Although I was one in and every one. Welcome to Casey's development at scale The pipeline strategies That Works. My name's Briscoe, and I'm the program's coordinator. And I'm delighted that you can join. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping notes. This applies to recording provided to organizations. You are receive a follow up email after the event with instructions on access. Supporting presentation slides are also available for use at Murdock Case Network. This webinar is approved for once delivery credit and you can find which chapter to claim those credits. Part of the course of the event. Learn decades of Work. We will also be taking questions, so feel free to use the Q&A box to submit questions as they come in the session will get through as we speak. Without further ado, I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to our incredible presenters, Nick Lindsay and the estate also. Thank you so much, Lauren, and welcome everybody. I'm going to share my screen and make sure we get the presentation up and running. Perfect. And I'm just so thankful for all of you joining us. We have a few more trickling in right now, but I am going to get started for the sake of our time together. My name is Nick Leonie, and I'm joined by Leah Swen, and we're from the University of Nebraska Foundation, which serves the University of Nebraska System, which is the only university system in our state, which is a four campus system and a clinical health care partner. And we're excited today to share with you some of the concepts and successes that we've had in the pipeline development space over the last few years and show some real life examples of how this work has helped us further relationships at scale. Just a little bit about us personally. I currently serve as the Vice President of Advancement and lead our centralized specialist functions at the Foundation. This includes corporate and foundation relations, stewardship plan, giving regional development, pipeline development and annual giving for our system. And I'm joined today by Amy aswell, one who joined our organization about two years ago as a donor experience officer or DSO, which is an acronym you're going to hear a lot about today. And late last year, Leah was promoted to lead our DSO program and this year she also became the founding director of the Gift Academy, which is a training and development program for entry level development officers at our organization. And the Gift Academy really focuses on learning the basics of development work and attempts to qualify hundreds of alumni and donors annually. So I often get asked to define a pipeline. It's become quite the buzz word in our industry recently, and I really don't think that there is a one size fits all definition. But for the purposes of today's conversation, I just want to outlaw outline how I think about pipeline. So in any organization we typically see 95% of the money being raised by 5% of the individuals, organizations or foundations. Recently, we've seen this trending towards 99% of the money being raised by 1% of the donor base. But if you look at the graphic here on the screen, this is what I typically think when considering the full engagement of the donor base. For most of our organizations, we know that top one, two, 5% of our donors pretty intimately. We know what they care about. We know why they've given to our institutions and we know their families. We've had them on our advisory councils or on our boards, etc. But after that, top 5%, our information and our engagement becomes pretty spotty. We may know them, we may have gotten a gift here or there. We've maybe had them at an event, but nothing near the level of engagement that we've had with our top top prospects. So the further that you get down this pyramid, you get towards never givers, you get towards newer graduates, we learn less and less about their inclination, their capacity and their readiness to give to our organizations. So a few years ago, this is exactly what our pyramid looks like at Nebraska, with over 70 frontline fundraisers specifically focused at that $50,000 plus level. We do that. Our assigned. We knew our assigned prospects pretty well, but that was only about 5% of our annual or biannual donors When it came to donors giving $10, $100 or even $1,000, our knowledge of their interests, passions and philanthropic priorities was incomplete at best, and nonexistent at worst. So for the purposes of our time today, I also think about the unassigned individuals in your database. How do you learn about them? How do you move more non donors to donors and move more donors to upgraded donors? We want to focus in really on that best of the rest, the individuals in that purple part of the pyramid. So I'm here to tell you that the green section of the pyramid is exactly where your major gifts staff should be focused on today. But that purple section is where executive leaders and new staff should be focused for a brighter tomorrow at your organization. So where do these prospects come from? They could be event attendees. They could be your alumni with high wealth indicators, or they could be individuals who are currently giving perhaps subtle leadership, giving them out. However, your nonprofit describes that, and our friends at KS will actually be launching a poll right now, and we want to hear what are the untapped segments of your donor population