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CASE All Districts Online 2023
Pipeline Health: Leading a Campus Wide Strategic P ...
Pipeline Health: Leading a Campus Wide Strategic Plan
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Hello everyone and welcome to the Alt District 2023 Conference in Session titled Pipeline Health Leading a Campus Wide Strategic Plan. We'll begin shortly, but I have a few housekeeping notes for you. On the right hand side of this grade, you'll see it went out with a chat, Q&A, feedback and notes tab. You can use the chat box to chat with other attendees, but please utilize the Q&A box to send questions in for your presenters. You can also upvote these questions in the Q&A panel. If you would like to see these questions answered at the end of the session, we'll get through as many questions as we can. There's also a notes tab for you to keep your own notes during the session. If you would like. We ask that you complete a brief evaluation that's found in the feedback tab at the end of the session, and we use the session feedback to continue improving what we offer. So we truly appreciate you taking the time out. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming our presenter Alessandra Demmons. Thanks, Lauren. Appreciate the intro. Hello everyone. I know we're in many different time zones, but good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Depending on where you're at. I'm also director of Pipeline Development at UC Berkeley. I can't go any farther without acknowledging that I co-presented this presentation at CASE District seven with my wonderful colleague Clara Dellenbach, and under normal circumstances she would be here with me today. Co-Presenting. But she is actually on maternity leave. So I just wanted to acknowledge Clara's contributions to this. So a little bit about UC Berkeley. We're the number one public university in the world. We have a very large student body and we have over 500,000 living alumni. We're a highly decentralized campus. So that means we have a Central University Development and Alumni Relations office, as well as Development out in our unit. We're in the last year of a $6 Billion campaign in our advancement phase across campuses, over 250 full time employees. And we in 22 had 52,000 alumni and not alumni donors. That's just giving you a bit overview of our institution just to ground us a little bit our learning objectives for today. I'm going to walk us through our Pipeline strategic plan and go over our process and our findings and how we kind of took a methodical approach to this or possible. I'm going to highlight some of the ICJ approaches and the lens that we took on with this work. That will be about the first two thirds of the presentation. The last third will focus on discovery journey. This is an innovative program to qualify prospects of scale. There's a lot in this presentation. I have to scale back a little bit. At District seven, we have an hour. I know there's probably folks out there that are coming from large institutions like my own medium size or small shop. You know, please feel free to take parts of this presentation. Don't feel like you need to take the entire thing or go from beginning to end. Cherry pick what's going to work for you and your institution. Before we really dive in. Language matters. We have some Berkeley terms that might be slightly different than what you use at your institution. And these are some acronyms that are just really common in our vernacular. I'm going to try my best not to use them, but just in case I do. These are some really common acronym. So addressing the health of our pipeline. Why did we even begin this work? So back in 2018, we received a report from Michael Lundy that said we needed to address grow the the mid-level portion of our donor pipeline. We decided to launch a strategic plan. And what that empowered us to do was to have a holistic conversation for all of advancement at Berkeley, for a highly decentralized campus, to have one conversation about how we're going to address the health pipeline. And we had these three goals on the right of having a unified vision. But pipeline health for the midlevel caution donors, the pyramid, determine how we're going to measure the health of that pipeline and then ultimately grow the number of donors in that portion of the pipeline. So the pipeline. That's right. It goes from acquisition all the way to predictable gas. And so what I want us to really focus in on is the portion of the pipeline that we're talking about for this presentation of this strategic plan for UC Berkeley and really that leadership level portion of the donor pipeline for our institution, we define that as a thousand 200,000. Your institution might be different. One of the things that I also want to acknowledge is our view on the pipeline is that this pipeline flows both ways, right? We're trying to identify leadership level donors that we can sign up to major gift officers, but then also acknowledging that there might be some major donors that have made their transformational gift to campus and they need to be pipe down to the leadership gift officer portfolio. So really, that leaves us with an ever expanding middle. So it's kind of like a muffin top, if you will, of a donor pyramid. But our goal is to make sure that our institution is able to support that ever expanding