Welcome to the All Districts 2023 Conference and Session Managing VIP Data, Very important processes and people. We will get started shortly. Please note that this is a pre recorded session so a Q&A will not occur. However, feel free to utilize the chat box to the right of the screen to converse with fellow attendees. Thank you. And please welcome Kate Stevens and Chris Kendrick. Hello, from the London School of Economics and Political Science. I hope you're enjoying the conference so far. I'm sorry that we can't be with you in person or live. We've had to pre record this session. We've been asked to share with your presentation we gave at the UK CASE Development Services Conference earlier this year. I'm Chris Kendrick and I'm the Deputy Director of Alumni and Supporter Engagement here at LSE. To us, that means I oversee the alumni engagement team, the communications team, the support relations team and the regular giving team within our advancement office. We work very closely with my wonderful colleague Kate Stevens. Hello, I'm Kate and I'm Head of Systems and Data here at Philanthropy and Global Engagement Division at LSE. My team manages the CRM and various platforms that we use to manage our alumni and supporter data. Well, Okay sets up the presentation. I'll just continue to talk a little while, but we're really excited to share this with you. And as we said, this is still a live project. So we're working through this and refining it as we go along, well aware that other institutions might be further along the journey than we are. So managing the IP data, very important processes and people. So our VIP's, well, they're important people, but there also are organisations. Our VIP's are grouped for mailing special events, the odd special announcement, more about that later and public listings. There are top donors, our closest volunteers, our supporters, our connectors and those who influence on our behalf. We're going to walk you through a project that we've been working on here at LSE, also working on, as Chris said, to untangle data structures and processes that have grown over time without there being much strategic thought about how this data is used. And and how it's considered for these purposes? We're now in our 4th decade of having an advancement office of some description at LSE, which I know is some way behind North American institutions. But we've had various iterations of our office. We're now philanthropy and global engagement, which extends beyond traditional alumni relations and alumni engagement activity. We also incorporate global academic partnerships and corporate engagement teams. And in that period, over the past forty years or so, we've had different systems, different requirements, different leadership and different ambitions. As you'll all be aware, data requirements change for everyone in the UK, in particular with the introduction of GDPR. But even then our historic methods of compiling, processing, storing and updating data hadn't necessarily kept pace. During all this and across the decades, we still managed to reach and connect with our alumni, friends and partners and really successfully and develop those wonderful reciprocal relationships which, you know, we're here for. But what's this? Sometimes in spite of ourselves? And that's the question we've asked ourselves during the this project. As advancement offices across the sector, we have a range of fairly standard communications needs. We know that we need to engage various members and external audiences at different points. Sometimes we broadcast, sometimes we encourage a conversation, sometimes we seek a form of direct participation. As we'll all know, this includes institutional announcements, flagship launches and events, community specific news, calls to action, when we launch services and products to alumni, friends and partners, and as we're doing right now under the auspices of our campaign. Celebrating the impact of volunteering and philanthropy. So we all know we need to engage our audiences, but we also know we have to place special care in how we share some of the above activities with our nearest and dearest. And for all intents and purposes, we've got our VIP audiences for for today and we need to communicate them with them meaningfully and in ways which enable us to advance our relationships quickly and well. We also have a duty as a team to promote sustainable advancements within the office. To ensure we we record these components, the data, the salutations, the nuances in relationships in a coherent way for the next people doing our jobs. We know that we need to get away from the mentality of getting the job done repeatedly to one of leaving a legacy for those who follow in our footsteps in future within the advancement offices. So as I've said, we know we have a range of stakeholders whose generosity, inside advice, time and expertise and philanthropy require that we define our relationship with them differently. I think historically we sometimes stumbled into a VIP list and then started bending existing settlements or mailing lists to fill out loose definition. One of the starting points for us tended to be a Christmas card list or a holiday card list where we mailed out to people with a very close relationship to us and it grew from there. And that can work, and it has worked. We all have some straightforward segments that can be defined by our participation level, a giving level, or formal membership of a functional title or a committee membership. But others are more subjective and need to be framed within a wider stewardship conversation. For example, at which monetary level persona become a so-called VIP. Are all donors VIP? What's the hierarchy of volunteer versus donor? Is there a hierarchy? A hierarchy? And as someone who currently leads the senior volunteer committee and works tirelessly for and on behalf of the institution for free on a monthly basis, but who doesn't make cash philanthropy a priority to themselves? Are they somebody that receives less prestige than a donor who once gave 10,000 pounds three years ago? Why does this matter? Well, we we need to know who to go to, with which message, what are the criteria for their inclusion? We've reached the stage whereby occasionally