that you need to focus on next? Could be your annual leadership donors, high wealth, low engagement donors, event attendees, or some other segment. So I'm going to give you just a few seconds to fill out that poll right now. When you calculate the results of that, were to come back to that later on at the end of our presentation. So I want to start really with the annual leadership Giving segment. This is a segment of donors and prospects that a lot of organizations are challenged with. And I've had the great benefit of working at a private university to regional public institutions and now a comprehensive university system. And everywhere I've been, the most immediate opportunity that I've seen is annual leadership giving. And there's no magic dollar amount across the industry to define leadership giving. But at the University Nebraska, we asked ourselves how many donors have given $500 or more in the last two or three years that are currently on our side. So thinking through the fact that we sent them an annual giving appeal either via email, direct mail or over the phone, and these are individuals that cared enough about our university to give over $500, but they're still on our side. So I'm just curious, when you think about how many donors you think that our organization had between 2018 and 2020 that met the following criteria, they had to have given $500 or more not to athletic tickets, So no priority points associated with their giving. They had to have more than one gift on record because we wanted to make sure that we were eliminating memorial donors and they had to be unassigned. So the answer to that question was when we ran that analysis, we found over 2300 households that had given at least one $500 greater gift in the last three years. And over 80% of those donors had no contact from a gift officer at our organization. I would tell you that the 20% that did have contact from a gift officer followed a similar script of Thank you so much for your gift. I love to learn more about your story and I'd love to buy a cup of coffee when I'm in the area. Let me know if you'd be open to that. And most of those outreaches were unsuccessful in booking a meeting, and the prospects, because they were never assigned, meant that they never received any additional outreach from those development officers. So those prospects went back to annual giving to receive the same type of stewardship and solicitations that anybody else in the annual giving pipeline was receiving. So we received no more knowledge at our organization of why they gave how they'd like to continue giving, and if they'd like to upgrade their gift in the future. So now we're aware of our target. But what was the goal? If there's a current donor, we of course want to retain them, but we also want to upgrade them because isn't that the role of annual giving? So we decided that our number one goal here at the University of Nebraska was to get the meeting we wanted to talk one on one with these individuals. Without doing that, we didn't know where to take the relationship. We knew that if we can get in front of these individuals, that we could learn why they made the gift that they made. We could learn the impact they were hoping to achieve with that gift. And then we could steward that. We could show the impact that they were having. And then hopefully that would open the door to having a gift conversation of a greater size. The challenge that we had was how do you get through 2300 households? We wanted to get as many 1 to 1 conversations going as we could. And when you think across the industry that the typical gift officers managing between 75 and 125 relationships in a portfolio, how are we as an organization going to manage this many prospects? So we had to begin with some core philosophies. The first philosophy is that we would attempt to conduct as many meetings as we could be. A Zoom or follow this reduced to our investment in travel. And it's also a much more efficient way to get information. Just oftentimes, I feel like we put too much emphasis on in-person meetings, even though we know that they are very, very valuable. But by allowing donors to engage via Zoom phone, we wouldn't have to deal with scheduling issues and we could really book meetings whenever the donor wanted, not just when we would be in town and when the in-person meeting worked in their schedule. The second philosophy that we had to consider is that while representing a four campus system with over 62 academic units, we had to decide whether or not we were going to approach these donors through a generalist approach or specialist approach. We had to ask, Does the person reaching out have to know every single priority of the dean and everything going on in the college? And we decided to answer that question, would know if we kept the conversation on the donor, what they wanted to accomplish, their giving and why they gave to our organization. Then after getting that information, we could bring a subject matter expert in if and when needed. We also talked about whether or not we should be leading with the acquisition of a donor story, and we decided that we wanted to approach them with stewardship first instead of telling them, Hey, I'm reaching out, I want to get to know everything that we can about you. We wanted to approach it with the idea that we want to make sure that we saw your gift. We want to make sure that