Hello. Welcome, everyone. We're going to give folks a few minutes to join. All right, I see some folks coming in. I see some names I recognize. Hi, everyone. All right, maybe just another minute, and then I'll jump in and get started. Hello. Yes, let us know where you're from. Drop in the chat where you're joining us from. That would be wonderful. Excellent. All right. Hello, hello. Look at all the folks coming in. Okay, wonderful. I'm going to go ahead and get started. A couple of administrative notes as we jump in. One is that the session is being recorded. We will be posting the recorded version of this on our learning management system at learn.case.org. So you will have access to this afterwards. What else do I need to say? There is a Q&A feature that if you have any questions, you can put questions into the Q&A. But we'll also be using the chat quite a bit today. We have some questions we want to pose of you. We want to try to make this as interactive as possible. So definitely keep your eye on the chat. So I'm going to do just a quick introduction of myself. Hello, everyone. My name is Debra Trumbull. I'm the Senior Director of Research at CASE. And we've got a wonderful group here today. Danielle, would you like to give everyone a welcome? Bonjour et bienvenue. I'm Danielle Lamotte, President and CEO of CCAE. And I did not remember which photo I submitted, and I'm wearing the same jacket. So I do have other clothes. So I'm really pleased to welcome you all today to this really important discussion on the key findings of the seventh edition of the CASE Insights on Philanthropy Canada survey. This survey is just really unique, and it allows us to gain some perspectives on the state of philanthropy in Canada's higher educational sector. So we at CCAE are very grateful for this collaboration with CASE, and also for all of the time and effort that the 35 member institutions were able to put into sharing their data for 2024. We know this is time consuming work at a challenging time in Canada's higher ed community. So we're really appreciative for your contributions. The information you share sheds light on evolving patterns and changes to the state of philanthropy in Canada, and that benefits all of us. So thank you. Participation in this survey also lets you benchmark against your own results year over year, but also against other comparable institutions across the country. So thank you. And we know CASE has made some improvements to the data collection process. So we hope that will make your work easier as we go forward, and that we'll see some increasing participation from CCAE members in 2025 and beyond. So with that, let's turn it back over to the CASE Insights team so we can find out what they learned. All right, great. Thank you, Danielle. I'm also speaking with us today. I'll be presenting some today. We have Dr. Fleming Puckett, who is our Principal Research Faculty here at CASE, and Nick Campisi, our Director of Data Science at CASE. So they will be joining me and presenting some of the findings. All right, let's just start real quick with an overview of what we're going to be going through in the session today. We're going to talk just a little bit about CASE Insights, some of the things that are happening here at CASE related to data. We're going to go through the 2024 key findings and takeaways. We're going to talk a little bit about acting on those insights, the data that you have available to you, ways that you can use our reports to benchmark your own performance. And then there'll be a brief little, I'll cover a few things about the upcoming 2025 survey. I do just want to let everyone know we do want to keep this as interactive as possible. We have a couple of polls that we're going to put in. We've got some questions that we'd love to have your participation in the chat. So I really appreciate that. All right, just talking very broadly about CASE Insights. So if you aren't familiar with the work of CASE Insights, maybe beyond this survey, this gives you a nice little snapshot of the kind of research that we do. CASE Insights really represents the standards, the data, the research for advancement worldwide. We conduct research in a variety of areas. You can see here these circles that are going around our CASE Global Reporting Standards. And the Global Reporting Standards are really the foundation that drives all of the data that we collect. So in addition to being quite useful in a survey environment because it helps give us those definitions that can be shared in all of our regions, it also provides a foundation for principles of practice, ethical considerations, guidance on campaign counting and donor control. If you are a CASE member, you do get one digital seat on the Global Standards. So I do recommend you use that. They're not terribly expensive to buy more, but it's a wonderful resource not just related to the survey, but related to the profession as a whole. You can see some of the surveys we do on philanthropy. I've highlighted the different regions that we're in. So you can see Canada is in there as well. And of course, you can go to our website to learn more. I do want to say, I just wanted to add this slide here just to say that we know that you all put in a tremendous amount of work in providing your data. We know it's not easy. We hear from you that it's not easy. But I did want to just present some of the ways that we're putting data into practice. You're providing your data. You're using the standards. You're sharing your stories. And it's not just that we're, oh great, we have collected this data. Isn't that wonderful? We can share some trends. But it's really about helping people understand the standards of the profession and learning more about what's going on behind the data and what's actually driving all the trends. So these are just some snapshots of some things we do, some different research that we've done. We have articles about data in our Currents magazine. And we hope that you're able to participate in as many of these as you're able to. Something that is new for CASE this past year, we actually have developed a recognition program for institutions that adhere to and promote the standards. So we have this new badging