Hello, thanks for joining us today. We'll just give it a moment to let the numbers tick up, get everybody in, but I can tell you we're very happy that you're here. As you are coming in, we'd love to know who we have, so take a moment and just put in the chat where you're coming from today would be fantastic. I think we're expecting a pretty large group. Oh, yay, I can see it coming in. Perfect. Now I'm just reading names. I must have catatonic. I see some nice familiar names. Hi, friends. Thanks, folks, for joining us today. This is one of our favorite webinars of the year where we get a chance to talk about the trends in higher education philanthropy, and very happy to have you with us today. We're still getting a nice inch up, but it looks like to be slowing down slightly, and since we've got a nice action-packed session for you today, I will go ahead and just get us kicked off. But again, if you're just joining us, as you can probably guess, we're just asking folks to tell us where you're from in the chat. Welcome. Today is the day where we're going to spend some time discussing the key findings for the fiscal year 2023 results from the Case Insights and Voluntary Supportive Education Survey, or as you all probably know, VSE, which is a bit less of a mouthful. A couple of housekeeping items before I introduce my panelists, or I should say have my panelists introduce themselves. This will be recorded. We have also uploaded the slides, so you'll have access to those. So hopefully you can just sit back and enjoy the presentation today. Speaking of that, though, we do want to keep this interactive. We're going to have a few opportunities for polls. We'd love to hear from you. And then, of course, as you're using the chat, that's a great opportunity to interact with one another. And if you have questions for any of us, we invite you to use the Q&A feature within Zoom. All right. Well, I am going to get us started. And before we kick off the session itself, I wanted to add some gratitude from Case. First of all, this webinar is sponsored by two of our fantastic educational partners, Blackbaud and the newly named Huron GDNA. And we are very grateful for their support of this webinar and, frankly, a lot of the work that we do within Case and Case Insights specifically. And I think it's of utmost importance to take a moment and just say thank you to all of you whose institutions took part in this survey. We know it's a lot of work to provide this data so that we can have these annual benchmarks. And that's what really makes this the authoritative survey on educational giving or higher ed giving in the U.S. And so, again, thank you. You are what makes this research possible. So, let's take a moment and introduce ourselves. And I'm actually going to come back to that slide in just a moment. So, hi. Jenny Cook-Smith. I lead our Case Insights Solutions team. And I will be a bit of your emcee or moderator today as my two colleagues take you through the findings and specifically what you as case members can do with those findings. So, I'm going to have each of them introduce themselves. Anne? I'm Anne Kaplan. I'm the Director of the Voluntary Support of Education Survey here at Case. I also manage the Alumni Engagement Survey even though it's not in my title. And I've been managing the VSE since the year 2000 when it was at the Council for Aid to Education. And it's a pleasure being here. And I'm Nick Campisi, Data Scientist with Case. I primarily work on our benchmarking reports, which I'm going to talk about today. But I otherwise enjoy just combining data points and bridging our different surveys to get most insights we possibly can out of all the hard work you guys put into those. Great. Thanks, Nick and Anne. And just to give you an idea of our plan for today, we'll start by just level setting and sharing a little bit of what we mean when we say the words case insights. And then we're going to spend the bulk of today on those other two boxes. So Anne, again, is going to take you through what we learned and what we saw for FY23 and how that compares to previous years. And then Nick is going to talk about what that means from a benchmarking perspective. So a little bit about our case insights team here at Case. This is the area, as you can see by our tagline, where we look at all of the data, the standards and the research that we believe are important for you. And I'd say particularly as we think about supporting an integrated approach to advancement. And so that's why you can see here that while today is all about our philanthropy metrics, there's way more to the work we're doing than just analyzing trends and fundraising, because we know that doesn't happen in a vacuum. Anne mentioned the alumni engagement survey. That will be up this spring, or I should say for those of you in the northern hemisphere this spring, but looking over the next couple of months, those results will be coming out. That's a survey that we've been doing for the last five years. As we think about the philanthropy results, we also do look at philanthropy trends in UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and where am I blanking? I'm missing one. Asia Pacific. Australia, New Zealand. Yes, as well. And so those will be coming out as fiscal years. And in the next up will be our Canadian review. We are hard at work developing a framework to better measure marketing and communications. That will look at how we started alumni engagement. So the idea of a white paper and looking at a