Everybody, we are just going to, I know folks are coming in, we'll give people just a minute or so since we're just not quite at the hour, but very glad to have you today and spend an hour talking about one of our favorite topics. And for those of you, if you're just logging in, I always think it's really nice to just know who's here. So would love for you to take a moment and just tell us in the chat who you are, where you're coming from, the institution you're with, where that's located, all those good things. And I think I'm seeing we have two o'clock. I'm also seeing tons of things come on the chat. So love seeing our case friends and family out there. And again, thank you for joining us today for our webinar. My name is Jenny Cook-Smith. I am really going to get you kicked off today and then hand things over to our fabulous presenters. I wanted to just give you a couple of housekeeping items. As you are doing, we'd love to use the chat for a way to interact with each other. I also think as our presenters are sharing some of the things that we're seeing in our findings and that we're hearing, if you're seeing the same, jump in. If you're feeling very different, jump in, let us know. Talk to each other, talk to us. And then the other feature is we do have a Q&A. We will absolutely take your questions. If you could please make sure your questions go into that Q&A though, that way it won't get lost in this great chat that we're seeing here. So I think that covers our housekeeping pieces. Let's go ahead and jump right in. First and foremost, I want to give special thanks to our sponsors of today's webinar, Blackbot. And of course, I wanted to thank everybody that has come here today that represents an institution that has provided data for this survey because you make the ability to produce this research each year. So again, as I said, we'll be introducing our presenters in a moment. Before we do so, I thought it would just take a couple of minutes to talk a little bit about the team that we call at CASE, our CASE Insights team and our workaround standards to orient you a little bit about how the work we'll be discussing fits into the greater landscape at CASE. I lead our Insights Solutions team and I like to think of that as really a good example of what we're doing today. How do we take this great data and research and help you see value in it as our members? And we'll be talking about several ways of doing that as Anne Fleming and Nick share those results. When we say CASE Insights though, as you can see, it's a lot more than just the voluntary support of education results where we look at US higher education fundraising trends. When it comes to philanthropy, you can see we have a number of surveys that are in regional areas around the globe and we're really excited to have some new surveys fill in those fears. We also do data and benchmarking specific to CASE Insights on alumni engagement. So we'll hope you'll join us in a couple of months when those findings come out. That is a global survey. And then we've kicked off a survey on campaigns that's in partnership with Marts and Lundy. That survey is open right now and we are collecting data from closed campaigns. They're really, we're hoping folks that have closed a campaign will pay it forward so that people that are in them or exploring them can really start to see some key data points as we explore transparency and accountability in campaign counting. In addition, we are rounding out our advancement work when we think about sort of that broad story of how it's all connected with a framework for brand and reputation that will fill in that sphere for marketing and communications. We don't have that survey yet. We're in the sort of early stages, but more to come as we start to, again, tell that big story. Finally, as we're thinking about the data today, one of the things our team has been focused on is building in the operational aspect of advancement to start to understand what it takes to really see the outcomes that we'll see today. And that is through our advancement investment and advancement resources that we're seeing across all of our case surveys now, as well as we are excited to announce the formation of a new commission. That is the Case Commission on Advancement Operations and Strategic Insights. So really putting first and foremost, this idea of all the key operational aspects that it takes to get where we will be today. As you can see, all of this rotates around our big yellow sunshine of the case global reporting standards. The case standards are what allows us to count the same way in all of our surveys. It's also when we think of thought leadership, it's really what starts to one, help us provide you that value of thought leadership, but the standards are what allows you all to share with each other as well and think about the things that are your challenges, the things that are your successes and how we see that in the data. So as we put this all together, what my hopeful takeaway is, as we think about case insights is that we're using these shared practices, we're using these metrics to help understand the data, the standards for the profession and how we help you put that into practice. So with that in mind, again, couple of things, we talked about the big yellow sunshine of the standards, but it wouldn't be a case insight session if we didn't just remind you one, that every case member institution actually does have access to one digital copy of standards. So if that's something you're not aware of, we are very much happy to help. Again, this is what allows us to do the global benchmarking. It's what is based, all the data we'll see today is based on. And if you're here representing an institution that submitted data to the BSE, and in fact, any of our case