to today's webinar on Case Insights on Alumni Engagement, our FY23 findings. My name is Jenny Cook-Smith, and I'm joined here by Nick Campisi, and we'll introduce ourselves in just a few moments. I know we have a very large crowd joining us today. We are so happy for the response to this webinar. And so we are going to just give folks a minute for Zoom to get everybody in. As you're coming in, though, we would love for you to take a moment and just tell us where you're coming from. So if you could just put in the chat who you are and what institution you're representing, and as a global survey, tell us what part of the world you're coming from as well. Ah, nice to see lots of friends on the phone, or the phone, the webinar as well today. Oh my gosh, we're seeing them just flooding in, great. Well, again, so, so happy to have all of you. Nick and I are promising that we're gonna keep this session interactive. And so please, please continue to use the chat throughout to communicate with each other. If you have questions for us, please use the Q&A, and that way we'll make sure that we see it. And our colleague Leah, who is our literal wizard of Oz behind the scenes, making everything happen, will make sure that she gets those questions over to us, and that if we don't get to today, we'll make sure that we have a chance to answer. So with that being said, I am going to go ahead and let's get started. Without, I think the first thing I wanna make sure we do, actually, let me take that back. The first thing I want to make sure we do is to tell you that this session is being recorded. So the session will be recorded, and you will get the slides afterwards. So please do not fret. And the second thing I'd love to tell you is that we are incredibly grateful for our sponsors of this presentation today. This actually marks our fifth year of the CASE Insights on Alumni Engagement metrics. And so one reflection we've had over this time is the overwhelming support from CASE's educational partners. You could not provide us metrics without the work they've done to help adopt your systems, to help you work with your teams and thinking about building collaborative strategies, to start thinking about adopting engagement, and to really use the CASE framework to meet their goals. And I'm particularly grateful for the five sponsors that you see noted here, Illuminati, CMAC, Give Campus, Hivebrite, and Huron GG&A, who have all sponsored today's session. And of course, before we go further, I want to thank all of you who are here that represent institutions that took the time to take part in this survey and contribute to these important annual findings. We literally cannot do this without your support. And if you are joining us today and you're not terribly familiar with CASE's alumni engagement metrics, or perhaps you're familiar but you don't take part, we hope that you'll leave excited to learn more about how you could do so. And I really hope a commitment to take part in the survey that opens in September. But don't worry, we'll talk more about that later. First, let's actually get to some introductions. So as I mentioned, my name is Jenny Cook-Smith, and I'm our Senior Director for CASE Insights Solutions. This is actually my fifth year at CASE. It's no accident that my timing at CASE coincides with the alumni engagement metrics survey, because it was certainly this work that CASE was doing that got me so excited to come here and think about how we could really look at metrics from an integrated perspective. I am joined here today with my colleague, Nick Campisi. Hi, nice to see everybody today. Nick Campisi, Director of Data Science. I haven't been with CASE as long as Jenny. That being said though, my background is in demography and counting humans. I have been working with higher education institutions for quite some time. So I'm really enjoying applying that to alumni engagement this year. And so Nick and I are going to tag team a bit through our findings throughout today's session. And just to take a moment, our plan for today is to talk a little bit about what we mean when we say CASE Insights, and specifically introduce you or reintroduce you to the alumni engagement survey. We'll then really spend the bulk of the time discussing what we learned for the fiscal 23 results. And we're going to present that in the form of five key findings. Nick will then talk through how you can actually take action on these insights. Because of course, our goal and really why we have a solutions team is for you to think about this great data that CASE provides and use it. This isn't just for learning. And then finally, we'll talk about some of the resources available to you from CASE. So as I mentioned, Nick and I both represent a team called CASE Insights. And when we talk CASE Insights, what we're really thinking about is all the great data, standards and research that CASE provides. And as we thought about this data, what we've really attempted to do is build key metrics that would help you as institutions and schools think about understanding an integrated advancement approach. Of course, throughout our history, because counting of gifts is actually much easier than measuring all the other things we're going to be talking about today. We've certainly been known from a data aspect of providing philanthropy surveys across various regions. And that is a key component, I think as we start to learn about how we take and use alumni engagement and thinking about how we take alumni who are maybe starting to pay attention, get engaged and convert them to some of our key outcomes, such as giving. We also are going to be talking all things alumni engagement. So I'm gonna skip over that circle for you. But in addition to the philanthropy survey, we're starting to launch a survey specific to campaigns. This survey is also global and it's actually for institutions that have completed a campaign