framework for how we measure that. And again, how it fits in these other elements. We're also launching a campaign survey. So I'd say if any of you are joining today and you completed a campaign in the last five years, we'd love to know it because we're trying to understand some key metrics to look at transparency and accountability in campaign counting. And then last but not least, we have a tool that actually measures the, we call it the Advancement Inclusion Index. And it looks at your advancement office's maturity on a number of different measures to understand that DEIB maturity. All of this is powered by our global reporting standards, which are the common set of counting practices that allow us to have these comparisons that we'll be looking at today. So let's actually start off. We asked you to put in the chat and tell us who you are, but we'd love to know what area within advancement you represent. So you should be seeing a poll launching. And we'll just give you a moment to take part. And Leah, as it looks like we've got a majority voting, feel free to go ahead and put that on the screen. Our colleague, Leah Prince, who is our Senior Project Manager on Insight Solutions is keeping everything going behind the scenes for us today. And no surprise, we have the vast majority here from the Advancement Services and Operations. Again, many of you, either your teams or you yourself did the hard work in providing this data, but really happy to see some nice representation throughout and particularly from our group of leaders as well. So I am going to pass things over to Ann to talk a little bit about what we saw in the FY23 results. Oh, and you're on mute. I see that. Okay, so the Voluntary Support of Education Survey began in 1957. So this is the 66th year that this report is coming out in some form. And I actually have some of the earlier ones in paper on my shelf, and I just, it's great to see how far it's come. The participants in the survey raised about 80% of the funds among higher education institutions in the United States. And we do an estimate of the non-respondents as well. The 2023 findings are based on responses from 757 institutions. The response rate has been as high as 1,200, it fluctuates, but the estimating methodology accounts for that. Okay, so the basic insights from this study this year are that charitable gifts to US institutions of higher education amounted to $58 billion in fiscal year 2023. That's the second highest total in the 66 year history of the survey. However, it represents a slight decline from the previous year, and I'll show you that later. Personal giving declined, giving from organizations increased modestly, and we'll explain that later. We have a small sample, I would call it a convenient sample of 236 respondents that answered a relatively new question on gift bans. And those respondents reported that just over half of the funds received came from under 2% of the donors. So let's take a look at some of the findings. On the high level, total support was 58 billion, and you can see the percentage represented by alumni and non-alumni individuals and organizations. The reason all organizations are grouped together here is that we introduced donor advised funds as a separate category in 2022, and I don't have enough data to disaggregate that into a national estimate yet, but the organizations represented are foundations, corporations and their foundations, donor advised funds, and other organizations such as religious organizations, other nonprofits, other universities. So that's sort of a catch-all for everything that's not broken out separately. Can you- And we should add that this is looking at hard credit. So if someone was an alumnus that gave through their family foundation, or- Or donor advised funds, or the closely-holding company. Right, and if we looked over multiple years, decades, you would see that organizations overtook individuals as sources of gifts, but that is the reason for that. That's part of the reason. The other reason is the growth in assets at private foundations as well, no matter who controls the assets. So this is just a five-year snapshot of giving. So you can see that we hit a high in 2022, and then kind of returned to normal. Looks like it is a decline. There's no saying that it isn't, but this is really a return to ordinary circumstances, and I will be explaining why 2022 was so different from 2023. And for those of you, I know for me, sometimes seeing these bars is hard to interpret, but this was, I know from 21 to 22, a 12 and a half percent increase, which was kind of unknown, or not unknown, but unheard of, or at least in the last decade when we've looked at some of these trends. So I think you'll be very interested in hearing some of the unpacking Ann's gonna do as we look at some of those economic and other factors. Okay, so here's a big one. This is a summary of what happened in the stock market, which is not really a thing, but these different indexes. And you can see where we had giving up 12.5%, as Jenny just said, and then down 2.5%. And you can see where the change in the values of certain indexes over certain periods. And we, as people who work in higher education, tend to think in terms of a fiscal year, but the donors, whether they are organizations or individuals, are thinking in a calendar year. So when you see on the lower chart, the start of the calendar year to the end, look at how we have double digit increases. And this is when individuals and some organizations were