we're showing you what this gift is doing to improve lives at our campus. And we wanted to approach. It was a much softer, truthful approach about stewarding their current giving and then taking that conversation into future gifts of the annual leadership and major gift level. And then finally, we knew that to get through 2300 households, we were to have to be extremely disciplined about our outreach. If we email somebody to social visit and they don't respond, then what is the next step? If we call a prospect and we leave a voicemail, or are we expecting them to call us back or are we going to call them back, how do we know when we've exhausted all avenues and it's time to move on from a prospect? So to get the meeting, we worked with our partner, not ever true to take a model of quite persistence. The cadence that you see here is backed by 100 million data points across multiple industries proven to get results. The data says that it takes 6.6 touchpoints to get a response. So like Nick said, we knew we'd have to be very disciplined and how we were going to approach this outreach. Now, I'll pause just real quickly to say that we at the Advancement Leadership team level in our organization, we debated this at length when we understand that it takes 6.6 touchpoints to get a response, We asked ourselves, What about a scenario where somebody in our organization knows a prospect? Or what if they work at a company where we've worked with other donors in the past? Shouldn't we try to work our networks to get those meetings, or do we follow this outreach cadence and where we ultimately decided is to walk through the front door first with these donors, instead of going through somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody to get to them, let's try and email them directly. Let's try and call them directly. So if we don't get a meeting through those just very 1 to 1 means, then we can start exhausting other avenues to get a meeting with a donor. So this introductory cadence starts with light research. We want to know what they've given to have they given to multiple areas? Did they graduate from the institution? Do they have a spouse and what's their spouses name? The whole point is to make sure that we sound competent. If they answer the phone, we then craft a personalized video introductory email. We introduce ourselves our role, and we ask for a 30 minute meeting five days after that. If we have not heard from the donor, we then call them. If they don't answer, we're going to leave a voicemail and then that voicemail will let them know that we're going to follow up by email if that's their preferred communication method. And then we're going to send the email and say we're the person who just left the voicemail five days after that. If we still haven't heard from this donor, we are going to send a LinkedIn connection five days after that. If we still haven't heard from that donor, we're going to do the call email combo again. And then five days after that, if we still have not received a response from this donor, we're going to send what we call the breakup email. And in that breakup email, it essentially just says that I'm sorry we to get a chance to connect. And perhaps it was bad timing on our part, knowing that we appreciate and are grateful for your gift. We're really hoping we can connect in the future. And I just want to clarify a few points in this cadence. If they respond, this cadence does stop. We no longer keep moving forward with it. If they book a meeting, our officers then prepare for that meeting or if they respond in a way we then strategize on next steps with that donor. I also want to share that each of these steps has an outlier template that 30 created that we then can personalize for the donor. So we call it personalization at scale. And having each of these templated allows an observer to move at this high volume rate that they're tasked with. I'm going to ask you really quickly, because I feel like every time we talk about this approach, we rehash one of the original conversations that we had when starting this program. When I originally saw this model, even though it was backed by data, I thought to myself, This is harassment. We're going to have so many people telling us, Leave us alone. You've reached out six times, seven times in the last month, even though I know it was backed by data. I just know from my 15 years as a Frontline fundraiser that I had not committed this level of discipline. So I'm curious, by the time you've gotten to that breakup email, how many times have folks told you to quit reaching out to them? It is a great question and one that a lot of people do think. I can tell you. We have sent this breakup email over 1800 times that are institutions and we still get a 7% reply rate to that email. And typically when we get a reply, it goes into two buckets either this has been poor timing and I'm sorry we weren't able to connect or they actually schedule a meeting with us and they thank us for our persistence. And I can tell you that there's been a handful of times, probably less than a dozen, where someone has said, Please remove me from your outreach. But it's a great question. Awesome. So let's take an example. Let's say that you have a thousand donors that you want to try and get a meeting with. If you have an officer who's role is solely dedicated to this work, our recommendation is to add five donors