program. Some of you may have received an email with a badge. If you participate in a survey, if you provide data, you do receive a badge as a standards contributor. And that's, you know, you'll get an email for that. Anyone who was in our system tied to an institution that provided data this year, you should have received an email thanking you for that and providing you with a link on how to display your badge on LinkedIn. So it goes into the little certification section of LinkedIn. But just real quickly, I'll just tell you the different kinds of badges we have. A standards steward is someone who has purchased the standards. A standards scholar is someone who's taken our standards course. A standards champion is for our educational partners who are, you know, learning and taking into consideration all of our standards as part of working with their clients. And then, of course, standards contributor is for those who contribute data to a survey. If you haven't gotten your badge and you want your badge, and you know you've provided data, you can reach out to standards at case.org, and that team will make sure that you get your badge. I just wanted to highlight that real quick. All right. And before we dive into data, I just want to remind everyone on the webinar about the different ways that we measure fundraising in Case Insights surveys. There are really two ways that we look at fundraising, and I'm just going to, I'm not going to go in excruciating detail on these, but I want to just explain how they're different. Funds received is really more of a cash flow view of your data. It's we're counting the money as it's coming in as you are receiving it, whether that's, you know, property or outright gifts. It's what has been received within the reporting year. This is more useful for some of you from maybe a budgeting standpoint. You know, maybe there's a certain amount of money that you need to be able to provide back to your institution every year, and you've got certain goals around cash. So, that's where that way of measuring might be useful. New funds committed, on the other hand, instead of counting pledge payments received, we're counting pledges as you receive those commitments, right, as people make those commitments during the year. And we do allow you to count the full value of the pledge. So, by doing that, it allows us to better represent the impact of your fundraising efforts. So, the work that you're actually doing during the year to secure those commitments, you're counting the full value of that commitment. So, new funds committed is a wonderful measure to, you know, really helps you understand the work, the activity that you've done in the year to reach those numbers. And it also helps you understand what you're setting up for future giving, because you know those payments will be coming in over time. I do just want to point out something here. Before we look at the graphs and the data in detail, I do want to mention that we do periodically make updates to the Case Global Reporting Standards, and we did have an update in March of 2024. So, last year's survey, the FY24 survey, had two changes that affected the survey. One was that when we're looking at pledges, our old guidance was to count just five years' value of pledges. We have changed that guidance that now you can count the full value. So, if you have pledges that are going out six years or seven years, you can count those future years. I will just add, we're not necessarily saying that you should regularly have a 10-year commitment or a 15-year commitment. That's not necessarily good practice. There might be circumstances where you're going beyond five years, but it's really there to allow for those exceptions where those commitments do go beyond the five years. One other change that was made this year was around recurring giving. We used to treat recurring giving, and by recurring giving, I mean those monthly donors, quarterly donors, where they've got an ongoing payment schedule set up that has no end date. We cleaned up some of our guidance around that and found that, in the past, we were counting only five years of that value, but for recurring giving, it's really tricky to say that five years is the value because you have donors who drop off. Their payments don't go through. They cancel their payments, and it's also tricky because if donors are upgrading in the meantime, you might miss out on counting those upgrades. So, recurring gifts are now being treated as cash as the payments come in. So, you're treating them exactly the same in new funds committed as you do in funds received. I point all that out just to say we don't feel like these changes had a significant or meaningful impact on the trends this year, but we do want you to keep that in mind as you're benchmarking the data on your own. Just remember that some of those definitions have changed this year. I will add the fact that we have a digital version of the standards is really helpful to allow us to make adjustments when the ways that we're fundraising are changing. So, we do expect to have updates about every two to three years, so just a heads up. They won't always impact the surveys, but when they do, obviously, we will adjust. All right, so now let's dive in to the 2024 key findings. Some things to know, right? We've been conducting this survey since 2018. We had 35 participating institutions in fiscal year 2024, and 21 that participated consistently over the last six years. I mentioned that 21 because we do have graphs in the data that are based on just that consistent cohort of 21 institutions. When we're looking at trend views, we want to make sure we have the same institutions in the data for all the years that we're looking at. So, if you notice that there are different counts on some of the graphs, that's why. If we're looking at just this year's data, we'll be displaying data for 35 institutions, but if we're looking at a trend, you'll see those numbers be a little bit different. All right, these are some real high-level takeaways. We're going to obviously dive into a lot of detail on these, but I think in terms of kind of the big stories this year, or what we're seeing in 2024, total funds received and total new