making plans. I can put a pin in that because some of them were making plans for 2023. Organizations often do that. So that's sort of foreshadowing why organization giving was up slightly where personal giving was down. And then if you look at the start of the calendar year to the end of the calendar year, 2023, so that's midway through the fiscal year. But when most of the fundraising takes place, November and December, the stock market was down. It was down a lot. And not only does that change someone's assets, but it changes a person's perception of his or her own wealth and capacity to give. Can make you nervous. And then if you're doing formal tax planning, you're obviously gonna be giving less. So let's go to the next slide. So the overall trends, giving was down 2.5%. All of that was personal giving. Organization giving was up 2.7%, but if you adjust for inflation, that's not that much. And giving for current operations was up slightly, capital purpose giving, which includes gifts to endowment, that's the primary part of it, it's not just buildings. Those gifts were down. And that also makes a lot of sense because those gifts are often made either in the form of stock, right? Or with underlying assets that belong to the donor, which are themselves health and security. So I might have a retirement plan, health and securities, I might make my gift in stock, but my perception of where I am in terms of affluence is based often on where the stock market is. And this is why when we look at giving, we want to look, first of all, at our own giving, which Nick will talk about later, but also you want to look at multiple years. Let's go to the next one. Okay, so just to explain why organization giving, or to, this is a hypothesis about why corporate giving was within our respondents up a little bit. You can see where corporate profits were. They're going up. Profits are going up, even when the stock market is not going up, right? So corporations that are making charitable gifts, either through their foundations or directly, may make those decisions a year ahead of time. So they were making this decision in 2022, committed the gifts, then they flowed through the next year. That's kind of a simplistic view, but you can see that with the ups and downs in the economy, corporate profits are not suffering. And then if we were to look at assets held by private foundations, that's kind of their corpus and what they give through, those assets have also increased, both because of investment returns, but also if there's new foundation formation that would cause that. So one of the things that this begins to suggest is that these major gifts driven by assets and that go to capital purposes, while they were not up this year, it's still quite a large percentage. And then in the news, you sort of hear of colleges and universities hoarding wealth and endowments are through the roof, but let's take a look. Gifts to endowments primarily fund that giant gray area called student financial aid. After that, academic divisions, so departments within institutions and then faculty and staff compensation. This keeps the place running. This is the engine of the organization. And this is my opinion, but I think these gifts redistribute income much more than outright gifts to current operations do. But those are important also, most of those go to research. And that makes sense because research has a contained time period. So you're not gonna endow a research project in perpetuity, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. So that is the lion's share of giving. And then we also see strong giving just to academic divisions within the institutions. So they fund very different things. And I've often asked the question, why aren't more gifts unrestricted completely? And it's because the larger gifts are not going to be. But what they are restricted to is very useful and really keeps our organizations going. So, and again, in keeping with some of the headlines recently about accumulation of wealth and influence of large donors, I looked at the 20 institutions that raised the most over the past decade. And as you can see, it's not like they're gaining a larger and larger share. Right, they do have a commanding share to remind ourselves that these are multipurpose nonprofits. They have a university, they may have a hospital and an art collection, a symphony, they do medical research. So they're not just educational organizations. I always think of them as large multipurpose nonprofits. So when they're raising money, there are a lot of cases they can make to different kinds of audiences. If I'm interested in medical research, I might give to one of these institutions. If I attended and had a good experience, I might wanna give back. And so I'd be giving to a college. There was a time not too long ago where there was an influx of gifts of art to colleges and universities. It caused a spike in giving. And it was because these institutions are good stewards of those kinds of assets. Right, if you've been a collector for many years and everything's temporary, where are you gonna leave your precious collection to be cared for? So there's a lot going on there in those 20 institutions and many others. So I mentioned earlier in the insights that we do have a question on gift bands. So donors, donors, respondents will tell us the percentage of gifts in terms of dollar amount and number of gifts that came. This actually in the data portal tool, which Nick will talk about a little, the dollars