to this cadence per day, totaling 25 added per week. The reason for this is that this cadence compounds. So looking at this calendar, if you were to send five intro emails on Monday and you didn't hear from any of those five donors by Friday, you're going to pick up the phone. Hopefully they'll answer. If not, you're going to leave a voicemail and then five more emails on that same day, your office is going to be adding five more people to the cadence. So in total on that first Friday that you begin outreach, they're going to have 15 outreach steps to complete over time. Once your officer is fully up and running, they're going to have between 30 and 40 outreach steps to complete per day. So by following this disciplined approach, if you add 25 donors per cadence or two cadence per week, your officer will have entered the last 25 of those 1000 identified donors into cadence in month ten. But we have to be realistic. We know there's holidays, we know there's vacation time. So more realistically, it'll take a year to get through those 1000 donors. So as a reminder, we're doing all this outreach, but we can get the visit. That is the goal. And when we get the visit, we are so excited. All the outreach has paid off. So what are we trying to learn? We need to learn their inclination, their capacity and their readiness. And if we can do that, while also identifying plan, giving opportunities and finish our conversation with an understanding of where to take things from here, then we've done our job. We do this by asking very specific questions that will lead us towards a meaningful next step with the donor. So these are the questions that we typically ask of donors when we get that 1 to 1 meeting. These questions give us a reasonable opportunity to determine that capacity inclination. In writing this, we want to learn their Nebraska story. What was their best experience? How is the institution impacted their life and what areas have they stayed informed on? We want to learn about their giving to other charities. Where are they currently invested and how do they feel about those causes? We want to hear from them. So instead of saying We noticed you gave $1,000, tell us about that. We want to ask what top three organizations do you support financially or by volunteering? If we find out that we're not in the top three on their list, not telling us that they give more elsewhere, we ask, Have you considered leaving the university in your will or state? Would you be interested in learning more about how to do this every single time? Too many organizations dance around plan giving and we want to make it a habit and bring it up with regularity. And in closing, we ask what we refer to as the turn question. If the right philanthropic investment opportunity were available, could you see yourself over the next five years considering an outright gift of 25,000? If they say no, we follow up with could you see yourself ever making a gift of 25,000 to the university? The answers to these questions help us figure out how to craft those next step. If we get a yes or a maybe, then we know that they have the capacity and the readiness. We just have to find the right idea that aligns with their philanthropic interest. If we hear something like Maybe I have two kids in college right now and it's taking up a lot of my income, we know that they may have the capacity and the inclination, but not the readiness. And in that case, we might make it work in the near future, but just not at that $25,000 level. So after we've met with a donor, the question is now what? So after crafting a contact report that really follows the format of the question slide that we just shared, we bring in others from the organization to help craft those next steps. Well, thank the donor for their time and identify a timeline for follow up, and then we'll work with those subject matter experts in our organization to craft opportunities for future involvement or investment. So an example of how this might look is that there's a donor who tells us that they love the College of Business at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, that they also sit on a board of a nonprofit locally that focuses on sustainable, low cost housing and they've identified that they give annually to the American Cancer Society to follow up on that might look like a gift Solicitation with options to the UNLV College of Business for scholarships, emergency funding for students facing housing crises across the system or Cancer Research Fund at the University Nebraska Medical Center. I want to jump in here real quick. So as Nick said, like you have this great conversation, you learn these key details of their philanthropic interest. You understand where the institution falls among their giving priority, and they share that they're open to learning more. You've got to make the ask. I mean, that is why we're here, and that is how we progress the relationship forward. So as hundreds of prospects turn into dozens of one on one meetings, you're going to want to focus on key indications that let you know if the programs working. Are you keeping up with the pace? Is the cadence working? Are you learning from the one on one meetings? And do we have identifiable next steps for each donor? So we track every single interaction that we're having with these donors to better understand what's working with this approach as you might recall, step