized in fund B would be considered underutilized. Note that on these endowed funds, the last expense date does not come into play when we're measuring this. Now let's look at a few expendable funds and let's say Fund C has a balance of $1,000, and the last recorded expense was two months ago. Fund D has a balance of $1,000 and the last recorded expense was 28 months ago. In this scenario, Fund C would be considered utilized while Fund D would be considered underutilized. As you may have noticed, the threshold for utilized versus underutilized on both endowed funds and expendable funds is a two year time frame on an endowed fund. Two years of endowment distributions can accumulate before the fund becomes underutilized on expendable funds. The fund can go unspent for two years before it is considered underutilized. You may be asking yourself why two years? It's not a magic number or a benchmark that we picked up anywhere. That's just what fit our comfort level. As far as I know, there's no benchmark that does specify the ideal time frame for fund utilization, and this is what we chose. If under utilized funds are something your shop decides to measure, you may be more comfortable with a three year time frame or an 18 month time frame. It's really up to you, no matter what your measure is or how you choose to define it. This is an important first step to build your fund management and stewardship efforts. Once you've defined your major, my next recommendation would be to take a step back and make sure you're seeing the whole picture. Admittedly, this is an area where we got a little ahead of ourselves and moved a little too quickly into what we wanted to accomplish. We had defined our major and determined that the ratio of funds that we considered underutilized was too high. This was our problem and we needed to get to work right away to solve it. How are we going to solve it? Simple. We just needed to tell campus to spend the money. That's where we ran into trouble. See, underutilized funds were a problem, but as it turned out, it wasn't the real problem that needed to be addressed. As we were going out to our campus partners and urging them to develop spending plans and find ways to utilize these donor funds, we started to hear story after story about why certain funds could not be spent. There was more going on here than we had realized. Yes, we did have underutilized funds and that was a concern. But what we were seeing was a symptom of a much deeper issue that we weren't aware of. We were trying to solve a problem that, as it turned out, was a result of other things that were going on. We were essentially trying to fix a broken leg with a Band-Aid. What we needed to do was step back and see the whole picture. We needed to understand what was happening and build a strategy of addressing these deeper issues. To illustrate this, I'm going to use an analogy that you've probably seen before, and that's the analogy of an iceberg. When you're on the ocean, what you see above the surface is actually only 10% of the full iceberg. There's another 90% under the surface that you don't see unless you take the time to look for it. We were only focusing on that 10% of our funds management iceberg that we could see. And that 10% wasn't going to get us the results we were looking for. We needed to see the whole iceberg to understand everything we were dealing with before we could develop a comprehensive plan to achieve our target. We did not see the whole picture. We were too eager to jump in and start fixing a problem that wasn't really our problem. In our eagerness to jump right in and solve our problem. One other important piece we missed was building the partnerships we needed to be successful. As I just described, we thought we knew what our problem was. We had too many underutilized funds and we needed to fix that. How are we going to fix that? Simple. Tell campus to spend the money in the donor funds. But as I said, once we started doing that, we immediately started receiving pushback from our campus partners as we pushed harder and harder on the campus to solve the problem with our simple approach. Campus push back harder and harder, telling us why that wouldn't work. This went on for several months with us thinking they were just making excuses for why they didn't want to spend the money. But until we realized that we were mistaking the feedback for excuses rather than valuable information that it was, we were going nowhere in our efforts. Once we took a step back to see the whole picture, we realized that dictating a solution was not going to work. We needed to build a partnership with campus to be successful in what we were trying to do. The way our organizing and funds are structured at the University of Nebraska Foundation is we as the foundation, do not control the spending on these funds. That power rests with a campus authority. They have ownership and manage the funds. Spending them as the donor intended. They were more familiar with these funds than we were, and they knew the reasons why they weren't getting used. If we wanted to address underutilized funds, we needed to work with our campus partners to understand what those underlying issues were. Why couldn't the funds be spent? What were the barriers that had caused the funds to become underutilized? How could we work together to identify and solve these challenges? With this revelation that we needed to approach this as a partnership with campus, we were able to really dig in and start identifying the challenges that existed and the opportunities we had to make some real progress. To help illustrate what I mean by this. I have a couple of examples of how a partnership between the foundation and campus helped us identify a root cause to our underutilized fund issue first. Over time, campus structures change. Colleges and departments evolve, merging together, spinning off to form new academic units. Being eliminated entirely. As we began to work with Campus Partners on underutilized funds, we realized that there was a lot of underutilized funds we were trying to address that couldn't be used because of the language in the donor agreements was so outdated and did not reflect what the campus was that currently existed. The oldest bond