and numbers of gifts are divided by donor type. So there's a real richness of data that you can't see in just this summary. But you can see that more than half of the money, so gifts of a million dollars or more come from under 2% of the donors. I'm going to argue that's a good thing. And so we'll move to the next slide. So this is a little messier than the corporate assets and the foundation assets, sorry, corporate profits and foundation assets lines. But this is from the most recent tax return data available from the IRS. And it shows you number of returns, the blue, and then income reported on those returns. And you can see when you get to a million dollars and more, you can barely see the number. So you've got a very small number of returns representing a fairly substantial amount of income. Now there's more income at 100,000 because there are a lot more people there. So you're multiplying them together. But it is a similar pattern. So let me, this comes from our alumni engagement survey and answering this question were 205 institutions. Again, this is a convenient sample. It's not a national finding, but it gives us a hint. And it is the second year where we saw this pattern where as alumni age, they're much more likely to give. And also they give a lot more, right? The percentage of the dollars in the 31 and up age range is much higher. So with this suggests a couple of things. One, we should be studying alumni engagement because it's not all money. And even if you want to focus on money, you have to engage people before they have enough to make substantial gifts so that you have a relationship. But the second thing is that we used to refer to the ages 35 to 64 back in my GivingUSA days as the prime giving age range. This is when people have come into their own, even before the economy was the economy we're living in today, it still took some time to take care of yourself, take care of your family, take care of your community. And then if you have something left, then you go outside that circle and then you become more philanthropic. So as you have more money and more emotional and financial security, you're more likely to give. And I would argue this is as it should be. This is not a disturbing finding at all. So let's go to the next one. The reason, I'm just gonna start this off, but the reason it's not disturbing is people have been saying, I'm sure you've been hearing in the news, well, these donors have all this control over the agenda at campuses. Case has explicit statements about donor control and influence. Donor, you may, yes, you may lose a donor if they want more than recognition and influence, like intent, general intent. This should be for research or this should... But when it starts to slip into control, your relationship may have to pause because that's not ethical. And that's not just in higher education fundraising anywhere. So Jenny, maybe you wanna say a little more about this statement. Let me just find my unmute button. Yes, great. And thank you, Anne. I think it's always, I love kind of getting in your brain for a few minutes and hearing what these findings mean as we look at that greater context. A couple of things to add to this. One, because this has been something that our library has had a lot of queries on. We have this in the form of a nice, pretty sort of member facing document or something that you could also share broadly that will be coming on KACE's website soon. It's gonna be part of our new standards page. So just know that we'll have a nice document you can download. But to Anne's point, there's a lot in the standards around ethics. And I think if you're not familiar, that's a really helpful place to go because based on the slide, we sort of told you a little bit about donor control. But when you get into the book itself, you see there's really specific cases of examples of things that would fit into the idea of that control that would not be admissible. Similar to donor influence, what we want to talk about is this idea of undue influence. And we know that as you can see here, the notation around the quid pro quo, and assuming that if we go back to the definition of educational philanthropy, that we're really clear and upfront that by supporting institutions and schools, that donors are getting that stewardship and recognition for their support. It's supporting the mission, but they're not getting those other pieces. And again, the standards are pretty clear of some good examples for you. We thought that it'd probably be a good opportunity why we have you all here today. If we went through some of that and you thought, I probably need to do a little bit more work and I'm getting myself up to speed on the global standards, we do have a course. And this is something that upon completion, you do get a digital badge so you can share that you're a standard scholar. And more importantly, it's meant to really walk through those components. For the people at your institution that need to be those standard bearers and make sure that as a group, that your advancement team is adhering to that. And I think with the news, this is important now more than ever. So we are going to launch another poll because Anne shared with you what's happening in 23. And by the nature of what we do, we're always looking back. So we realize we're sharing this data from you as many of you are in the final quarter of your fiscal year 24 results. So we'd love, I always think it's helpful to, we've got a lot of options for you because we know