in the last five years, or you'll do so by June 30. So if that meets your institution's qualifications, we'd love to talk to you more about that because we're trying to understand, again, how campaign metrics are crucial as we think about the work you're doing. Of course, marketing and communications work is really at the forefront of all of the aspects of engagement. And we are currently creating a similar type of guidelines and white papers as we had with Case Insights on Alumni Engagement and thinking about a framework and key definitions to measure MARCOM. So that work will be coming soon. And then rounding out our components would be CASE's work on diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, specifically in the form of a product we call our Advancement Inclusion Index, which really looks at your own maturity as an advancement shop, specifically to how you're collecting data, how you're training volunteers, how you're staffed as it comes to all of the work that supports DEIB. Lastly, this is all possible thanks to a consistent practice of counting as established by our CASE Global Reporting Standards. But as I said, with that, today is really all about all things alumni engagement. Now, if you're new or you're just like a quick refresher, when we discuss alumni engagement, this really includes a framework of the four modes that you see here. And it's fairly simple in the sense that it's binary. So what we really wanna know is, did alumni engage in each mode at least one time during the year? We'll look at measures that say, did they engage in all modes? We'll look at measures that see, did they engage in one mode or two modes and so forth? Or the question as we understand our alumni engaged, out of those four, was there at just one point at least? And that is what would make them engaged. In your own scoring and your own strategies, you absolutely are probably looking at things like the number of interactions, did they engage at multiple times? And I think that's critical, but from a comparative benchmarking lens, this is what we'll be examining. And as you're thinking about the data, and as we at CASE have released these findings each year, we've really adopted the principle that you see here from Douglas Hubbard, with the idea that as we've moved beyond counting gifts, we don't actually count engagement because that implies that we're capturing everything. And while we know that we've made great strides and there's still work to be done, we also realize that we'll never capture the idea that someone walked down the street wearing a T-shirt for your institution. And so we'll always be measuring this idea of how do we reduce the uncertainty of what we're trying to figure out? So many of you have probably heard me say this before, but it's just something I think critical to keep in mind as we look at both key learnings, and I think more importantly, what your next steps might be. So with that in mind, let's actually take a quick poll. And we just love to know, I think it's always helpful to get an idea of primarily are you here because you're representing from an Advancement Services Operations perspective, your primary role is around major and planned gifts, you're on the alumni relations and or annual giving side, marketing communications, or you have responsibilities that oversee more than one of these categories. And if none of these fit you, welcome, we're glad to have you, you can mark other. And always curious to know what other is, please feel free to put that in the chat as well. So we'll just give you a moment. And Leah, as it looks like we're getting a nice representation, we can go ahead and post those results. Well, no surprise that the vast majority of you are coming from the alumni relations and annual giving side of the house, followed by advancement services and operations I actually might have thought that one would be a touch higher. And again, for those of you that are in the other category would love to know where you're representing and I see a few folks said just alumni relations that's fair we probably should have said, and or, but but great again glad to have such a nice well represented group across advancement. I mentioned to you that we are in our fifth year of this survey. You've also probably seen at least from this presentation template but perhaps in other areas of case that we're in our 50th year at case, and as we are going through this year. One of the things that we've said as a team is as important to both look back at key milestones and use those to consider how we ensure a bright future. And so with that spirit. I've compiled a few of those milestones here today, beginning with the fact that when case was established, it was actually the merger of two organizations, one of which consisted specifically of alumni relations professionals. And really around that same time so once case was case. They also became an important sponsor patron of the voluntary support of education survey. And this is a survey that now is part of cases repertoire on our case insights offerings, but at the time was part of a group called the Council for aid to education. So again since its inception, this idea of how do we use metrics to understand where we need to focus and how we drive results. It's really been baked into the history of this organization. You may or may not know that in 2005 case and specifically at the time case Europe, and then followed by case Asia Pacific had an annual survey that we because we all need an acronym called I cars. But it was the international case alumni relations survey, and many facets of that survey actually helped make its way as we thought about as we look at to the work that we're measuring today. And then throughout the last few years but really was the pivotal point was in 2018, our CEO Sue Cunningham penned an op ed to inside higher ed as really sort of a mic drop on the fact that