surveys, you also are doing your part to adopt and use standards. And we now have some badges that you can use to share it. Specifically the case standards contributor badge, the one that you see there on the far end, that is a badge that we provide to any institutions that submit to our surveys. We've reached out and sent those to you if you're the person that actually filled the survey out. However, we would love to spread the love on this. So if you're part of an institution, you didn't get a badge, but you want one, all you have to do is email standards at case.org, and we will get that badge your way. I also want to note that the other badges are ways that we're showing widely that use of standards from the stewards, which are people that are consuming and purchasing the standards to the scholars, our members that are taking part in the online course, and our champions, which are our educational partners front and center, really helping with that adoption of standards. I thought it might be helpful for our session today, before we hand things off to our presenters, to bring two definitions from the standards. We are primarily going to be focusing on the definition you see to your left, which is funds received. And that is really what we think is a bit more cash in the bank or money in the bank measure. And it closely aligns to what's always been total support in the VSC and will be the big numbers we'll be seeing today. However, we did have a new required field this year of new funds committed. And the goal of new funds committed is looking at that greater fundraising activity. I think of this as new gifts plus new commitments equals new funds committed. And so over time, that's a measure we're excited to start to trend and see how that data is going. It's not something we're gonna be spending time on today, but you will see it in the summary benchmarking reports that Nick will be sharing. So I wanted to go ahead and sort of plant that seed in your heads. All right, well, without further ado, I'm really excited to introduce our three speakers or actually probably have them introduce themselves. So as you can see, we have Anne Fleming and Nick. I will pass things your way. Well, I'm Anne Kaplan. I'm the senior director of the survey we're talking about today, the VSC survey. I've been operating that survey since at least the year 2000, not always a case. So it's my favorite project. And I also direct the alumni engagement survey. Hi, everybody. I'm Fleming Puckett. I'm in the middle there. That might be a slightly antique picture of me, but I'm sticking with it for now. I am new to CASE, very excited to be here and have been working in the field of education for 20 or 21 years. I just added it up this morning. So it was more than I expected actually, but very excited to be a part of this team and able to add some information and research to the data that we'll be talking about today. It's great to see some friends in the chat there as well. Mariel and Devin and Jenna Dell. Great to see your names and glad that we are able to start reconnecting again. I am coming to you today from Beaufort, South Carolina, where it is not snowing and will not be snowing. But thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. And Nick Campisi. I work closely with Jenny and Fleming, really focused on all things data, but particularly helping you storytell using the work you did to submit our survey, which we know is a lot of work and we're very appreciative. Okay, I'm gonna kick this off by talking about the Voluntary Supportive Education Survey, the subject of this webinar. It is the definitive source of fundraising outcomes data for U.S. colleges and universities since 1957. That's a very long history and we have a very deep database because of that. The participants in the survey don't represent all the U.S. institutions of higher education, but they raise 80% of the money. The 2024 findings are based on responses from 736 institutions, extrapolated then to the United States. Some of the slides we're gonna see are only about survey respondents and some are extrapolated and I'll make sure you know the difference. So the big headline is that in the fiscal year 2024, total support to institutions of higher education in the United States reached 61.5 billion. You can see that foundations are the dominant funder. We will talk about when they got there and some of the reasons for that, followed by alumni. And we have a breakout this year for donor advised funds, which were originally part of other organizations and we broke them out. We have enough data now to do that. But let's go to the next slide and get some more context, unless you're doing a poll. No, okay. So this is just, the dark purple is 2023 and the blue is 2024. So you can hopefully see that alumni, non-alumni individuals, donor advised funds and foundations all gave more in 2024 than they did in 2023. There was a slight decline in giving from what are called other organizations. So those would be, for example, other nonprofits like the American Red Cross, other institutions of higher education, and religious organizations, fundraising consortia, rotary clubs, everything that doesn't fit in those other categories. And corporate giving was down slightly, but let's bear in mind that these days, philanthropic giving is not the primary way that corporations support higher education institutions. And if their philanthropy is slightly down, it's not a big trend. So this is just giving you a five-year glance at giving 61.5 billion. Yes, that's a lot. It's a very gradual increase though. This is something that's reliable and dependable, but not staggering given the historical context. All right. So with that, we are going to do the first of our polls for today. Thank you, Leah, for