there's a lot of ways this can go, but to tell us what's happening currently at your own institutions. And as you're looking at this, make sure you'll see we have some options for up in donors, up in dollars, down in donors, down in dollars, but also that flat piece because sometimes we hear, yeah, it's sort of just status quo about the same as we had last year. I know some of you are also, it's my own alma mater's giving day. I know it is giving day season. So obviously some of these questions are pertaining to what happens on your giving days as well, but to your best of your knowledge, where you are right now. And we'll have Leah post those as we get to a majority here. All right, well, I don't know if it's a selection bias that those of you that chose to attend this webinar represent institutions that are doing pretty well as we look towards the stage in the fiscal year, but we do see, if we look at sort of those top three, that you're somewhere in that increase in dollars, the majority of you, but we do see a distribution throughout. And of course, keep in mind, this is aside from some of the points that Anne made when we think of your own institutions, we know that campaigns and strategies can have a real impact on those trends as well. Okay, so we're gonna keep you interactive. We have one more poll. And I mean, I should have given you an answer that says nothing, you sleep great. So this might be a little bit metaphorical, but we're giving you an option to pick two. And the top two things, when we look at some of the challenges that we as case are hearing that many of you are experiencing, we'd just love to know, what are the things right now that are keeping you up at night or at least causing you a little more pause and concern? And we're gonna go ahead and say out loud for anyone that marks other, we'd love to know in the chat what that other is as well. All right, and let's go ahead and see what our poll results are. So Monica, yeah, that idea of the influence of donors and how to draw boundaries, which goes exactly to this question of donor control and donor influence. Great point. Interesting, I think if I remember correctly that last year, I do believe that number one was finding training and retaining talent, which has shifted to number two this year with the keeping up with expectations of campus leadership, which we thought might be the case. Again, having just almost wrapped up, we still have, I guess, three districts, but many of our district conferences and opportunity here for many of you, lots, lots of things. And appreciate that, Scott, your current capital campaign is your third that keeps you up at night as well. Well, thank you again. And I'm going to, before we shift things over to Nick, I wanted to just take a moment. I think these are things that probably many of you are well aware of, but I don't think it hurts just to take a moment and to remind ourselves, okay, and share what's going on big picture. And so our goal, and specifically when we look at the work that our solutions team is doing at Case is that we take the great work of Ann's team and say, now, what does this mean to you? Or this idea of so what? And so as a reminder, the number one thing you really should be doing before you ever do anything else is understand your own year over year trends. I cannot stress that enough. And then once you have a sense of what happened year over year, particularly based on where you placed your effort and energy, then we move into that next step, which is looking at some comparison benchmarks. And I think of those as both the KPIs. So what is the measure that we had compared to the measure of our peers, as well as the trends? What was the direction that we went compared to our peers? And I made a note that I think when you do this, it can be helpful to see this on individual peers. And Nick's gonna talk about a couple of ways that you can do this, as well as a median of peers. And that idea of, if you look at the middle of the group and where you higher or lower, or did they all go up and you went down? I put my hands the wrong way, but you get the picture. Those are key places to start. So while Anne looked at the national estimate and looked at the big picture trends overall, we're actually, as we shift into what to do with this, going to move to more of a median, or again, that individual comparison. And then that last step is this idea of identifying, did we care? So by that, I mean, let's say that your focus last year was on your campaign, you were really focused on your major or principal giving donors. You were less focused on shoring up a base of alumni. That balance might've meant that, yes, your alumni donor counts went down, but it also may have been because your strategy had been you were focusing on that pipeline or that larger group of donors. So always keep that in mind as well. And then I think based on that strategy, it gives you that idea. Did we course correct? Was it our strategy and it just didn't work? Or did we celebrate? These were the things we planned and we see the data moving in this direction. So with that preface, I'm going to pass things over to Nick to kind of talk through what we do with this data. Thanks, Jenny. So this has been an exciting week, I would say for us data geeks, not only do we get a findings webinar, but then I should also say, while the VSE data has been available in the case data portal for a while, we just added our summary benchmarking reports for our participants as a member