funds committed increased after we had had declines in 2023. That's actually a trend that we saw in the U.S., we saw that in the U.K. as well. Fiscal year 23 was sort of down in a lot of places, but really nice to see the increase come back up this year. And of course, we'll got some graphs to walk through all that detail, giving increase from all donor types between 2020 and 2024. So, there were some more significant shifts this year, we'll cover those. New funds committed designated for research and student financial aid both rebounded after declines in 2023. And full-time equivalent advancement staff rose 8.4%. I know we talked about that last year, that staffing was down. So, nice to see that in FY24, that overall staffing has come back up. All right, so let's dive into some data. This first slide, we're looking at total and median funds received. So, you can see the pattern of funds received in that top graph, where you can see that drop off in 23, there was sort of a kind of a flattening and a dip during the pandemic, a rebound in 2021. And then that dip in 23 was a little concerning. But you can see now it's come back up in 2024. So, it's up 25% compared to last year. And when we look at the median, we see the same thing. So, you know, it's important to note that we do have a small number of institutions here, right? 21 institutions. So, we've tried to pull in the median as much as possible to help understanding what's happening at the middle. You know, when you have a smaller data set like this, if you've got, you know, some really large institutions in here that have a big swing, they can sometimes view the totals. So, we made sure to pull in median here where we can. But keep in mind that, you know, it is, you know, things can really be different when the numbers of institutions is not as big. All right. And so, when we look at the median, a very similar pattern, right? The median actually last year had gone up a little bit. But this year, up again compared to 2023 and is above where we were pre-pandemic in 2019. All right. Come on slide. There we go. Taking a look at new funds committed. So, these are the same views for new funds committed. Now, remember, this includes multi-year pledges that are committed during the year. You can see that there was a very similar pattern in the totals from funds received where there was a very similar pattern in the totals from funds received where there was a dip in 2023, but that has come back up in 2024 and is about equivalent to where we were in 2019. At the median, it's really interesting, and this is where I think maybe the small number of donors might be having a little bit of an effect, or small number of donors, small number of institutions. The median in 2019 was quite high, and I did go back and look at prior reports, and it looks like there were some institution types that had some really big guests that year. So while that looks really dramatic to go from 31.9 and then have this year the median be at 24.2 million, I'm less concerned about that because I know that there were some large donations in 2019. What is interesting is how flat the performance is from 2020 to 2024, that the median hasn't really come up a lot. It did come up in 22, but overall it's been a little bit flat. A little more than half of institutions had an increase compared to 2019, so it's not like it's all bad news. You know, half are seeing increases, but we're not seeing like a big growth there. All right. I'm going to pass it off to Fleming here. All right. Thank you, Debra. Hi, everybody. I'll be walking through some of the data slides as well, and then handing things over to Nick here in a little bit. On this slide, I really wanted to have a look at what was going on with bequest intentions, and you can see in terms of dollars that these have been steadily declining over the past three years. And they're dropping, as you can see, in total dollar value, but they're also dropping as a percentage of new funds committed, which we've been talking about. So in terms of new funds committed, bequests made up 15.1% of those in 2022, and in 24, they were down to 7.8%. So with the flatness of new funds committed that we've just seen and the decline in these bequest intentions, I did have a question for you all that I'd like to put on the screen now. Have a look at this, and if you'd like to put an answer in the chat, I think that would be the best way to do this. So have you seen at your institution a decrease in or a flattening of new bequests, gift intentions, and pledges, a lot of those things that go into new funds committed in recent years, and if so, which factors appear to be creating this situation? I'd just like to get a sense of what you all are experiencing and what you think the factors might be that are going into those trends that are appearing in our data. So if y'all can put your thoughts in the chat, that would be fantastic. We love hearing how you are experiencing and relating to the data that we're collecting and what it means for you and the impacts that it's having for you. So I have a few of these during our time together today. Want to give you all a chance to chime in. So we'll keep an eye on that as you collect your thoughts and put those in the chat, and I will carry on and look at some other data slides. So in the next one that we have here, we're looking at new funds committed by source, and hopefully that's coming up. Oh, sorry. Ah, it's coming. There we go. There you go. Thank you. So some exciting things happening here. You can see great giving coming in from Trusts and Foundations, obviously the primary source, and great growth from 2020 up through 2024. Also really wonderful, and the one that kind of stood out to us was this increase in giving from alumni. So these are dollars here that you're seeing. So not alumni donor numbers, but actual dollars coming in, and great to see that increase there in dollars from alumni. Of course, alumni are giving directly, but it's important to keep in mind that they might also be directing gifts from other sources, and in fact, most of the other sources that you see here, other organizations, corporations, Trusts and Foundations, they may have your alumni in them, and they