one is that light research and step two of our cadence is our initial outreach with the donor in a review of over 2100 introductory emails, we are seeing that 64% of those emails are getting opened and 25% are watching the video or opening up the calendar link to book a meeting. But oddly, only 5% of these outreaches are translating to responses. Those responses either being booking a meeting or telling us that they don't want to meet with us. And I want to pause there and say first that 5% of 2100 households is 100 responses. And that is awesome. That is 100 more than we would have had without starting this approach. So I want to just say that that's a big win, but it also proves to be our least effective outreach showing that that one and done approach simply doesn't work in converting the most meetings you can get. You cannot line up a bunch of donors, reach out one time and call it good. So as we move along the cadence, you'll see that we logged 2155 phone calls and we're seeing pick up rates of nearly 20% when making phone calls. When all we hear industry is that people don't answer the phone anymore, we're actually seeing that nearly one of every five does answer. And that gives us the opportunity to conduct a discovery visit right then and there, or schedule a visit for a later day. For those that don't answer, we leave a voicemail and follow up with that email right away, and we're finding out that an astounding 13% of donors are responding to this outreach. And as you continue down this chart, you'll find that by the time we get to that break up email, the 2174 households that we started with is down to 1050 households. And that breakup email is still getting responses from 7% of the population that receives it. So this is polite persistence at work. So I would challenge you to ask yourself, are you and your teams committing to this level of discipline when attempting to secure visits? Are you trying multiple times through multiple modalities or are you reaching out once through email, calling it good? Conversely, are you making the time to stay this disciplined with so many competing priorities for development officers? Time This type of approach requires you to take time daily to follow up with each of the steps to get the necessary visits. So this point I just a point I quickly want to make is thinking through the journey that non respondents go through and the examples that we've shared so far. You've identified a $500 donor or donor at whatever level you'd like to focus on, and you're reaching out using a disciplined approach seven times over 20 business days to get a response. But you didn't get a response. So what do you do now? These donors could be unassigned and then worked through phone. THON They could go back into annual giving appeals or you could attempt to reach out quarterly for the next few quarters to see if the timing better aligns with them. It's ultimately up to you, but it's a strong consideration to consider that these are individuals that have engaged with your organization and you should have a plan on what to do if these efforts are not fruitful. So I'm thinking about pipeline strategies that scale. You have to first identify a population. Who are you attempting to reach out to? Then you've got to begin communicating with them, staying disciplined and consistent with a goal of securing the meeting. When you get the meeting, ask questions that matter and have a plan to follow up with each person with a story of impact, a solicitation or a volunteer opportunity, and hopefully all three track your progress and report on it. This helps not only identify the effectiveness of your effort, but also gives you the data to encourage others in the organization to consider similar approaches. It will also give you the ammunition that you need to scale these efforts because you'll be able to understand how reaching out to certain populations turn into visits, turn into gifts and turn into qualified prospects. And you can start building a workforce plan based solely out of the data within your data, within your CRM. And finally, you have a plan for those non respondents. This work should not replace other strategies but complement them. So know what journey your donors will go on if you're not able to get in touch with them. All right. You guys ready to see this in real life? In 2021, we launched our Donor Experience officer program. Are those we hired three, the XOs, and we assigned each 700 household portfolios by adding households, 25 households. The cadence per week. We thought we could get through all 700 households within 7 to 8 months. And if that vehicle could get a visit with 10% in their portfolio, that would be 70 plus follow up steps to make their giving experience hyper personalized, which would lead to retention upgrades and reactivation. So meet Dr. Bailey. I was assigned to Dr. Bailey at the DEA, so he is a 1967 graduate from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. He's been a faithful donor for 42 years, and he typically gives around $1,000 per year. Dr. Bailey lives in South Carolina, and over time, a few development officers have traveled to see him. When they're in the area, they thank them for their giving, but they don't assign themselves to him. Dr. Bailey comes back for a reunion. He has a wonderful time. He meets with the dogs while he's here. But again, we don't get them assigned because based