we've got to stop this over focus on donor participation, and use that as a moment to say something like engagement would be a much better proxy for alumni affinity and obviously we can see the outcome of that in today's world where participation is no longer at least here in the US part of that ranking for colleges and universities. And as part of that, that overall strategy, global task force I know we have some representatives here today, built the wrote the alumni engagement white paper that outlined the framework, and the definitions that really are the survey today. And so as we look towards our fifth year, one of the things that happened last year was at this main stage at case summit. There was a panel case summit is the annual conference for advancement leaders, and we invited representatives from us news and world report from qs and from times higher ed, all three rankings. services to come on and talk a bit about the importance of rankings and really is a chance to understand where do we go from here. And I'm incredibly excited to share with you all that here and your five that we've reached another important milestone. And that is, as we focused on why engagement matters. why engagement matters on what engagement is, and specifically why someone that might be a prospective student to your institution could should care that the fact that alumni are engaged. That's actually going to be the first step in this stage we looked forward to more editorial content. with the publication. We also again have the findings report that will be coming out this month. Today is really meant to be a preview for you. We're also excited to announce that Sue Cunningham is going back to pen and paper and authoring another article on this five year milestone. And really thinking about, you know, engagements importance to our, our leaders and institutions, and particularly citing how we're seeing more and more use of engagement within campaigns. So, exciting news now and lots to come as we start to again, move from this feeling of we've, we've adopted it. And now we're really telling that story and hope to hear many of you continue to share your stories with us. So let's talk a little bit about this year's findings so fifth year as we've talked about, and this was the most participants we'd had to date with 375 institutions and across 20 countries. And I think one piece that you don't see in that number is the fact that due to the great resignation that I do think hit particularly hard with our advancement operations staff. Last year, we actually saw almost every other survey really struggle in terms of response rates and so the fact that this survey had an increase during that hard time tells us that there's real value and excitement behind continuing to build adoption in this space. Because we do have a group of 217 institutions that took part in the last three years, we love you thank you for that. What you'll see is that we've got some consistent cohorts that we can start to look at trends. And so let's talk about what those five key insights were, as we spent time really looking at the data. And what we're going to do is Nick and I are going to tag team through these Nick's going to start showing start by showing you some of the data as we start to look at each region, and how alumni engage per region and how that is similar and different. We'll then talk about what we've learned about really how to use this data. As we think about the comprehensiveness of the data that you're collecting. We're thrilled that this year we were able to collect some graduation cohort results. And what we found as a result of those is that when we look at your recent alumni those that graduated in the last 10 years, they are more likely to engage experientially and through communication, as opposed to philanthropy. And then we see volunteers are actually pretty rare across all grad cohorts and we'll look at those percentages in a moment. And then as we look at the last two, it really falls into the lens of what do we do with the data and so we're starting to see some ways to really take this data and use it as you're thinking about your engagement pipeline, and the depth or the more meaningful engagement. And then, again, as we think about how to take and use this data. Another piece that's crystallized is when to use the overall data directionally, and how and when to use the more decisive comparison benchmarks that we provide, and Nick is going to walk you through those as well. So Nick, I'm going to pass things over to you. Wonderful. Thank you. So, one of the things case really strives to do is maintain this globally, be globally consistent but regionally relevant. And one of the things we've learned over the last few years of administering a global survey is that are some of the nuances of doing these regional comparisons, and how they can sometimes be misleading. But one of the key findings we came out over the last five years with is this fact that alumni are engaging differently across different regions, in part due to a variety of reach of reasons that impact both the regions and then the countries within the regions as well. But the primary dominant mode of engagement that has come out from all of these Jenny next slide please. Is communication, long, long awaited but I'm sure everybody can imagine communication, the most passive form of engagement is the largest across all of the regions and countries that we collect data from. This makes the most sense. However, the dominance and the extent to which communication really drives total engagement varies between the regions, in part due to the rules of contact that vary between different countries, as well as more of the norms of engagement. And so one of the things we like to look at is if we take out communication from this group, we see that what are those kind of dig down into those norms of engagement, a little bit