may be directing gifts to your institution from those other sources. So sort of on the soft credit side, you might say, but clearly highlighting how important alumni engagement is to the work that we're all doing. So on the next slide, you can see new funds committed by purpose, and I always love looking at this and seeing where these destinations are for the pledges and the gifts that are coming in from donors. So you can see here at some of the, perhaps smaller institutions, some big old capital projects that are happening there. So we're doing some fundraising for capital improvements and building. You can also see student financial aid here being a really important gift destination, and it actually turned out to be number one or number two in terms of giving purpose for all different types of institutions in Canada. So really great to see that, and clearly it's important for donors to feel like they're supporting students directly, and they're giving those restricted gifts to student financial aid. So very exciting to see, and really shows the power of what we do to impact people's lives on a very personal level. Another thing I wanted to point out here is how small unrestricted giving is. We know that as dollars across the board have kind of been maintained or increasing, perhaps some of the donor numbers are down, but we are seeing a lot more restricted giving, even with small gifts. A lot of donors are saying, I want it to go to that particular purpose. So unrestricted has become a bit of a challenge, as I know you all are very aware. But on the next slide, I did have another question in the chat, and thank you all so much for putting your answers and your thoughts into the chat. Here's another one. With increased donor focus on restricted gifts, as we've seen, how are you encouraging unrestricted donations to help sustain institutional operations? Obviously still a very important area in terms of the work that we do at Advancement Shops in supporting our institutions. And we know that across the board from the various surveys that we do at K through, a lot of them, but somewhere like 10 to 10 and a half percent of college and university operations expenses are covered in a given year by advancement, by philanthropy. So it's nice to see that we're hanging in there as Advancement Shops and contributing to college and university operations, but would love to hear what you all are doing to try to make sure that you're still getting in those operational funds and particularly unrestricted gifts. So once again, feel free to put your thoughts and experiences in the chat. It's great to hear how you all are responding to that trend that we're seeing in terms of restricted versus unrestricted. On the next slide, this is new funds committed by purpose. And this is over time. So in terms, it's instead of the distribution, we're looking at the trends in giving by purpose over time. Here you can see great support for research, which is always nice to see. There was a big kind of blip in 2022, but overall, if you look from 2020 to 2024, it's been a pretty good steady growth there. Obviously, different institution types in Canada do more or less research, but it's nice to see that folks are wanting to support that. They're really seeing the benefits that higher ed research has for society more broadly, and they're still wanting to give that. Another important piece here, of course, is financial aid. Really seeing a great increase there. And a little bit more detail on that in terms of institutions who reported in 2023 and 2024, a majority of those folks saw growth in giving to financial aid, and 10 of them actually saw growth in financial aid tagged gifts of 50% or more. So massive growth rate in student financial aid. Very exciting to see, not only as a priority, but as a growing priority. And I've actually got another question for you. I just love collecting information. I hope that's obvious. We wanna have these conversations today, but also moving forward, understanding how you all are kind of witnessing these trends and the data that we're collecting. But here, have you witnessed this significant increase in funding for student financial aid? It's clear in the data that it's a big growth area, and certainly even more recent trend, but we'd love to know more about what you think is driving that. Are there particular situations or circumstances that are causing the donors to want to give more in that area in Canada? Or are there particular strategies that you've put in place that you feel like have led to increased donations specifically for student financial aid? And obviously, we'd just love to hear more about what y'all are doing in order to make sure that you are providing that support directly to students through your philanthropy work. So thank you. Again, great to see that. Oh, please, is there a question? Yeah. Yeah, no, I was just gonna add, I did reach out to some institutions that had large increases to ask a little bit about what might be driving that. And it sounds like it's a little bit of the donors are driving it, but also you are driving it. Chicken or the egg, which came first, but it seems like it's a big priority for at least the handful that I reached out to that got back to me. And it looks like some of the responses are coming in the chat are similar. James is saying it was institutional goals set by a recent strategic plan. So very focused on that. Yep. That's great. Thank you. And thank you all for chiming in. Please continue to do so. It's great that folks are saying a lot of things that are happening in the economy and in government are impacting students on an individual basis. And we're seeing that we as an advancement shop are really wanting to help and to focus on that. But we're also seeing donors coming in and saying, how can I contribute to this and make a difference and try to make up for some of the gap that we're seeing? So absolutely wonderful. And this is why we love working in philanthropy because of the gaps that it's able to fill and the work that we're able to do that directly impacts folks. So thank you all for your thoughts on this really important subject. On our next slide, I wanted to look a little bit at the advancement