setting that up for us. What I wanted to do is just check in on where y'all are in fiscal year 25 so far. And as you can see, we've got options there for basically increase, flat, or decrease in dollars, and increase, flat, or decrease in donors. So if y'all could check the box that best describes where y'all are so far, we'd be grateful for that. And while you are looking that over, also wanted to ask a question that could go into the chat in terms of responses and ideas and strategies that you all may have. We know that donor retention is particularly important these days. Over time, we've seen a lot of changes over time, we've seen dollars kind of steady or increasing, we've seen donor numbers, in many cases, decreasing. So wanted to see what you all were doing. What were you trying? What are you trying and experimenting with right now in terms of donor retention strategies that you'd like to share with the group? We'd love to hear about that. That can go in the chat, and we'll have a look at the results of your poll vote in just a sec as well. So thanks, y'all. Ah, there we go, thank you, Leah. All right, so it looks like for most folks who are on this call, we're seeing an increase in dollars and donors or an increase in dollars, but decrease in donors, which as I was saying, was kind of that overall trend that we'd seen over time. But it's really interesting to see the diversity there. And we know when we're talking about some of these results today, that they are not experienced equally by all different institutions. And so we're always interested in hearing what your situations are and what your stories are and your experiences at the moment. But thank you so much for filling in that poll and also for including some items there in the chat. Feel free to continue adding those as we move ahead. But for now, I'll turn it back over to Anne. Thanks, y'all. So this is what I was talking about when we first saw that first donut chart showing the percentage of giving that comes from each type of donor. If you look at this, you can see that well, foundations are the dominant funding source now. This really started to happen in the mid 2000s, right? Originally it was alumni and foundations gradually took over. However, I think it's 42.5% of the foundation dollars reported on our survey come from family and personal foundations. So one of the reasons that foundations overtook alumni, that makes it sound like a road race, but became a more dominant funder is that alumni were formed, there was a lot of foundation formation, a lot of big increase in assets due not only to the formation, but to estates, very large estates settling and forming foundations. So we're even seeing corporations outsource matching gifts to community foundations. So it's not such a pure, each donor type is not really that pure. And you see the corporate give, and by the way, this is not the amount going down, this is the share of total giving going down. Giving can go up and your share can still go down as you know. Corporate giving has been somewhat replaced in modern times with more strategic types of support that are not strictly speaking charitable in nature, but they certainly are useful and they help to, in fact, I've spoken to corporate relations people who don't distinguish between the two in their day-to-day jobs. I mean, when they're reporting out, they do, but in terms of forming relationships and so on. And then we have all these other types of organizations coming through. So you might have an individual who has a company like a closely held company, and that company makes us gifts through an LLC. It's not pure and simple, but we tried to simplify it here. And Anne, there was actually a question that is not related to this slide, but would be related to what you shared earlier. And that was just asking if the numbers were adjusted for inflation. Well, when we're looking at the total dollar amount, that's just a dollar amount that's obviously gonna be in current dollars because it's the same year that we're reporting on. When we say that giving increased or decreased or decreased, we report it both ways, adjusted for inflation and in nominal dollars. And the inflation adjustment that we looked at this year was don't forget, you can adjust for inflation using myriad indexes. Use the consumer price index, that's what most people use, but there's also a higher education price index. Costs in higher education inflate faster than in the general economy. And, but the consumer price index affects donors more. It's not pure and simple, which is the right one to use. So if you'll see anything where there's a change, you will see adjusted for inflation. This is just percentage of total, so this wouldn't be. And then one other, just clarification, what percentage of these numbers are U.S. higher ed institutions? All of them. Perfect. We do have Canadian institutions. I think three of them fill out the survey. We don't include them in the analysis, but you can use them in benchmarking. Okay, so we, in the last few years, we've had a question on gift bans, the amount of money received by gift bans. So the top tier here is 250,000 or more, and these are collapsed tiers. We're gonna show you the very striated tiers later. And we hope over time that we'll be able to shed, you know, more objective light on the concept that there were fewer donors giving more dollars. Let's go to the next slide. We can see a little bit more about some detail about that. Oh, so this is gonna, when you get your copy of this, you will be able, and you'll also be able to download a PDF. And our book will have the actual numbers behind this. But you can see that the share of gifts, right, there tend to be more gifts at the top of this, which is the smaller amount. And there tend to be more