we have at the University of Nebraska Foundation was established in 1936, the same year the foundation began. In our 85 year history. We've established a lot of donor funds. The has changed a lot in that time to an agreement from 50 years ago, maybe directed to support an academic unit that existed 50 years ago but doesn't exist today. By partnering with campus who are aware of the outdated language in these agreements. We were able to identify a root cause as why these funds were getting underutilized. Our original solution to solve the problem by spending the money was never going to work on these funds because money simply could not be spent. Our partnership revealed an opportunity that would allow us to develop a plan and fix a problem at the root. A second example. We work in advancement every day. Campus partners don't. As we were pushing for increased spending of donor funds to solve our underutilized fund problem. What we were advocating for wasn't making sense to campus. Here we were saying to them, You've got to be good stewards of the donor funds and spend the money. And they were responding well. We are being good stewards of the donors funds and we're saving it and taking care of the money. We clearly had a breakdown in understanding and we had to address that as we were dictating ways to steward the funds. We incorrectly assumed that campus just didn't want to spend the money. But when we shifted our focus and started communicating openly about these funds, we realized that this was an education issue. Our campus partners did not understand that using donor funds that had been entrusted to us was being a good steward. We had to educate them on that. Explain to them that donors don't usually make another gift if they're seeing their previous gifts not being used. We had to be partners communicating with and educating one another at the University of Nebraska Foundation. We love our policies and procedures. When we can put a system into place, we document it. We have a documentation on how to create documents and policies about how to create policies. And while I say this somewhat tongue in cheek, the fact is we do put a lot of work into creating policies, processes and procedures. But had we ever taken the time to communicate these policies, processes and procedures to our campus partners, where we partnering with them and communicating with them to understand the impact of what we were doing would have on their ability to steward these donor funds. As we came together around the table and started discussing what we needed and what campus needed, we weren't aware how these policies, processes and procedures were putting in place were building barriers between us and campus ultimately impacting fund utilization. And you can reverse that to, in some cases a lack of a policy process or procedure was preventing us from working together. Effectively. Approaching this as a partnership allowed us to find a common ground and start making mutually beneficial decisions. Partnerships weren't just important with our campus partners. Internal partnerships across all departments within the foundation were critical in understanding the big picture and getting everyone on the same page. We quickly learned that addressing our funds management issues could not be addressed by one individual or one department. It was going to have to be a team effort to help facilitate this and build stronger partnerships. We formed a funds management work group that consisted of internal team members from all areas of advancement for accounting, development, advancement services, donor stewardship, general counsel, and IT. The collaboration and partnerships that developed from this team gave us a wider view of the organization, a better understanding of our relationship with donors and campus partners, and revealed opportunity that we could explore that likely would not have occurred in a siloed environment. The partnerships we built throughout this process, both internally and with our campus partners, have been so valuable in moving us forward in our funds management and stewardship efforts. It has helped build cohesion around our objectives and it has given us a better understanding of what the whole picture is and what the real issues are that we needed to address. So after a few false starts and taking time to step back and take a different approach, we began to develop some good plans on how to address the underlying problems that were causing our underutilized fund issues. And we had partners at our side to help us work on implementing those solutions. But this is where things got really challenging for us. It admittedly a bit overwhelming at times. With more than 3500 underutilized funds to address. It was a formidable task to come up with a plan. We often referred to our funds management stewardship work as a big, stinky onion. Every time our work group would meet and work on a solution, we felt like we pulled back one more layer just to reveal yet another smelly layer that needed to be resolved. The issues kept mounting. The work became more daunting, and every two steps we would take forward. It felt like we were taking one step back, but we knew we had to start somewhere. We just had to figure out where. One of the things my manager always says to me when we're taking on a complex process and challenging issue is you have to eat the elephant in the room. One bite at a time. You're never going to solve the whole problem all at once. You break it down into workable solutions, identify smaller objectives that you can work on, achieve and celebrate piece by piece. You start to eat away at that elephant in the room and start making progress on your overall objectives. And that's exactly what we decided to do. The elephant in our room was 36% of our funds were being underutilized. We knew that we could not just attack that number and have any success. As I mentioned earlier, that underutilized rate was an issue, but it wasn't the real issue we needed to address. Now that we had taken the time to see the whole picture and develop our partnerships with campus, we knew what some of those smaller bites were that we needed to take to do this. We put all the known issues out on the table and began to walk