staff growth that Deborah mentioned briefly earlier. Here, this is total staff in the chart. That's total staff across advancement shops who reported. So nobody's got advancement staff of 1,200 people that was kind of an alarming number when I first saw that. The median numbers are actually the ones on the left-hand side. So that gives you a little bit more context in terms of what it looks like on an individual kind of institutional level. But it's great to see the growth here in advancement staff, as Deborah mentioned. Obviously a lot of places have been struggling in recent years due to a budget cuts that may have happened during the pandemic and hiring freezes, all sorts of things as institutions were trying to adapt to the situation. A lot of places have not necessarily, across all the markets we serve at CASE, they haven't necessarily seen a return to the staffing and budget levels that they saw pre-pandemic. So it's nice to see that folks in Canada are really starting to emphasize the need to get the staffing levels back up where they belong. There's a note on the bottom here that's really important that we saw growth in all the different functional areas of advancement that we looked at. So management, services, alumni relations, MarCom and fundraising. And the largest increase was in alumni relations. It's great to see that. I think it really shows the importance of the alumni engagement work that we do and recognizing that gifts, as we saw before, might be coming directly from alumni but also from other sources where alumni might be behind the scenes directing those gifts. So really important and great to see that you all are responding to that. My next slide is about expense distribution. So where we're spending our money in terms of different functional areas in advancement. Is that one coming up, Debra? It's coming, it's coming. Thank you. So I love these kind of rainbow slides. So expenses, now something to keep in mind here is that the biggest chunk of expenses in many cases are the salaries and benefits for our advancement staff. So the distribution of staffing is gonna look very similar to expense distribution as well. And you can see some interesting things here. So in smaller shops, we often see that there are more advancement management folks not only because they're leading the shop but also because they're probably contributing to other areas of work as well. And so they are kind of multitasking across the advancement shop because of just the realities of operating a smaller advancement shop. In the larger shops, what you can see is as they grow and that research has been showing this for a few years now as they grow, shops that want to make sure that their fundraising staff continues to grow and their advancement services also continue to grow. Really seeing great ROI from advancement services. Of course, we love advancement services folks. They're the data folks and our database folks but also prospect researchers and portfolio managers. A lot of folks will fall into there. So really important to keep growing those areas but also starting to see some economies of scale in other areas like management and marketing communications and potentially alumni relations as well. So you see those kind of stabilize as other areas of advancement shop grow. So my next slide, I do have a poll for you. So this is not a chat one. This is one that I believe Leah can launch for us but what I wanted to do and it may be that everybody ends up in the same bucket here but I just thought it would be fun to ask this while we're together. In terms of funding and support for your advancement shop. So we're talking about dollars and technology and event funding and all those sorts of things. Do you feel like you have sufficient investment from your institution in your advancement operations? And separately from that how do you feel about your staffing levels? And we're looking at this as of today. So there might've been changes since you submitted your fiscal year 24 data but where do you feel you are in terms of staffing? So you feel like you're great in both or you have enough investment in most areas but you're a little short on staff or maybe it's the other way. You'd like to have more investment but if you feel like you've got a sufficient team there now or maybe it turns out that you'd rather just have more both and I would understand that too but we'd love to hear where you all feel like you are these days particularly given the struggles we've seen in recent years in terms of both investment and staffing. So I'll stop talking for a second give you all a chance to vote and we'll see where these come out. How are we doing there? Leah, coming through? Yeah, one more second. All right, great. And you'll be able to display the results, yeah? Yeah, there we go. OK, that is quite a mix, even more of a mix maybe than I expected. So it's great to see that. We know that in terms of one-on-one conversations with institutions over the past year or so, I think I only talked to one of them where they said, yeah, we feel fully staffed, and we're ready to go, and we have our budgets back, and it's all great. So there are some folks, and it's great to see that four out of 25 said that you're now great on both. So it's wonderful to see that growth and reinvestment and staffing up that we know you all have needed, and that's across the industry for some time now. So that's great to see, an interesting mix between investment versus staffing and feeling sufficient there, and then most folks, 14 out of 25, saying we could use more of both. And I think I get it. I mean, there is a clear ROI from adding new advancement staff across all functions. It's amazing some of the research there. So I hear you on that. Appreciate you all chiming in, and it's great to see more folks feeling like they're getting where they need to be in terms of staffing and investment. So next slide, what I wanted to do was just pull out some of the themes that came out of our most recent report for Canada, and it's based on the data that we've been talking about so far today. So this belief in the power of higher ed to create opportunities for students and benefits to the public. So for students, you can