the roll out or the leadership level portion of the pipeline. All right. So we took a phased approach to running this strategic plan. I'm going to go over every single phase and process with you guys today, but this is just an overview of everything. So we started this work in June of 2021, the lower half of the screen is the core working group, and that was made up of about five people on the pipeline development team. And we were the ones that really moved the phase of the law above the timeline there on the upper half of the slide is where we engaged the advisory committee. And this was a group of about 15 stakeholder. So before we could really begin, we had some prep work. This took us about 2 to 4 months. So we needed to begin with establishing the core working group. Like I mentioned, it was about five people from the pipeline development team and then select our advisory committee and how we decided to who should be engaged in different aspects of this work as we did the stakeholder engagement metrics. And this is a great tool that you want to cherry pick this one slide out of the whole presentation. Feel free to do so. But this is a really great tool of identifying how you want to engage different stakeholders. Representation matters not just from senior leaders down to maybe development associates, but also that area of work that they represent or the corner of campus that they come from. So what we did is we listed out all the various stakeholders that we wanted to potentially engage in this work, and we basically rated on where their awareness level of this project in this topic and where they needed to be for the project to be successful. The gap in that told the core working group the level of communication we needed to do with that individual stakeholder to make sure that they were in the right place and were aware of the program before we invited them to participate. And on the far right, you can see maybe we had an internal stakeholder interview. Maybe we wanted to invite them to serve on the advisory committee. But this is just a really great tool to kind of assess where the different stakeholders are. And with that, we formed the formal invitations for the corporate receiving advisory group. Now, about 15 people on it. It was great representation from our central development shop as well, from medium, small, medium and large unit, as well as senior leaders and folks that were more junior in their careers. We really set clear expectations on that formal invitation for the advisory committee for folks knew what the expectations were to what they if they were able to commit to it on. We spent a lot of time focusing on the kickoff meeting because it sets the tone for the entire process. We were together for about seven months of work and then we reviewed all the materials together. Since we came from different points in different places across campus. It was really important that we had baseline assumptions for all the campus and not just the unit that one was representing. So the second part of phase one was environmental assessment. So data is the foundation of everything we did on analysis. And then we also conducted internal and external stakeholder interviews. So we did a pipeline health by the numbers report. This was a document that was maybe 15, 16 pages long. And it really boils down to to this graphic. We looked at revenue trends. Now, I know these are a couple of fiscal years old. We get to remember we're doing this work about two years ago and we saw the trend line at the leadership level portion of the pyramid headed in the wrong direction for unrestricted administrative giving. And that was something that annual programing team, the team that I'm on, we needed to reverse that trend lines. That's also why the annual programs team was leading this campus wide conversation. We also conducted a series of interviews and surveys. So we reached out to these 16 schools and some of them we sent a survey and some of them we did interviews back in the summer of I guess would have been 2021. We looked at their target analytics data and saw that these institutions had the exact opposite trend line as us in that leadership giving space. And so we wanted to give them a ring and ask, Hey, what are you doing in this space of being successful? How do you define pipeline and how do you measure the health of your pipeline? Some of you guys actually might be on the call today that participated in this. And I think if I went back to these institutions today, they have a lot different things to say. As UC Berkeley, we have a lot more information in this space than we did just two years ago. In addition to doing actual interviews, we interviewed 17 internal stakeholders and we really got a sense that people were excited about this work and interested. But didn't necessarily have the bandwidth or resources to focus in on it. This is a quote from one of our stakeholders. We have plenty of prospects. We have a shortage of well-honed infrastructure. This really resonated with the core working group and it was kind of an aha moment of well-honed infrastructure that might be assigned to us on the direction and the focus of the strategic planning might be taking. So from there we go into phase two and really this is where we fully engaged the advisory committee. So we reviewed that environmental assessment report and we did a saw