money in the larger gift areas. And I don't think that really needs that much explaining. You'll see it's more evenly balanced when you look at individuals, whereas foundations are more top-heavy. I think that makes sense. If not, put something in the Q&A. I love this. Nick created that. Okay. So yes, I love that too. You gotta watch it go through a few times before it sinks in. So I have another poll for you, and I appreciate your participation in these. This is fun. We know that donors across the giving pyramid are looking more and more to make specific impacts through their giving. So I just wanted to ask a question here of how you're inspiring donors to upgrade their giving to your organization, maybe getting folks to go from annual giving to something more like a leadership annual gift, or maybe trying to get them up towards a major giving as well. So I've got some choices here, and I'll just kind of walk through these briefly. One of them, of course, just enhance access to folks like institutional leadership or academics or events for donors who reach specified giving levels. Maybe dedicated teams or communications focused on impact reporting specifically. Another choice, more personalized stewardship. Another one is focused efforts to match current giving opportunities at your institution with actual specific donor interests. And then also doing more work on big ideas, which of course are great at attracting transformational gifts, but which might also inspire other donors to give at other levels of the giving pyramid. And then of course, as I mentioned, I've got an other there as well. If there's something else that you're working on that you'd like to include, please check that one and then let us know what you're working on in the chat there. An example that I heard not too long ago is just creating a kind of shopping experience, right? Where donors can come on and actually purchase something and their gift goes to purchase that thing, which then goes to the institution. So they know exactly where their money is going, whether it's lab equipment or sporting equipment or maybe orchestral instruments or the music department, whatever it might be. So they know right away where their donation is going. So just one of those things for that other category that I thought was very innovative and clever. And of course allows donors to know right away the impact that they're making. It's also great for future upgrade conversations to say, well, you gave this great thing to our department. We need more things. Would you like to think about donating something else specific, perhaps at a higher level? Great, so we see the results here. It looks like lots of focus on stewardship, which is fantastic. I know that's been growing a lot recently and then a lot of work on impact reporting as well. And then that donor interest matching, I love that. And I've had several conversations with folks about that. So thank you for reporting in. It's always a pleasure to hear what you all are working on and appreciate you sharing your thoughts and your current strategies with us. So with that, I will send it back to Anne. Thanks, John. And in fact, I was just gonna jump in because a question in the chat was related to something that you had said, Fleming, around the, and actually as well, Anne, in looking at some of the gifts and the dollars. And it was just a little bit about quantifying the donor participation decreases that we've seen over time. Well, you could, I mean, not every institution is experiencing donor, you know, decrease in number of donors. So we are collecting, one of the questions on the VSC now is number of donors at every strata, but also at the bottom, total number of donors. And eventually we'll be able to have a match cohort and we'll be able to see what the trends are there. I have more to say on that later also about, so I'm not gonna, what do you call it, spoil my own punchline, but go ahead, Fleming, if you go ahead with something. No, that's great. And I do think there's more to be done there in terms of collecting hard data on that. I have seen lots of charts from other sources that just show this kind of downward trend over the decades going way back, but I don't have just off the top of my head what the percentage change is for the past 20, 25 years. It's definitely kind of a steady downward trend. We know that there was a little blip during the pandemic. A lot of people showed up and said that they wanted to give to things like emergency funds and student making up for folks who were suffering from food insecurity or taking care of university staff who weren't working because of institutions being shut down or all the things that you all are well aware of. But there was an increase then of folks showing up and giving smaller gifts and finding ways to participate. But it looks like since then that has started to trend downward again. So more to come on that, absolutely. One of the things about what you just said, Fleming, is that kind of, I used to edit Giving USA. And one of the things we would see in human service giving is that it increases after a disaster because people give what are called spontaneous compassionate gifts. It's a different type of giving, but we did see it within higher ed during COVID and it's the same phenomena, in my opinion. And I'll just add that the Generosity Commission has done research on the decrease in donors over time and this impacts every sector, not just education. And for anyone that will be coming to Case Drive next week in New Orleans, we actually have a plenary panel on this very topic where we're going to explore some of this research. So I'm excited for the question and more research coming from Case on this. Okay, right here. And we will get back to sort of the changing