more, of course, experiential tends to be our second largest in terms of the most frequent mode of engagement, but as we get into something that's a little bit more meaningful and requires more commitment from alumni, the volunteering and philanthropy sides. These numbers of alumni engaging with our institutions of course tend to get smaller, but then we see between the regions, larger differences between what our alumni are doing, and part of this can be in fact differences in the role that the institutions, your institution plays within the local community. It's not to say that in North America, in Canada, in the United States, philanthropy is the most dominant mode of these last two. And it's not to say that alumni there are giving more, it's just that alumni in other regions are giving more in different ways. They are giving maybe their time, not necessarily just their money. As we teased out, when I think about our second insight, I think about this is the one that feels very related to yoga. All right, we actually are getting almost a bell curve here, so it looks like the vast majority of you are in that space where you're collecting it, which is fantastic, and thinking about how you'll use it. I'm actually really thrilled to see we've got, what is that, 17% between the last two that are starting to take those strategies out a little bit farther. And if anybody feels comfortable in the chat, just adding an anecdote of how you're doing so, if you fit in those final two categories, we'd love to hear that as well. So on this notion, I'm going to watch all my circles fall into place. I'm also going to give credit to my friend Chuck Arnold over at Texas A&M University who shared this and the following slide with me, which I love as an illustration to this idea that this is not simple, right? And so this is the idea that when we start thinking about engagement data, we also have to think about all of the different places that that engagement data lives. And the goal is, how do we think about getting that all within that centralized CRM software? But that's not the only thing that makes it tricky, and that's because all of the different sources that are collecting this data. And so I'm sure this is not completely comprehensive of all the different sources of data that comes from, but you get the idea that we have, you know, it makes sense that as we look at year five, that we're still finding many of you in that place of, all right, we're getting there, we felt like we're starting to capture this, because it takes time to build those priorities and think about some of that strategic data integration, which Nick's going to talk about in just a moment. I will say that this is exactly why in the second year of the survey, we took a step back and added what we call a confidence level. And I hope if you take nothing away from this session today, my hope is if you remember one thing, it is what confidence means, because I tell you, this is one piece that we know actually gets a little bit misunderstood. So confidence is not asking, are you confident in the data that you submitted us in the survey that it's accurate? We're going to move from a place of we hope that you are. What we want to know is when you look at the data that you capture within your CRM and that you're able to provide to us, we want to know on a scale of not very confident to confident where you feel about the comprehensiveness of that data. And that's really reflective as you think about those different spheres of all the places data is coming from and all those sources of how you're collecting that. And we say this so that when you're thinking about where you're changing, if you're engaging more alumni, this helps you think about are you engaging more or are you capturing more? Both can be incredibly important and motivating metrics, but different, right, as you're thinking about what to do next. Absolutely, and one of the nice things that we get to see is that with this question of confidence, we're not just capturing that capture, but as Jenny really alluded to, we're capturing a lot of information on collaboration, especially in decentralized institutions. And by asking this question to you, our participants each year, we often get to see kind of how you progress over time in terms of, yes, the capture piece, which you many of you lovingly fill out with your notes in the survey, but then also that how are you building that communication and that buy in across your institution, outwith of actual engagement changes. And on that note, we saw between 2022 survey and the fiscal year 23 survey, 33 percent of our institutions, our respondents, increased their confidence in some way. And most of that was with communication. While it tends to be the most passive, you'll see later as we go a little bit more into the definitions of each of these modes, it also tends to be the most nebulous and have those laws that can really limit what we're able to track in that regard. But outwith of kind of the improvements, I'm sorry, can you go back? Outwith of kind of the improvements, we also, as Jenny alluded to, had the most participants in 2023. And if you think about kind of just the self-selection of the institutions who are taking the survey, we think of this as really good news, not just with the great resignation that Jenny mentioned, but also thinking about what institutions are in the place to be able to start reporting according to the case standards, sharing that information with other institutions. And one of the nice trends we've seen is not only adding new institutions year over year, but then as it happens, because this journey is iterative and it can be increasingly personal for your institution through database changes and whatnot. Those institutions who reactivate, maybe they took part in the survey previously and then had a database changeover and couldn't report all the information, but now