analysis. The saw is similar to what you guys might be familiar with somewhat, but so our strength, opportunities, aspirations and results, we focused in on strengths and opportunities and conducted probably over maybe 3 to 4 committee meetings, but an hour and a half each focused in on these to strengths and opportunities. And we conducted different we came up with activities. All of this work that I'm sharing today was done remote over Zoom and a really do think that we were able to leverage technology to our advantage. It was fantastic to have to quickly do the Zoom breakout room work on Google Docs and kind of eavesdrop on what the other breakout room was saying because you could read what they were typing in real time. And through those 3 to 4 committee meetings, these were the top strengths and opportunities that we were able to identify. So between each meeting, the core working group with the spill, the themes and share it back with the advisory committee on and could go into a lot more detail about that process. But these were the top strengths and opportunities we were able to identify from there. It was important for us to go back and have campus feedback and this was about a two month time period. So we did have three different types of campus feedback. We had a focus group and survey and a roadshow in which we did these different types of feedback loops with different stakeholder groups. So the first one we conducted was with our leadership gift officers. At the time, I think we had maybe 30 leadership get officers on campus. I think the position has grown closer to 45 and we basically did a mini version of the strength and opportunities activities that we did with the advisory committee, and it was a really amazing opportunity to bring this cohort of colleagues together that sometimes don't come together as often as they should get back others out there that they might be a small unit and there's only one of them out in the unit. I was actually able to have coffee with one of the guest officers that attended this focus group about two weeks after the fact, and she shared with me that I said, How did you think what did you think of it? Were you did you enjoy the focus group? What do you think of the work that we're doing? And she said she had never felt so seen or heard before in her work, but just really resonated with me because as you're going through this, you don't know what impact you might be having on colleagues all along the way. The once we conducted that focus group, the core working group, distilled the theme from that focus group. We also sent a survey to our chief development officers or our associate deans as well. Getting them together for a focus group would be a scheduling nightmare. So we had to pivot a little bit and instead of focusing on the strengths and opportunities of the store analysis, we decided to ask this population what were their needs for this portion of the donor pipeline? And again, leadership. We're defining the leadership level, 1000 to 100000. And again, the core working group went through the themes, distilled it. We went all the way back to those internal stakeholder interviews as well, and looked at what folks told us at the very beginning of this journey, integrated their feedback and their opinions because it's really important to try and incorporate as many voices as possible in the process. And what we found was that we actually had alignment with the strengths and opportunities identified by these two groups as we did with the advisory committee. And so that really told the core working group that, hey, we're headed in the right direction and we can move forward in the process if we didn't have strong alignment. That's okay. We would have just taken that information back to the advisory committee, explained where the misalignment was, and we just we needed to take a step or two back before we move forward. At the same time, this was in I think it was December of 2021, We were at a university development in alumni relations town hall, and I remember sitting there and they were announcing the new division wide priorities and one of the five divisional high priorities was implementing the Pipeline Health Strategic Plan. And I think in that moment this was in the middle, like we were in the listening phase of this campus feedback loop. I was excited like, Oh my goodness, this work is getting attention and a spotlight on it and this is fantastic. And oh my God, this is a division priority. And what we realized was a lot of our colleagues that hadn't yet been engaged with this process were curious, what is the pipeline strategic plan? I haven't heard of it. How does my work fit into it? How can I benefit from this plan? And so we decided that even though the work was very much half baked, we were going to go on a roadshow and share what we had up to that point. So Claire down the block and I probably presented at, I think 15 or 17 different team meetings throughout the division and just shared what we had up until that point. We asked for grace and we said, you know, when we share our recommendations in a couple months time, it might be really different than this, but this is where we're at currently. And one of the great benefits and side effects was this kind of curveball that was thrown at us was it created early openness when we did. Fast forward a couple of months and we