demographics and donors, numbers of donors. But these are the purposes to which respondents, sorry, to which donors restricted their gifts. And this is something that I'm always trying to, I wouldn't have to say it to this audience, but it's the university very rarely gets to decide the area that a gift is committed to. You can see that with that orange and dark blue, almost all the money is restricted. It's either restricted to, well, it's either restricted to current operations. So there'd be something to be used in the same year, but for a restricted purpose, such as scholarships or research. Restricted endowments, there are very little money is given to endowment with no restrictions on income. That would be that light blue toward the top. Property buildings and equipment that is restricted to property buildings and equipment, but it's not as big a slice as some people think where they think, well, it's all going to buildings and physical infrastructure. A lot of it's monetary infrastructure. And within each type of gift, the restricted purposes, and we're going to drill down restricted to what, current operations gifts tend to be restricted. The majority of them are restricted to research. That makes a lot of sense because a research project has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you have the findings. There are ways you could endow research, and you can see there is a little slice for that on the capital purposes side, but those are mostly current operation gifts in support of pivotal, well, I guess some of it is a matter of opinion whether it's pivotal, but I think most of it is really, really supports society at large and goes far outside just supporting the institution. Then we have academic divisions, which are almost the same size slice in capital purposes and current operations. That would be the English department, biology department, and some pieces within that. Almost all athletics giving is in current operations. And then we have student financial aid, which is small there, but larger on the other side. So let's look at capital purposes. And here we're really looking at gifts to endowment. What are they restricted to? So the property buildings and equipment are not in this. It's mostly student financial aid, and this is some part of our messaging this year in talking about these huge endowments. They're transferring wealth. That's what they're doing. And it's not just the student financial aid, it's faculty and staff compensation and academic divisions. Without that, you can't provide education, right? You need the staff and you need to support the individual divisions within the institution. And you want to make education available to those who do not have the funds. And this is what donors want. And this is what has virtually always been the big slice of endowed gifts. So there's a lot of conversation on Capitol Hill right now about, you know, we're gonna increase the excise tax on endowments at universities. And I don't know if they've landed anywhere, but it's not gonna be anywhere good. So I looked at a study and I've seen this study or similar study done by I think a council on foundations. But a more recent one I found was from philanthropy round table and they did a, they kind of modeled two scenarios over 30 years saying, if you had a grant, so the mean grant that's available for paying out to nonprofits, if you had a 5% payout rate and a 10% payout rate. So after 30 years, a 10% payout rate actually reduces the amount available to fund charitable purposes. So increasing, what increasing an excise tax does is put the money back in the hands of government to decide what to do with it. But it takes money out of, you know, out of the hands of people who really need it and that you can prove it, so. And we're also seeing, and I just grabbed a few of these. Grabbed a few of these. This is from the Congressional Budget Office. But income is being transferred, transferred, is being earned more and more in these higher income brackets. You can see that dark stripe, which is the most recent year of this study. There's only one place where there's this significant gain and it's in the highest quintile. That in part, and this is income. You know, if we looked at wealth, we would be seeing something even bigger. But this means that there are smaller, the small number of wealthier individuals who actually have the means to make transfers through charitable giving and good for them. You know, so if the number of donors is going down, but the money is going up, that's not necessarily something to be, dejected about. It's got a really good side. And this is just, did I put the source here? No, I'll make sure it gets in there when you get a copy. This is a distribution of income by quintile over a much longer period of time. And you can see that more of the income is concentrated in the highest quintile. These are people who have means and they're being generous with it. And it's not necessarily a negative finding if some people at the lower ends of the income spectrum are struggling to make ends meet and maybe are not making those charitable gifts. They may also, and this is just to nudge people to look at our alumni engagement survey. They may be being engaged in other ways that also lift the boat, right? If you're volunteering or you're involved in experiential things, attending events, it's contagious, it lifts the whole boat. And if you don't have the means to give, you still might be engaged in other ways. And if we just look at philanthropy, we're looking at one slice of engagement. And come back for the alumni engagement webinar when we have that, because we'll see more. So I did want to answer, and Ann can help to answer a question that was in the Q&A as well, that I think is really important. Whether