benefit and a huge thank you for all the hard work it takes to complete and submit your surveys. And then I saw some of our friends from the Great White North in here today as well. So the Canadian philanthropy survey that was benchmarking reports also went out this week. So a lot of data being thrown at everybody today, but hopefully in ways that we can easily digest them. As Jenny alluded to, we have two different versions of that. On the left here, I just took a screenshot of our summary benchmarking report. This is the one that's loaded online. It's the kind of precursor to start that benchmarking, looking at your trends and then how they look at compared to peers, which I'll get to in a minute. And then on the right is our strategic benchmarking. Uh-oh, I think we may have lost Nick. Anna, is he frozen for you as well? Yes. OK. He looks very thoughtful, though. At least he's frozen in a good expression. He has a strategic. So hopefully, we'll get Nick back in just a moment. While we're waiting on Nick, I'll fill in here. So as he was saying, on the other side, we have our strategic benchmarking report. So again, the one on the left, this is something that is available to all of you that took part in the survey. It is now loaded in the data portal. We'll talk more about accessing. On the right is our strategic benchmarking report. This report is available for purchase and a couple of different versions, which we'll speak to. But what Nick pulled in here is showing you that idea of that what next. So notice that on the summary report, you do see that comparison to peers. For the VSE, your peers are based on an algorithm where we look at the institutions based on a number of factors from the survey as well as appended data that look most like you. You do see in that report who those 10 institutions are. And then from here on out, all data shows you compared to the median. And Nick is back. So Nick, we were saying you froze in a very thoughtful expression. You said strategic, and then we lost you, but you looked strategic. I was just talking a little bit more about that summary, so I'll pass it over to you to dig in deeper to the strategic report. That's embarrassing, but probably why we shouldn't always trust technology. Anyway, so yeah, so I'm not quite sure where I got cut off, but the last thing I was saying is both of these are great resources if you want to begin benchmarking or if you have been benchmarking with and against peers as well, a great way to provide fresh perspective, especially considering that we are utilizing the data and the survey experts to the case data and the survey experts to generate these reports. So the key differences between the two, I'm not sure if Jenny mentioned this, but on the left, the summary reports, we really try to keep these minimal and digestible. We restricted this to five peers, this term peers, Jenny mentioned earlier. In the summary benchmarking reports, we take essentially a machine learning algorithm to go through the data, go through all of our participants for that year and find five that are similar to you in terms of what you and what they reported. Whereas on the right, our strategic benchmarking reports really give you that more customized option in which you can select your own peers. You'd select up to 20. So we find this is great for picking some that are similar and that you traditionally benchmark against, but then also identifying aspirational peers and having that mix. And because in the strategic reports, which the summary reports on the left don't do, is you get to see each respondent line by line. So in these screenshots, we just took two charts that are very similar, funds received over time and how that changed. On the left, you can only see three lines because you'll receive your own data, that median of those peers, and then the median for everybody who replied. And then on the right, you'll see many different lines looking like spaghetti because in the strategic reports, not only do you get the aggregated totals, but then you also get to see the trends individually. So this is a great resource if you are interested in particular universities and how they varied across different benchmarks, whether those institutions are very similar to yours and see where you perform similar above or below them. And then lastly, I think the best part of the strategic reports is just being able to talk to us. As I mentioned, we have the survey experts who design and administer the survey and give our findings webinars. And having that discussion about what's going on in your data and the peers, and then also us giving a presentation to your stakeholders or other staff, I think is a really great way to kind of summarize all this information easily for you. So next slide, please. Thank you. I'm not gonna take too much time on some different results, but I wanna give you kind of a flavor of what we cover in terms of higher level topics in our reports. The big one, I think for everybody is pipeline. And I think I saw earlier as well, there was a question in the Q&A from Lori about alumni participation. And while our philanthropy reports for the BSE survey do kind of get at that, I think when we start to talk about pipeline, bringing in our alumni engagement reports as well, and putting these together kind of gives that full picture of pipeline and starting in the process from start to finish. But in the strategic reports, we don't just look at the top line trends. We really try to break these down, look at