see that investment and the donations going to financial aid, direct student support. Also, we're seeing great giving towards academic units and support for faculty and staff salary, which also helps reduce the cost of providing an education. Also seeing that great continuing support for institutional research, meaning research done at colleges and universities in particular. Really seeing the benefit to the public in the eyes of donors, and they're still wanting to support that, so great to see. Institutional leadership, recognizing advancement as a partner for revenue stability with all the things we have going on now. Advancement's kind of come up in the world a little bit, and it's wonderful to see that reinvestment and getting those staff numbers back where you feel like you have a good, solid, and productive team. Alumni engagement, mentioned this a couple of times, great to see the increase in staffing around alumni relations. And also recognizing the need to be part of the lives of our alumni as they're developing the capacity to give gifts in the future, and hopefully larger gifts in the future, but also recognizing their power to direct gifts from a variety of organizations that they might be part of. Another one, the desire and ability of donors to create specific impacts through their giving. We saw that increase in restricted giving to particular areas. We know that issue-based giving has grown a lot versus that old type of giving which is I have this relationship with this university, and therefore I give there. As my grandmother would say, those days are gone forever. We're really looking now at what are you doing as an institution that relates to something that I care about, and can you show me those impacts? It's a great opportunity there to bring in new donors and inspire them to give to particular things that you're doing as an institution, hopefully upgrading their gifts in future, but also an opportunity for you all to work with your academics as well on looking for some of those transformational, big ideas that might really inspire donors to give some of those larger gifts. And then of course, continued public trust in higher ed. We have a quote from Sue Cunningham, our CEO coming up in just a little bit, but if you really want to know what people care about, you follow the money. It's not just people talking about how important higher education is, they're still giving, and they're giving more than ever before, so it's great to see that. There's still that strong belief in higher education and trust in our institutions, and it's being reflected in donor gifts. And my last bit here is just a moment with a good old return on investment, different ways of calculating this, different versions that we can provide as case, cost to raise a dollar, ROI, productivity versus staff, versus investment, all sorts of different ways to make the argument to your institutional leaders and boards, et cetera, on the need to continue investing in advancement and the impact that you all are having on the institution as advancement shops. Here, this is based on expenditures versus new funds committed. And you can see a couple of interesting standouts here. So medical doctoral has a high ROI. That is basically from our calculations, it's based on very high fundraising production, as you might imagine. The primarily undergrad number is high as well. In that case, it's because their expenditures tend to be lower. So obviously different ways of getting a great ROI. We were talking to some smaller institutions recently. When we do their calculations, I'm excited because I think they're gonna have really high ROI because they have just two or three people in their advancement shop, and people are divided among a lot of different tasks. And so in that case, I think they're gonna see that they're actually doing some wonderful work. And that if they add more people to their advancement shop, they're gonna see an increase in fundraising production more quickly because they've got the ROI, they've got a great start, they've got the right processes and systems in place. This is a great way to argue for continued investment, as I mentioned, in the advancement function. And it's great to see some of these numbers. So my last slide then is another question for the chat. And it's really about using the data that you collect, that you provide to us, and thank you again for doing that, in order to be able to demonstrate your impact. And there are lots of different ways of doing this. Sometimes it's showing your impact to your institutional leaders to say, yes, you need to continue to invest in us, and we're having a significant impact on institutional revenue. But it might also come into conversations with donors as well. Can we demonstrate to you the impact that we have on this issue or in our area, in this region, on students? There are lots of different things that donors might be looking for in terms of impact. So it's always nice to be able to have data to back up those conversations. In this case, the chat was specifically about showing your importance and value and impact to the institution for your institutional leader, so that they can just see the value that you have, which is huge. Sometimes it's just about having those conversations and providing the right data that your institutional leaders will respond to and understand and act on. So thank you again for putting your thoughts and comments in the chat there. I think we're doing great on our time. So thank you all for that as well. I will look through the chat and the Q&A now as well. But thank you all for letting me kind of go through and talk about some of our key findings for this year. With that, I will hand things over to Nick. Thanks, y'all. Thanks. Thanks, Fleming. As Danielle mentioned, we know intimately from all of our conversations with you all in participating in the survey that this is a heavy lift for you. Your contributions to the survey help us do things like this findings webinar and our findings report that give a pulse check on the industry and keep us all moving forward at large. But since it's so much work for you, we wanna kind of give that data, give that information back to you. And that's really