in cases where we're seeing, or where some institutions are seeing a decrease in donor numbers, particularly for individual donors, what's causing that? Is it an overall decrease in philanthropic support kind of across all of philanthropy? Or are they giving to other places? I do think, and Jenny mentioned the new kind of generosity report that came out that shows a lot of angst on donors overall, which is something that we're going to be tracking. I do think a lot of it has to do with increased competition from other charities, where people are wanting to make an impact. They see the kind of frontline, out in the streets kind of work that certain other nonprofit organizations are doing, and they're giving some of those gifts, whether an impulse gift or thinking about it over time, to those other institutions. We know that there are a million and a half nonprofit organizations in the United States alone right now, which is staggering. So there is more competition there, but we're going to keep track of kind of what's going on overall in philanthropy. Ann, please. Another thing is that, unlike, say, when I was in college, more and more students are going to more than one college, right? So in effect, you've got one donor being split, not among many nonprofits, but among several institutions. And the other thing that I think is encouraging, if the hypothesis that people are giving to kind of urgent causes that are more from the spontaneous compassionate, right? Colleges and universities are multipurpose nonprofits. They are engaged in almost all of those activities, and not all they have to do. One thing they can do is to really make the case for that, and to give funders the opportunity to engage in, let's say, international affairs work by supporting the institution. I do understand that you don't want to keep building programs to absorb gifts. We don't want to let the cart drive the horse. Is that it? Absolutely. Thank you, Ann. I do think a lot of it has to do with the stories that we're telling, the impact that we are talking about. Universities have traditionally not been great at bragging, and I do think we could be doing more of that across the industry. So, yes, and that leads very well to this question that we now have on the screen. How confident do you feel using data to demonstrate impact to your donors and or leadership? And this can also be demonstrating impact to government as well. We've seen increases in institutions saying that they need to have these conversations with regional and even state governments as well to demonstrate their impact as an institution in terms of knowledge creation and employment and arts and culture and all of those other things. So I've seen some pretty creative calculations happening. Is five high and one low? Leah is, yes. So five is super confident here. Okay. Thank you, Ann. Sorry, I thought it had that on there. That's all right. Thank you. So I would love to hear kind of where folks are in terms of confidence in using data. Obviously at CASE, we love data. We think there's a lot of power to being able to use data to demonstrate impact. Also in the chat, just while you're thinking about this and answering and moving forward as well, any strategies that you have right now for specifically using data in order to accomplish this, to demonstrate impact to folks who are listening, whether they're donors or institutional leadership and you're wanting to have conversations about investing more in advancement, et cetera, lots of places that that could come in. Would love to hear more kind of qualitative comments there in the chat if you've got something you'd like to contribute. So we'll go ahead and see the results of this one. Always love to see where folks are here. Oh, great. Okay. So kind of middle to high confidence in terms of using data. That's great. And as Jenny mentioned, we'll be talking more about this next week. It's already coming at Drive in New Orleans. So lots to be done around data. And of course at CASE, we just gobble that stuff up. So more to come on that. Thank you for participating in this and for now I'll hand things over, I believe to Nick. Thanks Flemming. As we mentioned at the beginning, we know that participating in our surveys can be a lengthy experience sometimes trying to pull all that data. And as the data guy, I know that pulling data from a CRM is not always the easiest of processes, but we want to make sure that from your participation and helping us continue to drive the industry forward with our research, that you are also getting your benefits out of it as well. And so I just wanted to spend a few minutes here to just make sure everybody is aware of their CASE member benefits that they have for participating in the survey. One of the biggest ones is this data portal that we have. We recently, if you participate in the survey, moved our survey platform and as such, we moved our benchmarking platform where that data is available. For our data confident people, please go in, dig around. A lot of the questions that we fielded today can also be found with answers in the data portal, but just a little bit of digging on your own. And that website, I'm just going to pull it for you really quick is insightsdata.case.org. So if you're a CASE member and you don't have a login to our new platform just yet, feel free to email us and we'll get you set up lickety split and make sure you have access to that. So that hosts the wealth of information for benchmarking for not just the VSE survey, but all of our CASE Insights Surveys regionally and globally that we run. But for our not so confident people, we also load into that same website what we like to call our summary benchmarking reports. And our summary benchmarking reports we'll see in a minute, but these are