calculations and understand kind of core trends over time for your university, rather than the major gifts that are major donors that are covered here that can vary from time to time, or from year to year rather. So this includes, we look at the giving levels that Anne mentioned previously. Here, largest donors to say, what would your core philanthropic support look like without these donors? Is it something sustainable? Is it something like we're seeing in this chart for all of our respondents, or a core, rather a core group of our respondents who applied each of these 10 years to say the top three and the top, next top nine, the top 12 that we collect the data on from the survey, these are decreasing in their proportion of total support over time a little bit. And the other donors, those not top donors by group are kind of coming up. If we remove those large donors from the overall trends of your institution, we start to have conversations about the diversity of your giving and your pipeline, and how do we move alumni kind of along that pipeline to different giving levels. Next slide, please. Thanks, and we also start to get into your strategies. I think this is something that really comes out with our calls where we get the full picture of what's going on at your institution, not just in this year, the 2023 data, but previously, and then your plans for the next year. I think these reports are really great for kind of setting up your campaigns, campaign planning. So these really provide a great context. But to, I would say we can't fully understand your alumni donors without appreciating those who are also solicited to understand what that kind of conversion rate looks like. This is something that we get into with the data and the charts and the strategic reports. And while this is only part of your strategy, I think this discussion really starts to set up those bigger plans, like I mentioned with campaign planning to really get you the full use and the full context out of your plans and then setting realistic goals compared to your peers. Here again, we just, I kept it with all of our survey respondents from those last 10 years to look at the staffing and the solicitation and then the number of alumni donors. And generally what we were seeing is that lower conversion of alumni from solicitation to becoming donors. So using these reports to dig into your strategies a little more and understand what that looks like at your institution or how it relates to those upcoming goals, I think is really crucial. But then as, oh, I'm sorry. But then again, setting those realistic goals with your current performance and then talking a little bit more about staffing here, those resources, how much can we realistically expect from our staff in this kind of post COVID climate, even with greater automation processes for solicitations, but then also AI, we just had an AI webinar from a case survey yesterday, which you can find online. But from our US institutions seeing a large increase in the number of solicited alumni versus our advancement staff as solicited alumni decrease or increase despite those staffing decreases at your institution, does this reflect a larger burden on your staff? How do you balance the increasing income goals set for the future against the staff efforts to establish and maintain those donor relationships? So we get into all of this in our strategic reports. Well, I'm thinking about our poll where we saw one of the top offenders of taking away sleep was a loss of alumni donors. I think this can be a really useful tool, right? To show that we're seeing that at the same time, we're also seeing some staffing decreases as well. Yeah. Next slide, please. Great. And lastly, the last thing I have to say is we also are really interested in return on investment here kind of keeping with that idea of staffing. I know a lot of us have had difficulties with staffing in the recent years, not just getting staff, but then also the retention. So our reports are a great way to understand that your return on investment, not just the financial investment in databases and kind of technical costs, but then also that, I guess, human costs. So understanding how these have paid off in the past and how this compares to other similar institution peers that you identify, how they're doing, it provides a great context for maybe course corrections, as Jenny mentioned earlier. Yeah, it's good to see the metric being staff salaries as opposed to FTEs, because you could have the same number of FTEs where your whole staff left and you rehired brand new people at lower salaries. So speak something to staff retention and expertise that's a result of longevity. To me, that's a story it also tells. Absolutely. I love advocating for our staff. And I think investing in our staff is a great way to maintain those pipelines that we kind of touched on earlier, outwith of institution or advancement shop size, investing in people definitely shows a return in philanthropic support for institutions. At the bottom here, at the top in the chart, we can definitely see that kind of positive relationship that just from the 2023 data, but then expanding that across the last 10 years and underneath, we definitely notice how we can start putting dollar amounts, I suppose, to start to say increasing this average staff salaries related to so much funds received coming in, despite different in this, I should also say in this particular sentence here, kind of controlled for different things, of course, larger