strategic communications were anything but strategic. When the audience for the message is identified before the message is being created, how can that succeed? What else do we take into consideration? Well, we utilize different channels and platforms to reach our audiences based on their own needs and our own practical considerations. We need to respect their wishes with data and contact preferences. We know that we need to deliver mass engagement at scale as well, easier with certain audiences than others. And we know that we can reach 100,000 alumni who gave consent to be contacted through e-mail marketing client. But we wouldn't want to engage our nearest and dearest through that Channel. It's not appropriate. Also, we know that mass marketing platforms can inadvertently mean that people unsubscribe from communications channels that we or they don't want to. In addition, when certain VIP messages need to go from school leadership, which could be the chair of council or the US President. Often that e-mail address from which it's sent is not underpinned by a formal ID, so it doesn't have a formal account. You can't even create a mail merge for that. So some of the challenges we face are based around that. In addition, we had data that had just grown organically and it was all over the place. We had affiliations that were recording LC relationships. These are quite visible on the entity record, but we also had committee participation, so that was managing our alumni group leadership reasonably well. We have mailing lists and they were a means of grouping entities or constituents after the mailing had happened. So we would often have if they were included in that mailing. Can you include them in this? Additionally, we had data that was not in the CRM not visible to our users because we had tried to attempt to put this data together in materialised views and so that segmented our audiences based on volunteering, giving relationships etcetera, but it wasn't visible to the user. We also found we had organization data that was not. Held us as well as it could be. Uh, hence the Cinderella. Uh, reference. We had thought a lot about the data structure for individuals but but that had fallen behind for organizations, so we had trusts and foundations and we have a growing foundation, partnership and corporate engagement team. So we really needed to get get better with our data management in that area. Organization contacts were not being recorded in the right place and we found that data checking was often done in a hurry and was placing an unnecessary burden on relationship managers for foundations and corporates. We also found some processes had just not been checked for a while and and actually it turned out, weren't doing quite what we thought they should be doing. So a name change process was effectively keeping storing data as just reference data rather than it being used correctly. So we've had to reengineer that process. Additionally, spouse info or marital information data processes needed tightening up and we needed to revamp our data quality diagnostics and ensure that, you know, for example, joint salutations were being populated when the spouse information was being populated. It sounds basic and common sense, I know, but a lack of checking meant that that was going unseen. Set that this data was looking a bit lousy every time it was needed, and often in a hurry. Family foundations have been set up without this, using the same principles as other foundations, and so there was a layer of data missing the defaults of credit, for example, for family members who at the core who are the core relationships was missing, so resulting that resulted in inconsistency in recognizing our donors in the CRM, the process for grouping monetary VIP groups was reliant on the right people knowing about what's going on the system. As an example, systematic checks for benefactors rarely matched those frauded manually. Affiliations. So we with all of that, we knew that we had to start a project. We need to understand all that was right and wrong about the current setup and see through the, at times opaque and I, dare I say it, undocumented processes and we needed to find a better way to work. So how did we go about this? Nothing groundbreaking here. We just started a project. We needed to assess the current situation, the as is, understand the current state, plan the work that needed to be done, then start implementing and then at the end when we get there, learn from the project. So in assessing. Ohh situation I'm going to hand over to Chris. One of the aspects of this was looking at defined groups and how we set out to establish clarity with both monetary and non monetary audiences. And the questions we asked What's the threshold around each group? What the business rules for inclusion? We wanted to ensure that everyone within our team starts to care about this data, whether that's a relationship manager with a senior prospect or donor, or an individual VIP or a volunteer manager overseeing an entire committee or board. In addition, we have an old CRM. It's a CRM that's been in place for over 20 years. So automated workflows are in our future and not are now. So we have to undertake some sequel scripting. We've also listed off some functionality that we'd left in our past or never implemented so Clubs and Organization Contacts, and offline. We had found that our corporate engagement team were actually using Excel to manage their CRM data, which was horrifying obviously because the functionality in place just did not meet their needs, which was slightly embarrassing. And as a note, we've now been in the green light to implement a new CRM. So there's been a tension as to how much change we put in at the moment. Before we move to our future, however, we need to use, we need to manage our business as usual in the meantime. And I always think it's about the data, not the system that we should focus on. So we looked at our stakeholders of this project and we did a little bit of stakeholder assessment or management. And and we looked at those who had influence and impact here. So we had a look at who we needed to keep informed versus who we were gonna work closely with and those were our high impact, high influence stakeholders. So