essentially our thank you back to you saying here is some nice tidy presentations that you can use for data storytelling to kind of get the most out of those results as soon as possible without having to dig deeper and look under the hood yourself. And then lastly, I'll touch on briefly at the end, our strategic benchmarking reports, which kind of just take that summary benchmarking report aspect and explode it. We put as much from the survey as possible in it, 10 years for the VSE results that we can look at historical trends. And then what I think is the most critical, you get to talk to all of our lovely people, our survey experts here today about kind of what's going on at your institution. What are we seeing from other institutions across the industry at large? And then how can we be a little more strategic in thinking about the data we do have or the data we don't have and what kind of progress can we set up for ourselves beyond just looking for the next goal? Next slide, please. So this is kind of a preview of what our summary benchmarking report looks like. So it's a little small, but you can definitely see that what we try to do and try to emphasize is not just saying, okay, you told us you received this much CAS or this many donors that came to your institution last year. We try to think about it strategically. And so we calculate some KPIs to really try and bring that up to a higher level and give you back, especially our data folks, messages that you can take to your leadership and to your donors to demonstrate that impact. This is really just kind of our first step to get you knee deep into the data and thinking about this strategically and how to have those conversations and tell those stories with the data. What we do as part of that is do provide some reference points of how your institution performed compared to similar institutions in the United States, but then also the industry at large. So we can contextualize those trends and understand what that impact looks like across advancement. Next slide, please. And then this is an example here where we can dig a little bit deeper. We really try to make these charts and tables as interactive as possible. So you can hover over the data points and get more information, as well as dig a little bit deeper about these percentages versus dollars. And we try to provide alternative tabs and alternative views so you can find the fit that best works for you. And then once you do that, we also provide the functionality where you can just simply export the image, plop it in a PowerPoint and take it and run with it. So we really try and emphasize making it as easy as possible with these summary benchmark reports. So I highly encourage you to go take a look for those. Those will be loaded online in the next few weeks as we work through that technological transition. So these are available again to all our case members who did the survey, even if this was your first year or if this was your 65th year. Those are all available summarizing your fiscal year 24 data. Next slide, please. But as I mentioned, our strategic benchmarking report is really kind of our bread and butter, Jenny, Fleming and myself, where we get to have kind of the more exciting talks that we've been hinting at with you. And you get to ask us those questions one-on-one about these large scale trends, about what your data and your trends mean contextualized to the successes you had last year, the challenges you faced, what the avenues for progress continue to look like to make that meaningful impact from your institution. And so if I mentioned that the summary benchmarking reports, we kind of provide you some benchmarking peers of similar institutions. With the strategic benchmarking report is where you get the opportunity to pick those that you want to benchmark against, those that are your typical benchmarking peers or some aspirational where you would like to be in five, 10, 20 years and get to see what they're doing as well and have those conversations kind of looking under the hood. And last thing on this slide I mentioned already, but the number of indicators, we blow it up from the five to over 25, trying to bring in as much data back to you as possible. And really I can't emphasize enough that the strategic reports, the biggest benefit in my eyes is having those conversations. But here I just wanted to highlight some of the things that we focus on in those conversations to make sure you're getting your value out of your survey participation and that your storytelling, focusing on the best practices across the industry from what CASE knows and what our volunteers know, as well as taking how do we take action on the work that we've put in already, both recording and reporting out on data. So really trying to get as much back to you as possible. So I've got a few key kind of findings and takeaways from this round of the VSE survey. Just wanted to include this here to kind of give us some takeaways towards the end of our time together. One of them that we're seeing come out of the numbers here is just this belief in the power of higher education to create opportunities for students and also benefits to the public. And this came out of the data that Anne was sharing, the gifts that we're seeing to current operations, for research especially, and also to academic divisions, and then giving to endowments quite a bit as well, especially for things like student support and various areas that help to reduce the cost of providing an education. All of these are obviously very important areas for philanthropy right now, and it's great to see growth in the data there as well. The second one, importance of philanthropy in helping to cover operational costs for educational institutions. So we know that the cost of providing