universities with larger endowments, larger resources can essentially afford to pay staff more. But when we take that kind of factor away from the discussion, we still see the positive relationship. Thanks, Nick. I hope you all enjoyed as much as I did. Again, taking what we heard big picture and then started to extrapolate some more distinct findings that we can do as we start thinking about that so what factor. So to wrap it all together for you, we've got a handy little chart here. So as you can see, the summary benchmarking report, which Nick referenced, and again, free for case members now available for you in the data portal. We are hoping that you'll get off this webinar today and that's the first thing you do, you go get it, download your report, check out what your results said, check out your peers. As a reminder, it's visual. Our desire here was that you could have something to help point the way as to what you might wanna do next. And we'll talk about that do next in just a moment. The other piece we wanted to know, and this is actually new for this year, is when it comes to the strategic benchmarking reports, we actually have two options. We have a version that is actually half price because of course both of these are fee-based services that you can get the strategic report so you get all of the great benefits that Nick noted where you pick your peers, you've got many more indicators, you see those individual results. That report is available now. We are happy to work with you and get those orders. We'll have an option if you want to follow up with someone from case before the end of this webinar. So that's the new option that we have. And then the third option is actually something that I know many of you have taken advantage of in the past and this is the idea of that same report. But in addition, as Nick mentioned, you have an opportunity to discuss that with our team to help curate and ensure the data is accurate to help guide you once we look at the data further assess peers. And then we provide a written executive overview in that report and also a presentation. So depending on your needs, we think either one of these columns are a really great solution for you. So before we kind of wrap it up with what's next, we've touched on Case Insights on Alumni Engagement a couple of times during this session. And as we think about next steps and using these results, we thought we'd be remiss not to talk a moment about Alumni Engagement, because as we said at the beginning, none of this happens in a vacuum. And so as institutions that are taking part in the Alumni Engagement Survey as well, and you're really thinking about that broader narrative, know that we do have summary reports that we'll be creating for Alumni Engagement, so same process. And we also have the ability to do those strategic Alumni Engagement reports. And we're telling you this now because we find some teams want to go ahead and have that sort of combined strategy to review both. So when you do order your philanthropy report, you'll have that ability to order the Alumni Engagement report as well. Lastly, we started a brand new service that's been incredibly successful, and we are excited to continue to expand that, and that is we have introduced the idea of an alumni benchmarking cohort. And since we're all here together now, I wanted to let you know we do still have a few seats available for institutions. Again, that is fee-based. We can help talk through that. That meeting is happening June 10th and 11th in Boulder, Colorado. So I'm happy to discuss that further for anyone that has taken part in that survey and is interested. So as we get towards the end of our time, what we wanted to do is to wrap it all up and talk about where you're here, what do we want you to do next? Well, if you haven't done so, we really hope you'll access and read the full key findings report that Anne has drafted, or written, I should say. It's not a draft, it's final, and you've got the link available here. We do have a full version of that report that really gets into the Carnegie classifications, 60 different charts and graphs that go much more in depth. That is available to order, and it will be out next month, so more details coming soon. For those of you that took part in the survey, and we talked about you can access your report on the data portal, if you're here today and saying, that's great, but I have no idea how to do that, I've got the link here. I've also noted how you can get access. And then finally, we've talked about those ideas that from that summary report, we hope whether you do it on your own through the data portal, you'll dig deeper, that is available to all case members, or if you want to partner with our team, you can work with the case team to build solutions. So it really depends on your needs as an institution, but at the end of the day, our hope is you take action. So I think we've got one last poll that's going to launch, just so we know if anything you heard about today, you did want to talk further with our case team, just let us know. And we are incredibly grateful again for your support in the survey, and for joining us here today. And if you're going to be at the DRIVE Conference next week, please come by the state case space and say hi, we'd love to see you.

webinar

Case Insights team

fiscal year 2023

Voluntary Support of Education Survey

charitable gifts

US higher education institutions

major gifts

stock market impact on giving

benchmarking reports