they were supporter relations, alumni engagement and philanthropy teams. So some of the teams that Chris overseas. And and then there were some teams that we just had to just keep updated. And once we established this, we could then start on our project. And establishing the IP groups, as per the earlier slide, we know we have a range of labels that are sometimes applied quite liberally and quite vaguely within the sector. There's nothing unusual in that. And we know that we talk about transformative philanthropy, principal philanthropy, leadership philanthropy. And I appreciate in North America you probably have more refined and defined labels that you adhere to across across institutions. Sometimes in the UK we pick up some of those North American and some of that North American nomenclature and sometimes we develop it locally. But one of the big early successes that Kate and her colleagues have achieved is to force some of the fluffier people like me to bring our thinking into sharper focus based on the criteria for inclusion. So in the table you'll see the first two tiers of presidents circling benefactors which relate to very specific giving levels that lead to formal membership. And just as a side note, we formally launched our President's Circle last week. We had the LSE Festival on campus where we brought together some very senior donors. That's for donors who give in excess of eight figure gifts to LSE and we showed them. Differently to our benefactors, who also are very important donors, but giving gifts over £1,000,000 to the institution. But the 2nd 2 tiers in green of £100,000 a nd 10,000 pounds refer only to giving levels. They're not to define group in the same way while also being very important to the institution. Regardless, the criteria set out in the right hand column are clear. The same applies to the segments in blue. You can see once we've identified that the work we needed to do, there were quite a few streams of work here. So the challenge for us is to set off certain sets of actions, certain sets of tasks, while implementing others. So we extracted the data and sent it to Supporter Relations, our relationship managers, alumni engagement teams to verify that data, while in the meantime our systems and data was coordinating how we coded our data flows and our notification emails we were writing. Recommendation. I'm tightening up our business rules alongside our subject matter experts for giving data. Um, those in the Income and Management Services Management Services team. While keeping all the balls in the air, noticing that the data checking was falling behind, sending polite reminders, reading, breaking the data when it was returned to us so we had the correct data on the system, and alongside that we were implementing some user interface changes to surface some new functionality for users. We used Smartsheets to plan this project, which gave us a nice Gantt chart view of the data. And our reporting and insights analyst extracted the data groups, creating a form that was for for easy data entry for our teams where they were verifying and adding appending data. So we tried to make the process as straightforward as possible for our colleagues. Our technical analyst set about setting as scripting for gift club creation and amendment scripts and e-mail notifications and cleaned up some olds and seek food processes that were running in the background. Didn't need to be. And our data and support team altered the user interface and metadata, started updating the records when back from that verification. I'm always keen to emphasize that our operational teams work in partnership with, not in service to the development and philanthropy teams. I think it's a really important distinction that that we try to make at LSE. It's a it's a dual activity where we support and work with one another. Every advancement professionals busy. We all have our own tasks, targets and objectives that need achieving. Um, so this isn't ascribing importance to the types of roles people perform. Vacates earlier point refers to engaging people whose roles are more non operational and as such so often have their skills so that when we do get to various data tasks they understand why they're being asked to do things that they might not come easily to them. Sometimes our system limitations have meant that they've had to do that a few times. So we sent reminders to people politely and we carried on with work in the meantime and we tried to keep these various groups in mind while waiting for data and to be returned. But that does take energy sort of circling around. So we found a few edge cases along the way and we dealt with those things like there's people who sort of skirt around, they're giving thresholds and edges as a result of soft credit, currency differentials, Gift Aid inclusions are very UK specific example. And bank charges and just making sure that we took care of those educators in our processes. And also as I mentioned at the beginning, organizations, this is when we realized we had a difference family foundations and we needed to get that data structure right. Of course, this wasn't the only project that we were doing, let alone just the regular business as usual and handling the unplanned issues that crop up and busy people. We were asking busy people to check data, which is not necessarily the first task they would reach for as they set up in the morning, but we sent reminders and occasionally escalated for help from nudges where we needed to. As we look deeper into some data flows, we found that we were not actually clear where some of the data came from and for an example, Honorary Fellows. So we had to do a little bit of investigating to find out our data source. And it's quite said, we've had a few instances where individual gifts from couples supporting LC require a soft credit that that poses challenges. We also have an example of a major scholarship program through which past scholars all come together for a day of celebration and make their own lovely gifts to that scholarship fund. Those gifts are wonderful and great if they received, but they're wildly fluctuating and level. It could mean somebody giving, for example , £25.50 pounds, 100 pounds dollars, insert currency as relevant