an education has been increasing dramatically, even so philanthropy is still holding basically steady at just over 10% in terms of their ability to cover the operational costs of institutions. So very impressive numbers there as well. Also critical role of alumni engagement with all of this, not only making sure that we're building and maintaining relationships with individuals as they are building the capacity to give gifts and hopefully to give larger gifts down the road, but also recognizing through this data that many individuals now, particularly alumni, are giving through their companies or through family foundations or through gaps. We just had a question come through from Mariel, thank you for that. So lots of opportunity here to be building these relationships through alumni engagement and we're doing a lot of work at CASE, as Jenny mentioned right now on that, through our CASE Insights on alumni engagement as well. So also desire and ability of donors to create specific impacts through their giving. There's great power in the ability of the institution to be able to show impact for, as we've seen, donor retention, but also for upgrading gifts as well, especially as we also talked about in this environment of increased competition from other nonprofits as well. And then the last one here, continued public trust in higher education. And this is not just talk, thankfully, they're actually giving, which is wonderful to see and very encouraging news. And I will close my section here on the next slide. I just have a quote here from our president and CEO at CASE, Sue Cunningham, at a time when higher education faces financial and political scrutiny, this sustained giving is a powerful vote of confidence. And with that, I will hand things back over to Jenny. Thanks, y'all. Great, thank you all. That walkthrough flew through, and I wanted to just thank all of you for your great interactivity today and for a number of fantastic questions. I've been eyeballing, and I think we got to all of them, but as I'm talking about what can you do next, this is your last few moments to make sure you get your questions to us. So please feel free to put those in the Q&A as well. So what I'd like to do is pull a few things together from what was shared through our fantastic panelists and walk through some of the key highlights of the key findings report. Leah originally put that link into the chat many, many chats ago, and we've also got that in this presentation, which you will be getting for registering for the session. I wanted to also highlight that you'll see in that key findings report to piggyback on some of what Fleming was just sharing that we've really been sort of out front and center, giving you a lot of tools and great quotes and ways that you can demonstrate the value and the power of philanthropy to education. And one of my favorite things are there's some fantastic quotes from donors, from institutions that really help tell that story. And thank you for putting that back towards the bottom of our chat there, Leah. And this is really important because we use the word report in a couple of different ways. So Nick just shared with you the summary benchmarking report that you get as a case member. And he also talked about the report that you can purchase, the strategic benchmarking report. Because we love reports, we do actually have the full VSE report, which many of you are probably very familiar with that has all of the amazing charts and graphs and slices. Today we really scratched the very, did we scratch an iceberg? Anyway, we were the tip of something. And so we, in that book, you'll see all those elements around Carnegie classification and some of the things I saw asked about in the Q&A. And that is being put into the marketplace this year with a PowerPoint presentation as well. So that again, you could easily see all the pieces you need to help tell your story to leaders. We talked about the data portal. I wanted to just add on because a few people asked about this. We know it's a new platform. We also feel that our cheese got moved a little bit even though there's a lot of great power. It takes a little trying to figure out. We do have a video forthcoming. And one of my favorite things about Team VSE, which is a small group of Ann and Kim, they are very willing to make sure that you all understand how to do it. And so we have VSE at case.org and they will get those answers your way if you're struggling in the meantime to find things. And then we at Team Solutions love working with our case members that want to partner with us a little deeper. Nick shared some of the great aspects of the strategic benchmarking report. And we also are starting up benchmarking cohorts. We do have an alumni, actually two alumni benchmarking cohorts coming up in June. And we'd love, we have a couple more spots and we'd love to talk to you about that as well. And with that in mind, I think we're gonna have one last poll coming up as a super easy one. And all we wanna know is if any of these things that we shared with you today kind of piqued your interest and you wanna talk to one of us, just let us know. So just a quick yes, no question. And I'm just gonna do one last check on, looks like all questions answered. I just wanna thank all of you for being here today. I wanna thank Blackbaud one more time as our amazing sponsor of this webinar. And then I want to thank our amazing presenters, Fleming, Anne and Nick for sharing just a little bit of what's in their brains with you today. Thank you all. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Voluntary Support of Education

donor contributions

higher education

donor engagement

donor retention

philanthropic trends

economic impact

benchmarking reports

strategic relationship management