they're back in a place to continue reporting and coming back kind of into the fold. I should also say here briefly, before we move on, that if you are in that first group from our poll, we encourage you to reach out, look over the survey, because we offer two forms of it. One, the more detailed and, I would say, data heavy of the full, long form of the survey. But then also we have the shorter form because we realize this is a progress, this is a progression. And even if with this communication piece, this most nebulous piece, if you're not able to completely track that across social media and all of these email click throughs, you can still take the short form of the survey even without the communication piece. So we really encourage you to take the first kind of leap into the survey and then work with us. We will work back with you. You're not alone to continue improving that over time and having that tracking in terms of the survey across your journey. OK, next slide, please. And with that, we also offer other resources here. These are two kind of frameworks from Cara Giacomini, our VP of Data Research and Technology here at CASE, about strategic data integration. Sometimes I find that institutions can kind of have this circular journey about data capture and resources, and that has kind of contributed to this reactivation. Those who fall out and come back in. But the course that Cara, the KSET Campus course that Cara can walk you through really focuses on laying out the journey, being strategic about that data and making that work for yourself as efficient as possible and saving you time in the long run. Next slide, please. So let's get back to the confidence. So as I mentioned, we have a little bit about the definitions and what goes into these different modes here with communication. While we saw the most progress, it also just tends to be our mode of engagement has the least amount of confidence in this because it is complex for us to conceptualize at our institutions sometimes, but then also to actually get the data, especially in, I know, non-US institutions with data privacy laws. With that, some examples of what this includes is not just opening the email. We often get questions about that. But how many alumni are actually clicking through the email and engaging in that kind of way? As well as in addition, the communication piece really feeds into kind of the next level or the next modes of engagement. So this way we like to call it our most passive, for example, to often register for an event, you have to click through an email. So these multimodal engagements can really stem from communication and converting your alumni from unengaged into communication and then kind of opening up the pathways into more meaningful and deeper modes. Next slide, please. Experiential, more confidence than communication, which is probably to be expected, but many collaboration challenges faced here as well. So many of us at our institutions were running regional events or the non-alumni relations events that still reach our alumni. And that collaboration piece is asking and getting that data from other units or regional chapters to report back to us so we can include it and capture and track what those alumni are doing kind of on the ground. Is something that we still work with a lot of institutions through and then contributing to that, the volunteer engagement. This is our most confident mode, in part just because there tend to be fewer opportunities for volunteering than there are emails that get sent out or events that get put on. But nonetheless, still some collaboration aspects, that collaboration work that we experience a lot here as well. So, for instance, while not necessarily out in the field and regional sections, but more at home, the classroom speakers that may come into certain units and not get reported up or not even track. And here we have a lot of conversations with institutions about even getting that data starting to track and creating that buy-in with the units in order to have them track it and then working together to report it and put it in the CRM or whatever your alumni relations group uses to track that. And so the next area we're going to spend some time on is the findings that we teased out earlier, which is that this year we've collected counts by alumni engaged in each mode by graduation cohort, as well as counts of legally contactable alumni by cohort, which, of course, will allow us to understand the percentage engaging in each. So let's take a look at what we found. We'll start with experientially engaged alumni. And so you can see the first two categories are actually not a decade. Those are five years. And we did that because so much happens in those first 10 years that we wanted to be able to break out those differences. And notice what you're seeing here. For those of you that have been in alumni relations for some time, you're probably not surprised, is the U pattern. So this idea that we tend to get alumni engaging experientially early on, we lose them as they get busier with careers and families, and then we get them back again. This is an area, Nick's going to talk about really using this data, but I think this is a great example of findings being highly distributive, but maybe more importantly, really based on strategy. So I think when you start to look at your own results of how alumni are engaging by graduation cohort, you can start to dial it back to what's the programming? What are the things we're offering as we think about that engagement? And I did see there was a question earlier that was answered about experiential engagement. But just want to add that, you know, this is where we see all the event interactions and attendance is where we see things like your digital book clubs. It's also for those of you that have seasoned ticket holders that would fit into this category and your dues paying alumni association