might inadvertently be included in stewardship befitting the benefactor. Gave over £1,000,000 to set the scholarship in the first place. Organizations data restructure for the organization of contacts was necessary so we also noted the soft credit wasn't following the same business rules consistently across foundations. So we have grant making foundations. Sometimes there isn't soft credit, sometimes there is corporate entities. Sometimes there's a soft credit where there's maybe influence there and we are depending on the people involved and family foundations where soft credit should be consistently applied. So understanding those various use cases and and really nailing down the. The the detail on those was really important. And this project has been making really significant and wonderful progress. Naturally, life doesn't make for processes and projects to successfully conclude before they're needed. In January we returned to the UP from the holidays to to news that our brilliant president, Minute Shafiq, would be leaving aside to take up a role at Columbia in the US. Given her global profile and the nature of the news, it was incredibly confidential. I had to ask teams to work to produce data that we could use pretty much immediately knowing that this VIP project had not been concluded and I had to ask people to work quite hard at short notice without telling them why or what it was about, such as the nature of that confidentiality. I knew that a live request for data. Related to the VIP project that potentially trampled all over, it was not likely to be met with loud cheers from the team. However, quite apart from the the professionalism and skills possessed by Kate and her team, and by our excellent support relations team, there is a wonderful sense of collegiality across our office and there's trust. I think Kate knew if I didn't have to ask her to do this at short notice, I wouldn't be doing it. Expertly, they juggled the request, utilizing some of the planning and hard work already underway to ensure we were able to reach our VIP audiences in the best possible way while not having our final solution in place. So umm outcomes of this project and it is still underway, but what we have come up with is some defined groups and that's really important. So we've defined monetary versus non monetary and VIP groups and our data has more consistent structure and we understand the thresholds, so the the boundaries around those groups. So that means that we can be the data is more dependable despite our old CRM and while workflows are still in our future. Very excited about it, but for now we're still working with what we have and we are taking a view of monitoring the processes and and surfacing that data into Tableau so that it's available more readily to our users. Umm. So what we've learned, and this applies to most data projects. Purpose. We we absolutely have to understand, understand the purpose of what we're doing. What do we use the data for? Is it for events? Mailing lists? Public listings? Communication? Stewardship?Is it all of those? Data definitions, ensuring that we get consensus on the group or groups that we're talking about, how do we know about them? What's the data flow. Exploring those edge cases, EG a donor of a Europe €1,000,000, is that the same as a million pounds $1,000,000? Do we count them as a benefactor? Buy in. It's obvious, but you need collective buying to make this a success and to get the work done across the operational teams stuck within the the the weeds and weeds of this engagement. Teams using the groupings and then the relationship managers are actually work with the individuals and organisations on a face to face basis. We need to show why this is critical and the impact it will have both operationally and externally. We also need to show you that the collective agreement to prioritize work, what's needed, when and how. Is understood. Otherwise it's hard to make progress. For us it's been stop start due to resource due to emerging from the pandemic and then new and emerging priorities that simply have to be worked on as per the example I gave with the news of our President earlier. And as with many projects and and underestimated terms of time. Yeah, it always. You have one version of of how long it's going to take, but there's always some other things to fix along the way which also take a little bit of time and needs to be recognized that these sorts of projects will will take time and resource and you know you need the space to get on with them while trying to maintain your usual business as usual service. And of course, be agile. It's very easy for us to all say that we think we're agile workers, but it's understanding how different colleagues will be agile at different moments. So you have to make sure that you can collectively pivot in different directions rather than just worry about your own outputs. And we know that sometimes these emerging circumstances feel like they conflict with the project, but in the bigger picture, they're part of it. And finally, document and communicate. As with any project there, we need to embed this new framework properly. It cannot be left to drift after all this work. We don't want to have any more sticking plasters for these sorts of processes, so we've provided a good starting point for requirements for our new CRM as well in this area. And not forgetting, of course, thanking staff for their contributions and ensuring that their contributions are heard and appreciated. Thank you. Ordinarily, if we were sat in a room with you live, we would obviously take questions and have a conversation about it. As we're not able to do that today, please do feel free to make contact with us. We're both on LinkedIn and my LSE e-mail address is c. kendrick@lsc. ac. uk if you have any questions in particular in relation to the engagement aspects. Thanks for listening. Thanks. Thank you Kate and Chris for a great presentation and thank you to all of our attendees for joining. Before you go, if you haven't yet completed the session evaluations, please do so and you can return to the agenda to find your next session.

Managing VIP Data

Kate Stevens

Chris Kendrick

London School of Economics and Political Science

data management

VIP groups