through them. What were the issues? What was it going to take to overcome the issues? What resources did we need to have in order to address each issue? What benefits were there in addressing one issue over another? As we continued to look at the whole picture and see what our challenges were, we were able to see where we could make an impact. Where can we gain some traction with relatively low effort? Put another way. What was our low hanging fruit? I want to take the next few minutes to walk through some specific examples of opportunities we identified and the solutions we developed to address those challenges. First, one of the most obvious challenges we identified and prioritized solving early on was ensuring campus partners were aware of the funds they had available to spend and which of those funds were underutilized. As we started talking with our campus partners. One of the more shocking revelations that we found was that in some cases they were not aware of the donor funds they had available to spend. Sometimes the funds had been forgotten about over time. Other times they weren't even aware the funds existed to begin with, and on the funds they were aware of, they had no indication that the funds were considered underutilized. Clearly, not being aware of the funds that existed and not knowing which ones were utilized and which ones were underutilized was one of those underlying factors contributing to our underutilized fund count. How could we address underutilized funds if those who are supposed to be spending the funds didn't know they existed? While we did find this troubling, we also realized this was a great opportunity that we could attack right away to solve the problem. We ended up developing a series of solutions that would make these funds more visible to campus. First, we made a big push to educate our campus partners on the benefits of using our online donor fund portal. This portal was a tool that had been around for several years and was developed for campus users to access information about their donor funds, providing them with fund balances, usage criteria and financial reports. We made it a priority to educate campus partners on the benefits of this already existing tool and why they should use it. Second, we adjusted the online donor fund portal to call greater attention to underutilized funds. When a campus partner would log in and look at the list of funds they had available to stand from, we began formatting those funds that were underutilized, emphasizing and highlighting them in red text by making the underutilized funds stand out. It was clear that there was something different about those funds and they needed to be looked at a little bit closer. And a third way we heightened awareness around underutilized funds was by implementing a quarterly underutilized fund email process each quarter. Every individual on campus who has access to a donor fund that is classified as underutilized receives an email. That email lets them know that funds they have are underutilized and they need to be addressed. The email explains why they received the email and it gave us a great opportunity to provide education on stewarding donor funds and addressing the underutilized funds status. Also included with this e-mail was a list of the campus authority's funds that were considered underutilized. With a few minor changes and additions to existing tools. We've been able to successfully engage campus partners regularly, asking them to focus on their underutilized donor funds. Another opportunity we identified that had a potential to address a large number of underutilized funds was to develop a way to resolve nominal funds. One of the things we noticed as we work with our campus partners and started looking through the list of underutilized funds were these large groups of funds that had these pretty small balances or nominal balances. Some of these funds had been sitting unused for ten, 15, even 20 years, with balances ranging from a few cents to a couple hundred dollars. In so many of these cases, the funds were set up to support a specific research or capital project that was no longer active. In other cases, we saw a scholarship fund that had such small balances they never get awarded. In many of these cases, the donor had set up the fund with the intention that the funds would be fully expended and the fund closed within a few years. But as the projects closed out and the funds were spent down to nominal balances, campus moved on from the funds, leaving them to sit and become underutilized. To address these funds, we drafted a policy that was approved by our Board of Directors that would help us clean up these nominal fund balances. The policy defined how a fund would be classified as nominal. It provided a sideline for how to address a nominal fund. What notification processes were required to campus partners and to donors before addressing the funds and how often the policy would be implemented? In our first year of working through the policy. We were able to identify and resolve over 600 nominal funds. These were funds that were underutilized and would likely always be underutilized. How do we not address them with this nominal funds policy? The policy allowed us to clean up a large batch of underutilized funds and redirect the donor gifts to a similar fund and utilize it as the donor had intended. Now that we've had this policy in place for several years, we aren't addressing the same volume of funds that we did that first year, but we do still revolve resolved between 50 and 100 funds annually that are underutilized in nominal. As I mentioned earlier, one of the challenges we faced with our campus partners was a lack of understanding they had around advancement shop operations. They were the educators and we were the fund raisers similar to how they may not have been versed in the best ways to steward donor funds. They also were unfamiliar with how donor funds operated and were managed by the foundation. And that's completely understandable. For so long, all they knew about foundation funds was the donor made the gift. We set up the fund and they got to spend the money. When we started talking about underutilized funds and pushing them to focus on funds, management and