shared our recommendations, the vision, goals and strategies and people were kind of bought in and knew about it a little bit, but it really helped with that really open. So from there, now that we had alignment with our advisory group as well as our campus stakeholders, we needed to bring it all together. So we did that. After we reviewed and integrate campus feedback, we gained consensus and then we draft our vision, goals and strategy recommendations. So when it came time to start drafting our vision and goals, we really had to work hard individually and with the advisory group to stay on the left hand side of the screen. Remember, this was a campus wide strategic plan and we needed to come up with a vision and goals that applied for all of advancement at UC Berkeley. So we needed that 30,000 foot view. And I have to say a couple of times in the process, I fell in the trap of trying to is writing words like objectives, statement statements like, okay, we should pull this data point and this metric. And that really was way too granular. So we really need to make sure we kept our eyes pie on the horizon and having those lofty kind of 30,000 foot view on everything. And so this is another great fight that you could take if you want to cherry pick it out. Maybe you're working with an advisory group and an alumni board and you're trying to come up with a vision statement just knowing and making sure, where are we? Are we coming up with that big vision? Are we trying to get more into the weeds? Can be really helpful. And anyone who has tried to get a committee, the advisory group, I think I said had about 15 people on it. Get group consensus on that can be a little challenging. And I have yet to meet a professional colleague who likes group wordsmithing. So this is another great tool that you can take back to your institution of using ingredients of agreement to gain consensus among this group. So what we did is now that we had all of our scenes and we knew we were headed in the right direction, the core working group took the first path at drafting our vision statement, our goals and our strategies, and we put that into a Google form with gradients of agreement and sent it to the advisory committee. With each project, with each statement. There was also a text box. So there was a certain phrase that they didn't like, or maybe they were really wanted to add in a certain word. They could add that in, but we weren't able we didn't have to sit in a group and wordsmith together. The other thing about gradients of agreement that I think is a really powerful tool is it makes everyone's voice in the group equal, right? Because everybody the same level volume on their voice. And we had to go back quite a few times, right? We recently got their feedback. We iterated back to them and once we had all fours and five, we felt confident that there was enough consensus that we could go forward with our vision and goal. I think we had to go back and forth approximately three times. And so that brings us to our vision statement. The Berkeley advancement aspires to build a diverse donor pipeline, one case, about 100 case grounded in relationship based, data driven strategy to ensure sustained and increased philanthropic support. And what I love about this vision statement is I feel like I could maybe in 20 years retire from UC Berkeley and we could still be aspiring for this vision, right? We want something that is aspirational that is going to push you to always be reaching for it. Where we get really where I get really excited about this work is this kind of trifecta approach that we're taking to reaching that vision between data programs and people. So data is the foundation to everything we do, and we have to have a data throughline on this portion of the donor leadership portion of the donor pipeline on what we measure matters. What we start counting today is going to have an impact on advancement in the future. And it's also so we have to think about what that what we want to collect, right? Like what biographical data point do we want are requesting? Are we not collecting? What do we might need five, ten years from now that we need to start collecting now that we have enough data coverage that is valuable information for the institution moving forward? We're very interested in what our prospects and our events are, what their interests are today, and not necessarily who they were when they graduated. Maybe someone majored in history, but it has had a really successful career in marketing, and the best cultivation strategy for that prospect would actually be to the business school and not through letters in science. And it also gives you an opportunity to ask what data we might want to stop using or not waste heavily. One example of that is real estate. Obviously, UC Berkeley is in the state of California. I think most of you on this call probably now real estate in California is a little weird, but also using real estate perpetuates redlining laws that have been on the books, many counties, and that's a form of systemic racism. So what data points do we want to maybe stop using or stop waiting for heavily in our model and also through the process throughout this process as well to your process? Our thinking has evolved a little bit. At the beginning we kept saying we want to have a diverse pipeline and we want to measure the diversity of our pipeline