members. So it's a vast group. But again, it's really thinking about what you're doing within your own cohort. As we're looking through this, I'm going to show you the percentage engaged philanthropically in a moment. But just remember that historically, what we've known about the U pattern is that historically, what we've known for many years is this idea that alumni are more likely to give when they've been longer out. So when we think about how do we apply this data, this to me is critical because we start to show those gifts didn't appear from the sky. We all know this, but that quantitatively, we're seeing that you're really building those foundations with this experiential engagement. We noted that alumni also engage in those recent class graduation cohorts from communication efforts. So again, as Nick said, communication is the most passive of the four modes. We mentioned that it's where you have the click through rates, but it's also where if you're capturing it, alumni that are engaging through social, alumni that are filling out your surveys or your, you know, if you're capturing, you know, who's changing and updating their data. Those are all types of things that fit into that mode. Notice we got the big chunk up top, less of a U here, a tiny U, but you'll see a much higher percentage engaged in those first couple of decades and actually throughout than when we saw when we looked at experiential. And then our volunteers. Now, when we looked at the data overall, it looks like we don't have any volunteers in that zero to five years. That's really at that median level. But I can tell you, as we've been doing work with individual institutions that are purchasing our strategic reports or taking part in our benchmarking cohorts, that we're absolutely seeing places with success among volunteers, quite honestly, to the point that we almost have some a descending percentage. But overall, what we see is that it's about one percent. And so when we think about some opportunities, I do think this is a place where there's probably both opportunities around volunteer capture and opportunities around how do we get our alumni volunteered in this way? We know that particularly when we look at our younger alumni, that they really care about the impact and the mission. And so volunteerism really feels like an opportunity to build that connectedness. And all the data shows us that that connectedness is really, I'm going to say opportunity as opposed to problem when we think about our next generation. And then here's what I teased out earlier. I've been analyzing giving from alumni for almost two decades, and I think this has been the trend we've seen, which is this idea that it is a stair step. Again, we have seen some movement as particularly senior class giving programs have helped bump up those zero to five years out. But this to me tells us, one, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Two, how do we get and how do we use engagement as a way to get alumni giving to begin with and to perhaps giving in some of those earlier decades out? I know some of you are doing great strategic work on this and appreciated reading a couple examples on the chat as how institutions are thinking about building in some of those appeals. So as we were thinking about looking at some of this data, knowing that our alumni communities are getting more and more diverse, this felt like a quick opportunity on a poll to understand what are you able to currently capture as you're thinking about communicating with your alumni? So we've got an opportunity here where you can pick all that apply. So just give you a moment here to read through those categories. And like before, if you said other, we'd love to hear what that other is. Yeah, great, Mark. Great point. Hi, Mark. Yes. Industry, employment. Fantastic. Great. Great. Veterans. We actually almost put on there, but we fine overall. So if you were tracking that, that we were pessimistic. So thank you all for surprising us. Let's go ahead and put our poll results. Religion was actually the other one that we almost threw in. Great. You gave us the results that we completely expected and that we see in our own research through the inclusion index. And obviously, the point here is that as we think about our next question, having this data can be really helpful as you're thinking about strategies. So we'd love to think about. So we asked you what you capture. Now we'd like to know, as you're thinking about your own strategies and programming, what specific groups do you have strategies around? And I'm also noticing some of the notes about in Canada, there are prohibitions around collecting some of this. We see that in varying states in the U.S. as well. So certainly tricky, right, when we're thinking about some of those strategies as well. Happy to see first gen is something continuing coming up. Country of residence. That's great. And let's go ahead and see the results overall. So if we put these two poll results back to back, you'll see that we're certainly seeing some mirror images in some ways, as of course, what you're able to capture impacts those strategies overall. And part of that, we've been thinking about how do we take those elements and start to build some of those together? Because what we've seen in early research is that as you're focusing on some of these specific priority groups, and as you're doing work to train volunteers, that actually affects things like volunteer engagement. We also see that affects things like philanthropic engagement. So one boat rises the other. And I'm really happy to see some of those strategies coming out of this group. Anything else you'd add to that, Nick? No. I think, right, these two questions go hand in hand about if you're capturing this data, you likely do have the strategy around it already. It's interesting, though, to see that difference, considering, especially with our global