stewardship, this was completely new territory for them. One of those areas where we had to be educators was around the idea of how to manage a donor fund. I think it's a fair assessment to say that a majority of our campus partners had a very basic understanding of how an endowed fund works. The donor makes a gift. That gift gets invested, and every year a certain percentage of the fund is made available to spend. But what we discovered working with our campus partners is beyond the basic knowledge. There was very little awareness around what they could do with their earnings besides spend them. I can think back to a specific example where we had a large endowed fund that supported a professorship in one of our colleges. The department that this professorship benefited had been going through a period of transition, and the professorship position sat vacant for several years. With that vacancy, the fund also sat unused, accumulating endowment distributions, but never getting spent. As we started talking to the department about the fund and trying to find a way to start spending the excess earnings, they were overwhelmed with the amount of money they had to figure out how to spend the department actually told us we have no idea how we'll be able to spend that fund down to a point where it's utilized. As we continued our discussions with them. One of the ideas we presented was that of reinvesting a portion or all of the accumulated distribution back into the principle of the endowment. They weren't going to spend all of the money that had accumulated, and this idea of reinvesting allowed them to address the underutilized status while simultaneously increasing the value of the endowment, which in turn would increase the future endowment distributions. The campus partners had no idea that reinvesting funds back into the principal was a possibility. And this is where we identified an opportunity to be those better educators. Now, this type of education is much more involved and tedious. It takes time. It has to be tailored from situation to situation depending on what your objectives are. But this was a great learning opportunity for us and our campus partners where we worked together to take a unique fund issue that had developed and come up with a solution that resolved that issue and took care of the underutilized status benefits benefiting the department in the long run. One final example of an objective we identified, prioritized and executed on was opening the lines of communication between the foundation and the university, particularly communication about usage plans for underutilized funds. As we began talking about underutilized funds with our campus partners, we were hearing examples where funds were purposely being allowed to go into an underutilized status because of a spending plan that the campus partner had in place. One of the most common examples we came across with this was for large capital equipment purchases. The funds that support the purchases like this will sometimes have to be accumulated for several years before there's enough available distribution to complete the purchase. At the foundation, we had incorrectly assumed that these funds weren't getting spent, but the reality was our university partners did have a plan in place where it did make sense for the fund to become underutilized. This type of information is important to gather. Not only so we know what's happening with the fund, but also so we can communicate that information with the fund donors to help facilitate and open the lines of communication. We went back to our online fund portal I spoke about earlier and added a place where campus Partners could enter a note on what their intentions were with the fund. If they're saving the money to purchase a piece of equipment, it can be noted in the centralized location and accessed by other campus partners and at the foundation. Collecting this information and having it readily available allows us to know what is happening with the fund and share that information with a donor as part of our ongoing stewardship efforts. Over the past six years, we've had countless examples like the ones I've just spent this past several minutes describing as learn more about the root cause of our underutilized funds issues. We have opportunities to work on individual solutions that will help us on our ongoing goal to reduce the number of underutilized funds you eat the elephant in the room one buy at a time. That's how we started to make progress on our goals. The fifth and final takeaway I want to share is that as you move ahead with your fund management and stewardship work, you must continually be analyzing and evolving as you strengthen your partnerships, identifying new priorities and develop plans to attack the challenges that you face. It's important to remain cognizant of the work you have done and evaluate the impact it's having as something you've done in the past not made an impact on the major you've defined. Why is that? How can you adjust to get the desired impact? Or maybe the impact is happening, but the measure you have in place isn't recognizing that funds management and stewardship is a living process and it can't be set on autopilot. To be successful in making progress, you must always be looking at what you're doing. What impact is it making and how it's impacting other processes? And then you need to make adjustments where you need them. Think about funds management and stewardship efforts as a cycle. Something that you're continually working through. First, you define a measure that you want to show for your impact. Second, you do your discovery work to understand what it is you want to address. Then third, you identify and build partnerships with those who can help you achieve the impact you desire. Fourth, you prioritize those opportunities and begin executing on those. And then fifth, you analyze the impact of what you've done and make mid-course adjustments before moving on. It just keeps evolving. And the work you do in fund management and stewardship continues to evolve and grow. When we first began our work in fund management, we defined our majors and set a target to improve our underutilized funds. We defined what underutilized means, and we're