what my service to all of our survey participants at CASE is translating and summarizing all of the work that you put in and your trends and your data back into your hands so that you can easily and quickly get the contextual information and get the most out of the work that you already put in. And so we have a few resources that I just wanna highlight with my brief time today. The first being the findings report itself, which we've gone over today. And then it's also available online. I'll just put the link to that findings report in the chat once again. And then in our survey portal, we also have availability for you guys to deep dive yourselves into the data. And Deborah will talk about that in a little bit. But then most of my purview kind of centers around these summary points. And then most of my purview kind of centers around the summary benchmarking reports and our strategic benchmarking reports, both of which are just a nice succinct way for you to get that data back into your hands in a nice usable format, easy to plop into PowerPoint slides or reference documents and can communicate that data and those trends and those successes to other stakeholders and other staff members at your institutions and easily walk away with the kind of, so what? How do we translate these ones and zeros into human words and walk away with something meaningful? So if we go to the next slide, please. I just quickly wanted to highlight something that is also available for you in our survey platform. So if everybody logs into that same website where you took the survey and navigate to the resources tab, you'll find the ability to download what we call our summary benchmark reports. And if you've participated in our survey year after year, you will hopefully be familiar with these. It's really just a thank you for one, being a case member, but then two, doing that survey. So we provide some quick summarizing, some five key performance indicators and some other breakouts in the terms of the data that you can judge your progress against other people in your other universities in your reporting group or the industry at large across Canada. So we designed these to have a quick and intuitive feel that's designed to share with those staff and volunteer leaders or other stakeholders. But really this is just kind of our first step. And we always encourage you if you want the opportunity to talk about some of the things I've already seen today in the chat, like the strategy, how your strategies are informing those data trends or how the data can inform future strategies. Or I also saw a great example of using themes, not projects for donor relations. Navigating how do we put the numbers with the quantitative, with the qualitative really comes in as our next step with the strategic reports. But between both reports, and if you go to the next slide, please. I just briefly wanted to show you kind of how these work and we'd really try to make them feel at home for you with this dashboard interpretation. I think this is actually a video. Oh yeah, so if we hover over all of these interactive charts and tables, you can see the deep dive of data and all the numbers that can kind of come back into your hands. And we switch these between what's a relevant way for communicating these findings to you, whether that is as dollars or as percentages. And then, like I said, easy to plop, download and plop into a PowerPoint and have that communication, have that conversation with others at your university. And next slide, please. But like I said, this is something that you have available for you. So when you go home today, or when you switch out of this webinar, you can log in and download that report. If you wanna have those conversations about, okay, so what does this mean? Is down bad or is this a long-term strategy? Is this a long-term growth? How do the fiscal year 24 results reflect the good work that we know we're all doing, whether we are short-staffed or short-invested, or were those four institutions or those four participants who said, we are staffed and we are invested pretty well. There's something for everybody and have those contextualizing conversations about what does this mean for your trends over time? What does this mean in reference to the industry at large? And what does this mean for the other institutions that we benchmark against, right? So the summary, whereas the summary reports, we suggest those from your reporting group that you reported in the survey. With the strategic port, we can get a little bit broader where you pick those other institutions you'd like to compare against and see a little bit more of a deep dive in that data. So all of that to say, next slide, please. All of that to say, really, we have the resources for you. They're at your fingertips. We encourage you to fully explore. Please explore our website or reach out to us via email. We want to make sure that you're getting the most out of your survey participation, identifying those areas of opportunity or the strengths that you're already leveraging, the new investments and the best practices that you can take advantage of today in order to continue that progress and make sure that good work is getting recognized. And then also we're here to help you dig through the detailed data and find those quick and easy wins that you can take action on tomorrow. So thank you. All right. And now we're just switching back to me to wrap things up. I think whether we're talking about last year's trends or we're talking about current impacts of higher education, I think this is a wonderful quote from Sue. It's important to just pause and recognize the hard work that you do, that your teams do, and that the support that's generated from the work you do to advance higher education and the work you do to advance education. I think it's really important. Before we wrap up, we do have one last poll. What best describes your FY25 performance? I know that most of you will have finished your fiscal year 25. I know at least in our data, we have a couple of institutions that have fiscal year ends in June. So if you are one of those, just give us kind of your best estimate. What are you seeing in terms of performance in FY25? We know