and our thinking on that really evolved. And you can see that in strategy 3.1 we say diverse pipeline. What metrics would we need to be measuring around that? And is diversity being the right word and switch out the word diverse, inclusive? How does that change the metrics that we would be using and how how would we define that? How would we measure it? We're still we're still working through that, but I'm thinking has evolved on it as well. So programs you know, this is run by the annual programs team in our shop programs is of course going to be one of our pillars. I think with our current staffing levels and program levels that can be maintained. But if we want to again expand that ever expanding middle, we want to support that. We're going to have to adapt and we're going to have to do things at scale. We're going to have to innovate a little bit. So the biggest innovation that's going to come out of this entire strategic plan will be out of the school. And I will spend the last third of this presentation focusing in on strategy 2.1 of the innovative solutions to to scale qualification across. But the program's goal is going to it's going to take a while to implement to implement this one. And last but certainly not least, is the people. When I say people, I actually mean that. So how are we going to become a career destination place for staff where leadership annual giving can be a career destination, not just for frontline staff, but for all the positions that support this portion of the pipeline? And how are we measuring? We don't have standard metrics right now for our guest officers across campus. How are we creating managerial tracks for people in this space? Our creating early career opportunities for folks that want to go frontline and we want to make sure that we are creating a talent pipeline that reflects the diversity of California as well. So our process continues. So from March of 2022, we kind of went back with the feedback loop. We took these visioning goals and strategies back to senior leadership, integrated their feedback into, conducted a gap analysis, went on another road show for the Berkeley community, and now we have launched a implementation working group or implementation committee, and that's where that committee is going to roll up our sleeves and we're going to start identifying the practice and tactics that are needed to achieve every strategy and reach each goal. So that's the first two thirds of the presentation about the strategic plan. I'm going to dive in for the next couple of minutes on the Discovery program. So again, this is part of our program goal and it's strategy 2.1. So what is a discovery training? So Discovery Journey is a scalable get personal series of communications designed for a target population to be pre-qualified. Forget that. So the entire time that we were running this strategic plan, we were doing proof of concept on the site. And so we had a hunch the very beginning of this process that we had this idea of pre qualifying prospects for gift officers and having warm handoff. And so we thought, let's just try that, let's just put this together and see what we get. And we've been doing this for the last two and a half years or so, and it's been a really, really interesting program. So let's ground where does this program fit within the pipeline? So the Discovery program is designed to complement UC Berkeley's existing prospect development or Prospect Research Shop. That program Prospect Development is research heavy, which is necessary for technical gifts and major gifts for sure. But when we're talking about 500,000 plus alumni plus friends and parents turn to tuition, we have to scale out of that research. Just we won't be able to to to to apply the same model. So the Discovery program is really trying to work with annual giving or maybe a direct response marketing shot that they do. Some of the hardest work acquisition we know is the most expensive to raise, uplift the work of those folks and run these journeys and the data set for these journeys can be anywhere. The largest one we've done has been a population of 2000 and we actually have one in the field right now of just 132%. We partnered with our digital philanthropy teams and they do a spring crowdfunding cohort and we looked at the donors to that spring crowd funding cohort and put a certain population into a journey, and we're trying to reaching out to them to see if they want to get further engage with UC Berkeley. So this is where the Discovery program lives and this is a high level overview of what that program is. So again, the data on that can be anywhere. We've done, like I said, up to 2000 to small is a couple hundred. It's a series of multiple touchpoints. We leverage the thanks to you and do an intro video followed by an email outreach. We for one journey called every single household that was in the journey. We've done texting campaigns and then we always wrap it up with the last chance email. We'll do anywhere from 6 to 8 touchpoints. So this journey might be in the field for 4 to 6 weeks. The call to action on all of this is a qualification interview with the Discovery Officer Qualification interview. This very internal jargon that is not how we would present it, but the call to action, like I said, is that qualification interview. We have a series of questions that we ask them. It feels very much