very broad in that definition. We had a major and were able to put a number on what we thought our issue was. As we began to work through this cycle of defining investigating and partnering, prioritizing and executing, we started to learn more about what we were doing. One of the things we recognized early on was that maybe the measure we had defined was too broad. It encompassed too many types of bonds. Some that we really didn't think made sense for us to continue to focus our efforts on. When we first started looking at our funds, we were including our funds. But as we started to dig in and learn more about what we were trying to address, we realized that certain types of funds, like internal operations funds, donor directed funds, membership funds and a few other types, really didn't need to be in our major. We worked through our cycle. We learned, we evolved and we adjusted our major. And as we continue to work through this cycle, we discover new measures. We want to monitor that, identify areas we can start to focus on Working. That cycle has made us smarter about the work we are doing and revealed stories that we were that were being told by our data. It's helped us to see things we weren't seeing and pushing us to address, issues we weren't aware of. This work we have done throughout the cycle, I have described is helping us eat away at that elephant in the room one bite at a time by addressing the real issues that we're contributing to that ultimate challenge. We identified six years ago. So with almost six years of work focused on improving in our funds management and stewardship efforts, I'm happy to report that we have made some good progress. When we first measured our underutilized rate, we were at an underutilized fund rate high of 36%. About four and a half years into our process, we hit our low of 24% of our funds being underutilized. Today we're sitting at around 29%. With much of the recent increase contributed to plans being put on hold by campus as we work through the COVID 19 pandemic. But more important than the numbers, the stories behind the numbers is what I'm most proud of. We have stronger partnerships with our campus because we have worked together to address the fund utilization challenge together. Our campus are more familiar with what stewardship means and how they are a part of successfully stewarding donor funds. We have eliminated outdated processes, streamline existing processes and implemented new processes to help us do our work better and our ability to open to be open and transparent when stewarding our donors much stronger than it ever was. As we look to the future, we're excited to continue identifying and prioritizing new efforts to strengthen our funds management stewardship efforts. We are currently engaged in a partnership with an external consultant who is helping us undertake an extensive and in-depth overhaul of our funds. Stewardship and management processes. Touching on all aspects of the lifecycle of the fund. And once we complete this cycle we're in, we're going to continue on to the next revolution of the cycle as our time together begins to draw to a close. Let's take a moment to go back and look at that original question I asked when we started. Of the donor funds your Advancement Shop manages, how many of those donor funds are considered underutilized? I didn't ask you this question because that's what I think your team should be measuring to gauge the effectiveness of your fund management and stewardship efforts. I pose this question to get you thinking about something your team can measure and be a catalyst for strengthening the work you do. This measure, which started out as a simple question for our team, has evolved into our guidepost in for six years. This is what we have always come back to. There's been a lot of work around this one simple question, and we've made adjustments along the way. But ultimately it's always come back to this one question that was originally asked How many of our funds are underutilized as your Advancement Shop thinks about that? One question it will use as its guidepost. Keep in mind that this should be one thing that you will always come back to. It will be the underlying force that guides you in the work you do to manage and steward donor funds. You will probably do it differently than we have at Nebraska. You may identify different priorities in your advancement shop. You may have different things you want to measure. You may develop different tactics for addressing these challenges. And that's all great. You have to make this work for your organization, developing the best practices for your needs. But as you do that, my hope is that some of the key takeaways and examples I've shared in our time together will help guide you in those efforts. They've served us well and I think they all will be beneficial for any organization looking to address a similar undertaking. As you do consider jumping into the important work of fund stewardship and management. I hope you'll consider sharing that journey with me. I welcome the opportunity to share more detail about some of the work we've done at Nebraska and would love the opportunity to learn more about your organization and the work you're doing. If you have any questions or you want to share and learn more about fund management and stewardship, please reach out to me at any time with contact information on the screen. It has been an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you talking about the work I'm so passionate about. I hope you found this time to be helpful and beneficial and provide you with some takeaways that you can implement and the great work you're already doing your institutions. So with that, I want to say thank you so much for your time and best of luck in everything you do. Thank you so much, Erin. This concludes the webinar. Today's program is Copyright 2021 by the Council for Advancement and Support of With All Rights Reserved for additional case on demand webinars, please visit W WW dot Case Board on Demand. Thank you.

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best practices

managing donor funds

stewarding donor funds

fund stewardship

fund management

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