perspective, what institutions are allowed to capture, but then realizing in practicality, we still need to have a strategy around engaging these alumni, even if we can't collect the data around them, because they're still very important alumni to our institutions. And I do think that's probably a good segue to our next insight, which is this work is not all about how do we just get the biggest numbers and pat ourselves on the back, right? It's what the heck do we do with this? And so as we've used this data, and as we've had a couple of years really starting to test and look at some of the measures, this key to connectivity really does fall within the depth of engagement. And I'll share a couple of metrics with you on that. One is the percentage of alumni who are engaging through non-monetary modes, so volunteer, experiential, and communication, and then cross-referencing each of those modes to see are they also giving. And we've put this data both regionally and by institution type. You'll see there's some groups that have some tiny populations. We'd love to build those up, but that shows you that there's some real differences when we look at both of those categories based on that conversion perspective overall. You'll also see that in general communication, particularly once institutions are capturing a larger amount of communication, once they're at least moving into that somewhat and confident mode, we tend to see that that percentage engaged actually decreases those that are also giving. So again, to Nick's point, everything really pointing to that idea that that tends to be the more passive mode. And as we continue on that thought process, one of the things we've started to use the data is to think about your very first question is how do you get the group that is unengaged to engage? Question one is probably are they truly unengaged or are there data points we could collect to get them on that engaged front? And then it's once they're engaged, what are they probably doing? What we find is that communication by far and large is the mode that if they're just doing one mode, it's probably communication. And I've seen this range from 60 to 93% for institutions that are just capturing that. And so then you start thinking about, okay, the segment that's engaged, but they're engaging at probably the level that is the smaller outcome for other alumni and for the institution to think about how do we get them doing maybe more interactive and connective opportunities such as volunteering, such as engaging with other alumni through experiential, and then moving that group from engaged to giving. And one of the measures that we've started looking at is the yield. So how many alumni you engage non-monetarily to get to that donor count. And because I think we're still at a stage where so much is how are you beating yourself year over year based on your strategies, this is a number that I think you understand your own baseline. And then with strategy, see, are you getting that smaller numbers? The other piece that can be incredibly useful, particularly when you're thinking about value to the institution, is doing some work around multimodal engagement. We've seen institutions be able to demonstrate that alumni that engage in more modes have higher values. And doing that own work in your own database or having CASE do that for you is a great point and thinking about, again, what your strategies you want to do and where you want to go next. As we said at the outset of this, we're not going to look at frequency of interactions, but that doesn't mean that that's not something you should be examining in your own systems as well. And then, Nick, I'm going to pass things over to you. Great, thank you. So one of the primary lessons we've learned over the last five years, and we've talked a lot about this today with the confidence in speaking of kind of iterative journeys about CAPTURE and then not even discussing analysis yet, is that the survey itself is a great directional tool for that development. And so this is why we encourage you to participate at the earliest opportunity you have for reporting so we can work alongside each other to get you further into that next step. And as you can imagine, we don't leave you alone for this, and we offer you a few resources that I kind of just wanted to take the opportunity today to point out to you, the first of which are our benchmarking reports. And if you're a case member who participated in the survey, we want to extend our gratitude for the lengthy time it takes to fill out the survey and ensure that you are taking the results and using them strategically at your institution with our summary benchmarking reports. And this is what you'll see on the left. And with our summary benchmarking reports, we provide you kind of the starting point to using that data with five key indicators and benchmarks against your region, everybody else globally, as well as some peers we identify for you just that are some similar institutions as a reference point. That being said, the next point, and this is where we tend to have a lot more of our discussions together, are their strategic benchmarking reports, which go into a lot more depth and expand that from five indicators to over 25. We start to break out individual institutions a lot more and have those detailed discussions because we realized we really needed to have those kind of in-person conversations together to walk through that. And what you're looking at here are kind of the topics that we discuss together. On the terms of pipeline, we often have discussions centered around segmenting your alumni into what are they doing, talking about how are you engaging them and how are you engaging them in one mode or deeper multiple modal engagement, and how are you moving this year over year? Are you moving your alumni from one group into the other? That being said, we also talk a lot