like a natural conversation, but it's basically a publication donor visit and we record all of this into our database. Every single twist and turn you can imagine if they open the video, but not the next one. We record all of them into our database, as well as the entire interview that is conducted with the prospect. There are three main outcomes from these qualification interviews that we have. The first one is a warm handoff to a leadership if concert or maybe a major gift officer. So Discovery officers have been trained to listen for inclination and capacity. And so if they have those cues, they might get handed off directly to get the officer. There's a warm handoff there that gets the discovery officer and gift officer communicate so the gift officer can take it to the next batch as opposed to redoing another qualification interview or donor visit. The other one is a disqualification or D Q That is just as powerful. We have a lot of prospects. So knowing that that prospect is not interested in engaging with UC Berkeley on a deeper philanthropic level is really valuable information. From the third is what the remote and similar mode is. Maybe the discovery officer was talking to somebody and they said, You know, I really love UC Berkeley. I would love to get more philanthropically involved or engage, but I have a student that is still in college, come back in two years or a year, and it would be a much better time for me then. So we've just listened to a bunch of things that they told us that they're interested in. So we now have coded their interest code, their interest today from when they graduated on what they want to hear about. And we then will send out various communications to them over time. We watch for a change in behavior. Maybe they increase their giving or they tend in the event and we keep our eye on that. And maybe at that point in time they're ready to go and take it off their portfolio. One thing. And then of course, we're also tracking revenue, but that really is tied more to the gift officers, right? We hand them off to get officers and so on, and they need to make it into a shiny diamond. But we do track the revenue stream that comes from this, from this journey. One thing I want to say real quickly is all of the audiences for this is customizable. So we have done Journeys with Incoming parents. We partnered with one of our units with the chemistry department and looked at long last donors. We've done a live on journey. We've done leadership level donors that haven't been assigned to a gift officer recently. So with the population, we can also tailor all of the communications, the messaging, the questions a little bit to really target that population and really make it resonate with them. Trying to evangelize. All right. So some of the results from our proof of concept, we've been able to reach thousands of prospects and have had a number, almost 100 pre-med prospects that were handed off to a gift officer. We've collected thousands of interest codes. The goal is to have, over time, more data coverage on interest codes. So let's say we have an event coming up on social justice. We would be able to run the database on food. Told us recently that that's an area of interest to them and then we can run events list based on interest and thousands of contact records just to bring to light, to bring to life some of these things that we've been doing. So one of our journeys was at a leadership level prospect journey and we had we were kind of interested in knowing what has changed since graduation. Tell it to who you are today. We had a donor in that journey who started out about 15 years ago as a $100 donor. It's steadily been increasing over time, but he was actually never assigned to a gift officer portfolio. He was in our journey, he responded. We conducted a qualification interview, had a warm hand off to a gift officer, and in a two year time period he went from a kind of low level leadership donor to $125,000 donor. One of the things that when we began this work that really was like, Oh, we think we're on to something with the number of undocumented bequests that we were able to unearth throughout this process. I think it was kind of how we set up the questions. But people there were quite a few people that in the interview would say something like this Oh, will counsel in my my will. Good. That's fantastic. My goodness. Thank you so much. I see that it's not documented with us. Would you be open to documenting it so we can steward you and say thank you? So we were able to unearth quite a bit of the commitments. So key takeaways for this whole process is really from the strategic plan and also the discovery journey. Discovery journey is really to listen. I think it is so important and we have learned so much just by listening to our stakeholders, listening to the constituents on what they say they're interested in today. Share your findings throughout the process. Don't feel like you need to hold on to it until it fully breaks and done. I think sharing what you have is people excited about the work. We were able to leverage technology to our advantage, which I kind of mentioned earlier. Run a proof of concept. You have an idea doing a small scale. It's it's a great way to kind of gain excitement about what you're trying to do. But just have something and see if your hunch is really if you're on something. And