on our current staffing structure, Dr. Bailey is a good donor to the medical center, but he's not a major gift prospect. So I was assigned to Dr. Bailey. I sent an introductory video to him and he was an anomaly. So that first step where Nick was saying is not the most effective, he actually booked a meeting on that very first email that I sent for five days later. And so we connected via Zoom, and during that time I learned so much about Dr. Bailey. So he's traveled all over Asia and Africa doing mission work. He's worked in New Zealand and Australia as a researcher. He was even a consul for NASA on the Skylab project. We talked about his late wife, Jenny. He talked about his three daughters, his eight grandkids, as well as his two great grandchildren. And then he went into great length about his four foster sons, four foster sons who have now given him 14 additional grandkids. We also talked about why he supports international experiences for the College of Medicine students, and he really expressed how he feels those experience have really shaped his life and have given him really great opportunities. And he wants to give them those opportunities so that they can use them now and in the future. So after this really great conversation, my next step with Dr. Bailey was really to show the impact that he was having, that 42 years of giving of $1,000 a year. And I was able to connect with this student, Remy Remy received a scholarship from the fund that Dr. Bailey supports, and last summer he went to the university of Anorak in Mexico to study medical, Spanish. And while he was there, he got to work at some clinics. He got to practice the medical Spanish, but more importantly, he really got to immerse himself in the culture. And when he returned to Omaha, this has now helped him in his work in the Omaha community as well as when he goes back home. He can now actually speak to his grandparents, who he's always struggled to communicate with before. And so just being able to share this story with Dr. Bailey and the impact that he's making, my next step with him is really to now talk about his future giving to this fund and the university, Nebraska Medical Center, and to really talk about his estate plans and to see if this is something that he's interested in leading. So in our first year in the program, as I mentioned, we had three individuals assigned to 2300 households. In our efforts. We were able to retain 79% of donors assigned to a DSO. We able to reactivate 24% of those donors. We had 330 visits and we found out that about 20% of those assigned to us would actively engage in our outreach. And during this process, during those one on one visits, we were able to identify 12 planned gifts, which totaled around $1 million, and we were able to qualify eight major gift prospects with an estimated value of 1.28. And one thing that I do want to note on this too, is we are in the in the final stretch of year two of a program. And at this point, we've uncovered over $3 million in planned gifts in this last fiscal year alone. This has included planned gift increases, new planned gifts, and even individuals wanting to leave the university their summer home in Martha's Vineyard in their estate. And so this is done by asking that plan, giving question every time. And we are finding a lot of people who are interested in learning more. And we're just able to see that plan giving pipeline. So after running the program for two years, we knew as an organization that we could take the lessons that we learned with this annual leadership giving band of our donors, and we could use it to scale another population of our database. So this goes back to that importance of reporting that once we knew that the disciplined outreach approach worked for a defined population, we went in search of the next defined population. So enter the Gift Academy, which is our assistant director development program, focused on high wealth and mixed affinity discovery. So we took the same approach, but instead of focusing on $500 plus donors, we ran our database to find anybody with a $100,000 five year giving capacity, and we felt like this helped us give insight into capacity, but we didn't understand inclination or readiness. So some of these donors had given and some had not. Some of these donors had attended events and some had not. So we knew that there would be much colder cases than we were working in the DSO space. But we also knew that as an organization, if you run a wealth screening on your database and it tells you a whole bunch of people have capacity, well, she probably take a discipline approach in finding out how many of those individuals will take a meeting so that we can learn more about them and their philanthropic interest. So we hired four assistant directors of development as our first cohort of what we're calling the Gift Academy. And these individuals were hired to specifically focus on working through these high wealth individuals and to create their own portfolio qualified portfolios. They have no campus responsibilities, no annual giving writing, no event management. They are simply hyper focused every day on reaching out to high wealth individuals, conducting one on one meetings and crafting next steps. We're four months into this program and here's where our reporting stands. So we've reached out to over 1200 households. That is over 300 households per adult in just