about strategy. And this kind of Jenny mentioned before with our benchmarking cohorts, Jenny, if you could go to the next slide, please, where we break down these cohorts for your institution and start to disaggregate, well, how do you fit these expected patterns that Jenny mentioned? How do you break away from them? What are the positives there and what are the areas of opportunity? And what kind of successes do you have for one group such as volunteers that you can leverage for other groups such as the experientially engaged alumni? And then lastly, and I wanted to kind of bring this back up to the kind of whole level of all of our respondents, we do end up talking a lot about this return on investment. In the real world of alumni relations, we have to answer to our stakeholders. And with the great resignation and a lot of our operations teamwork, we realized sometimes we need this justification. And so one of the things that came out from the 2023 data is that we found one additional alumni relations staff FTE was related to about 4% more alumni donors. So we have a lot of justification and research from CASE about advocating for resources and how engagement stands with our philanthropy side as well. And you may imagine that, of course, those institutions with higher staff have more alumni donors. But what you're looking at here with the sentence at the bottom is really when we take out those kind of factors, we account for the amount that institutions are spending and their total alumni size. And then as well, as we mentioned previously, differences between the regions. So this top line statistic really stands out for the directionality, as you can see in the scatterplot here as well with this line, this positive relationship between putting more staff behind your alumni relations is going to ultimately feed the entire ecosystem for alumni donors. Next slide, please. And here I just wanted to put a kind of a high level summary of those things that I just mentioned. I'm also going to say if you're interested in having these conversations with us, please reach out to the email at the bottom. But then also in the chat, I put in kind of just our order form sheet so you can explore what the more details on each of these reports. If you are a member who participated in the survey, your summary benchmarking report is loaded into our CASE Insights data portal, which the web address will be coming up in a few slides. And that is already available for you to access and start exploring yourself. As we wrap things up, we wanted to share a brand new opportunity that we thought made the most sense on this topic of alumni engagement, because one of the things we actually capture in the software is products that you need to measure in engagement. And the median answer is six different products. And so as we started this webinar off with, we are delighted that we have great sponsors of this event. One of the things we hear from you, our members, is what do we need to be using? We know there's a lot of services out there. And so we're starting a new opportunity called the product showcase, the first one being on alumni engagement. Our sponsors you see here are participating. It's free. We just put the link in the chat. But this is a place if you want to have a quick way to see what the firms are doing to be able to access that product showcase. And as you can see, it's one-on-one conversations and hopefully a nice, easy use of your time to maximize and hear from multiple solutions providers. So again, really excited that this is something that we can offer and felt like alumni engagement made a lot of sense. As we're rounding things out, we also wanted to just put in one place resources from CASE. So these are things that we've talked about. We wanted to have those links here. So starting with all things you need to know about the survey, from the white paper to the guidance that has every question you could possibly have, to the findings reports are here on the CASE Insights on Alumni Engagement. The findings will be out later this month. And again, hopefully you've enjoyed this opportunity to preview those. Nick mentioned the summary benchmarking reports loaded in the data portal. We've got the link here. Happy to make sure that you can access those if you have any issues at all. And then a couple of options around partnering deeper with our solutions team. We are meeting next week for the alumni engagement cohort analyzing the 23 results. And soon, before we know it, we'll be thinking about FY24. So if you've got interest in being able to participate in a benchmarking group, you first have to do the survey. But then that's a great opportunity and we're starting to collect that interest here. That form will take you to it. Finally, it's never too early to think about the next year of data. Our intention is that we'll be opening again in September. As a reminder, we do have a fairly long cycle, though please do get it in as early as possible. But we do wish to accommodate our colleagues, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere that have an end date of their fiscal year that matches the calendar. We also are incredibly excited that we have a new survey platform for FY24. So what that means is that your process should be simpler, easier, and more streamlined. And we'll continue to make sure you have those details coming soon. Thank you, thank you, thank you all for your time today. Thank you to our fantastic webinar sponsors. And thank you all for making this research possible. We've got one final poll coming up just to make it real easy. If we said anything that you want to hear more about, if you could just give us an answer there. Hope you all have a wonderful day. Thanks for being a part of this.

webinar

Case Insights

alumni engagement

FY23 findings

Jenny Cook-Smith

Nick Campisi

communication

experiential engagement

volunteering

philanthropy