then also create space to do this work by potentially stopping doing else. Right. So often it's like, Oh, we're going to do all this on top of everything else, but is there enough space in the role to identify one or two things that you might want to start doing or scale back to allow the space to do this work? So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Warren, who I think spend moderating or monitoring the Q&A for me. But this is my contact information. This is my colleague player, the contact information. If I don't get to any of your questions, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm happy to hop on a call with you and your unit or department or chat over email. Please feel free to drop me a line. Awesome. Thank you so much. Alessandra. We do have plenty of questions. So our first question is, given the decentralization at Berkeley, how is prospect development and your team sending prospects into your central and college unit based LGO caseloads for example, if they're essentially focused algos not assigned to college's slash units, are they primarily focused on unassigned individuals across the system? Great question. So the central leadership gift officers are actually part of my team as well. And so I think it's a yes and yes, they get portfolios from Prospect Development and we have an amazing team over in Prospect development and some great partners. So like the leadership, get the officers on my team. We're decentralized, we go a mile wide and an inch deep for all of UC Berkeley. They get their portfolios from prospect development, but they also might be getting warm. Handoff from these attorneys as well. So it's kind of a yes. And I think as time goes, we'll find the right balance for our institution. And I think that balance might be different for different units. Right. A smaller units needs are going to be different than a large unit, which might be different than the central office. So I don't think going to be a cookie cutter, one size fits all. But knowing that there's these two different support roles and these two different aspects and strength, I described it recently, if you can imagine, we're kind of like a delta where there's lots of different processing strains. These journeys is just trying to create a new stream of processing for UC Berkeley to complement the existing strains that product development has established. Yeah. So stepping out a little bit further, did you have already a strong cohort of Agos on staff? And if not, how have you approached the need to expand the people resource to fulfill the strategic plan long term? Yeah. So I wasn't at UC Berkeley at this exact time when the leadership gift officer model came about, but I believe it. The story that I understand is getting ready for the campaign that we're currently in. The like the Wave campaign, the leadership model came about as a way for prospect to support this portion of the donor pipeline portion of the pyramid. So the answer is yes. I think we had a strong leadership guest officer cohort before I was actually at the School of Business at UC Berkeley as an annual gift. We didn't call ourselves leadership officers at that time, but those those positions were folded into the leadership officer model. I think since then it has really grown. I believe we have 45 leadership gift officers across campus, and I think it's just a testament to, you know, as we kind of end this campaign, that acknowledgment that we need to start identifying the next kind of generation of donors now. So when we roll out our next campaign in the future, you know, X number of years from now, we have identified and have the time to cultivate those prospects. So they're ready for that transformational gift to tuition for that next campaign. Awesome. Thank you. So I think you kind of touched on this, but do you have statistics on how many of your leadership level donors get advance to your major donor pipeline and ultimately make it to major gifts? That is a great question. I don't have the stats directly off the top of my head. We are working on creating a Tableau dashboard right now that that slide of the results that I showed you all, we have to manually calculate all of those for each one of our targets. We have a list of who was in that journey and we have to manually calculate it. What we want to do and what we're in the process of creating is a tableau dashboard so we can put that list into the dashboard, look at each cohort of the journey. And three, six and 12 months out from Wednesday, the drawing within the fields measure what has happened with those prospects, the ones that were assigned to guest officers, the ones that went into simmer mode as well as the ones that were GQ Right. And then we'll be able to more accurately track the the results, the revenue results, and that will help us be able to essentially methodically figure out exactly how many are going from leadership to target. Thank you. Now, that actually could be a really good measurement of sorry to cut you off for good measure. Then maybe it's a metric that we want to use to measure the health of our pipeline. Is that one way to see how healthy our pipeline is? Both ways, right? Should we also be measuring the number of media prospects that are being down that are going to remain those loyal annual leadership donors for hopefully forever? But that would be an