this year has been wildly different than fiscal year 24. We're all very anxious and excited to collect data again this year to get a good sense of how things are going because we are just living in the land of constant change right now. All right, so keep answering here and Shalia will share the findings or the results here in a moment when she gets, hits a good number there. All right. Wow, okay. Wow, it's kind of all over the place. This is amazing. All right, so definitely some increases in dollars with donors doing all kinds of things. I see some flattened dollars in the middle there. The decrease in dollars flattened donors, 28% in that. That was actually the largest category, decrease in dollars flattened donors for those of you that responded. Okay, wow, all right. Well, with that under our belts, talk a little bit about what you can do next and I'll give you a little bit of a heads up about what's coming in next year's survey. So what are some things you can do now? You can access the 2024 Key Findings Report. That's the data that we're looking at today. So definitely download that from our website. You can review your Summary Benchmarking Report. As Nick mentioned, that is available on the case survey website. The one thing that we have added this year for you all, many of you know, if you participated in the survey this year, you know that we implemented a new survey system over the last 12 to 18 months. We are still in the process of implementing the functionality. Right now, all of our surveys, all of our case surveys are in the system now. We are collecting data in this new system and we have some benchmarking available in the system, but not all. So what we have done this year to make it easier for you to have access to your data is you can download, we have all of the responses with the institution names de-identified in an Excel spreadsheet that you can download. And this is in the same location on the site as your Summary Benchmarking Reports. So for those of you who did participate, you have to have submitted data. It had to be clean and accepted data, right? We reviewed it and accepted data. You'll have access to this information. And there's just a little note here that you'll log into the site, you'll go to the resources menu, and there are some folders there where you can access both the summary report and the data in an Excel format. We are going to be working on building out kind of more built-in reports into the benchmarking system starting this summer. So that will be coming very soon. And then of course, you can build solutions with CASE. So as Nick mentioned, you can purchase that strategic benchmarking report, take part in a benchmarking cohort. So this is a meeting where those who have participated in some of our surveys can join as a group and discuss the stories behind the data. And then we also offer the ability to bring the Insights Team on site for more customized and detailed training. And then in terms of what's coming next, so the 2025 survey will be opening very soon. It will be opening in June. There are no changes to the survey content this year. We haven't had any changes to our standards. We'll be making a few tweaks just from things that we learned from the new system, but nothing that will dramatically change the reports that you have to pull, the data that you have to pull and provide. We are going to be highlighting, you know, which questions are required, which questions are optional. I know we heard from a lot of you that it's a lot of work to provide this data and we want to make sure we're as flexible as we can be so that you're able to participate. It's really, really helpful for us, not just to have your one-time participation, but to have your consistent participation. It allows us to do much more robust analysis with that. So one change that is happening this year that's different from prior processes, and you'll get more information on this in the coming weeks, but we are changing how you sign up to take the survey. In the past, we used to send out a form that you had to fill out to say that you wanted to take the survey each year. Now that we have this, you know, our survey's all in this consolidated system, those of you who participated last year, you all have logins to the system. You will literally just log in when the survey opens this year. We'll be sending out a notification and you'll, you know, there's a little checkbox there that tells us that you'll participate. You just have to click a little box. So not quite as many steps this year to get you in the system. We're really happy about that. I think it'll be a really smooth and easy process. And if you have any questions about accessing the system, if you're not sure if you have a login, if you have a login but you don't see the resources tab or any questions like that, please email insights at case.org and we can help you, you know, help you figure it out. We can help you troubleshoot the issue. And that is what I have for today. If there are any final questions, I see a few more things in the chat. Is there anything else I need to touch on before we wrap up? I just want to say thanks to you all for putting so many of your thoughts and experiences in the chat. It's super valuable to hear what you all are doing and the experiments that you're trying that seem to be paying off in many cases. So thank you for sharing those. Thank you all for also for the question about issue-based giving and more kind of impact focused donors. Would love to chat more about that. Obviously we're just about out of our time here but I put my email address in the chat. So please do reach out if you'd like to continue these conversations. We've got lots of resources. I'm always happy to chat about these different areas and also I can make sure I get you to the right folks as well. So please do feel free to reach out. It's been great working with you all today and really appreciate your time. And thanks to the CASE Insights Team for sharing these insights with us. That was great. All right, thank you all. Bye-bye.

philanthropy

CASE Insights

higher education

Canada

donor trends

alumni engagement

fundraising

institutional strategies

restricted vs unrestricted giving