interesting metrics to potentially look at as as defining the health of one pipeline. Yes. So someone said that they expect answered a lot of pushback on spending any time with lower level donors. How have you worked with colleagues to break down these attitudes and evolve ideas and thinking. Oh, that's really interesting. I think Data Talent can tell a great story. So I think looking at some of your institution's top donors and did their journey start? Did they come in at a five figure or six figure guess, or did they start out as a low level, $20 donor, $100 donor, some years in, some years out, kind of on and off, but over time was still consistent and over time with innovations. I think when you're able to have data back up the point or the story you're trying, the data tell the story that you're also trying to tell, it can be really powerful. And so I would take a pass at just doing a big assessment of maybe the institution's top 100 donors, 50 donors, ten donors, and see where they started and kind of reverse engineer that story to help get by. And then, hey, we don't identify these folks now and cultivate them and steward them and slowly move them up the pipeline. We're potentially doing a disservice to our institution, our future self, because we're going to we're not going to have that robust, healthy pipeline to be able to tap from. One of the things to that the strategic plan was trying to do and we're still trying to do, is the industry average and I might not get the exact number right from first gift to leadership, get the thousand, I think is like 18 or 18 years, right? So we can condense the amount of time it takes somebody from first gift to that leadership level get. We're going to speed up our pipeline. Not everyone who's in leadership is going to go major get it right. And that's why we need to be prepared and with systems and infrastructure to have that ever expanding middle, It's not everyone's going to go up to major get but condense in that timeline and thinking about the velocity or escalation that a donor is on, I think is a really important, interesting metric to look at as well. Great. Thank you. What types of people do you consider stakeholders? Is it donors, faculty, advanced professionals, academic leaders? Oh, that's a great question. For the purpose of the strategic plan, it was really internal. So it was a lot of the stakeholders that we focused in on was internal looking and that for the advisory committee we had two associate vice chancellors on the committee. We had an executive director from Stewardship. We had some major gifts officers, we had the leadership gift officers. So we had focused on units, like I said, in the central office, but we didn't just have frontline staff. We also had staff that we had some folks from our perspective and of course two folks from that team. But this strategic plan is a really is an internal thing for for us to kind of measure the health of our pipeline, grow the pipeline again, having that well-honed infrastructure. So I get really excited about it because building systems and whatnot just excites me and I really look forward to doing the implementation phase of this work. But it is really internal work. I think depending on what your institution's needs are or the strategic plan you're working on 100% donors, faculty should also be considered as potentially considered as stakeholders. Awesome. You. So we're just about out of time. Thank you, Alessandra, for a great presentation and thank you all of our attendees for joining. I saw some questions in the chat regarding recordings because they loved your presentation so much, so they will be made available on Crowdcomm. So if you are back in after the session, you should be able to open it and then also check your CASE community as those resources will be in there as well. Don't forget to fill out the feedback portion and I hope you have a great day. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, everybody. Thank you, Lauren.
Video Summary
The video is a presentation titled "Pipeline Health Idiot Campus Wide Strategic Plan" by Alessandra Demmons at the Alt District 2023 Conference. The presentation begins with housekeeping notes and an introduction of the presenter. Alessandra discusses the strategic plan created for UC Berkeley's donor pipeline, highlighting the goals and strategies to measure and improve the health of the pipeline. The plan takes a methodical approach and focuses on data, programs, and people. Alessandra also introduces the Discovery Journey program, which is an innovative way to pre-qualify prospects through personalized communications. The program has had successful results, including warm handoffs to gift officers and the discovery of undocumented bequests. Alessandra emphasizes the importance of listening, sharing findings, and creating space for this work. She also mentions the need to expand resources, such as increasing the number of gift officers to fulfill the strategic plan's goals. The presentation ends with a Q&A session.
Asset Caption
CASE Career Level: 3
CASE Competencies: Strategic Thinking, Industry/Sector Expertise
Keywords
Pipeline Health Idiot Campus Wide Strategic Plan
Alessandra Demmons
Alt District 2023 Conference
UC Berkeley
donor pipeline
goals and strategies
Discovery Journey program
personalized communications
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