four months. We currently have 650 who are in the process of those that intro cadence, those seven steps and of those that we have reached out to, 150 have taken a meeting with us which shows that while these have been colder cases, we're still getting meetings with 12% and yet 230 people said they didn't want to meet with us now, ever. And yes, 550 households didn't respond to our seven outreach attempts, and yet 68% of them said it was poor timing and call back later this year. But we have identified and qualified 22 individuals, that's 22 people who said that they would welcome the opportunity to discuss a gift offered gift giving opportunity of 25,000. And we've also identified seven individuals who said that they would like more information on how to lead the university in their will or state. This was a completely untapped group of individuals that we've now attempted to build a relationship with. And that helped me and a lot more people sleep better at night. So the question we often get when people are considering strategies like this are do I have to hire somebody specifically to do this work or can I accomplish this using my current staff? And I really think the answer to that is so dependent on your current staffing structure. My advice to you is this Think right now about who are your unassigned prospects and then ask yourself what are you doing to serve them? How many of them can you feasibly get to with your existing staff, keeping in mind that they're juggling a portfolio of qualified donors, They're asking closing major gifts, staffing deeds, etc. Then think about how you approach these prospects. How are how you would approach these prospects if you had a full time position entirely dedicated to it. So that can be a full time employee, that could be a part time employee, that could be a graduate assistant, that can be undergraduate student workers. The possibilities really are endless. It's asking ourselves, when you craft out a population of individuals that you want to get in front of, how are you being hyper focused to personalize your outreach to get that 1 to 1 meeting, conducting those one on one meetings, and ultimately driving those to future gift conversations and qualifications. So with that, we're going to pause right now. We want to make sure that we're leaving a lot of time to dig into some of these strategies, whether it be our annual leadership giving efforts or our high wealth seminar age discovery efforts. If you are interested, Leah and I love friends on LinkedIn, so I've shared our linked in URLs below. We welcome you to connect with us. We are sharing information regularly about the successes of these pipeline programs and also just being as vocal as we possibly can for organizations across the country that are focusing primarily on that 5% above of their donor pyramid to start thinking about processes and programs that scale down throughout the donor pipeline. Awesome. Thank you both for all these tangible tools. Right now, I'd like to open up the floor to any questions during this time. Feel free to use the Q&A box to submit any questions or comments or conversations that you'd like to have with these two. In the meantime, we do have a question. I mean, someone asked, is the video embedded in this email or how is the video indicated that you like to review or. Yes, so it is embedded in the email. And we actually we use video card is the tool that we use. But I think you could use other tools for sure. And we put it in as a animated it's not a gif, but it's like a gif. And so we have whiteboards and we're going like this and it catches people's eyes. And I can't tell you how many donors have said they appreciate the creativity because otherwise they would look right past it. Awesome. Thank you. Someone asked, Do you have a copy to share of the break up letter? Yes, we can definitely send a copy of the breakup letter. Awesome. Thank you. And we'll make sure that that's available. Doesn't work for you guys. Sarah asked, What CRM are you saying? S I want to get more. What CRM are you saying? We are currently we are on Blackboard. We have Blackboard CRM, which is a highly complex CRM. I would say that our ideas work out of our CRM to craft next steps. So that's how they continue on with all this volume as outreach. They'll do a step of the cadence and then they'll have a plan step for their next outreach, which I think Leo would agree does take ample amount of time to keep organized. And that's why the things that we really fire for is making sure that people can juggle all the competing priorities and all the different relationships and knowing who did I just call? Do I have the pending step two, then reach out in five days because it ultimately benefits them that when you come to work every day and you look at your pending steps, you know exactly what you need to do to accomplish your work that day. Conversely, our CSOs actually work out of every true, which is a CRM overlay that we've purchased specifically for that group. And they work through a program called Sales LOFT, which is very similar to those plan steps, allows them to juggle hundreds of opportunities at the same time. All right, so someone has four units without natural constituencies like libraries. How are you identifying and qualified donors for these units in this process? Ooh, that's a really good question. Our philosophy here and this is quite honestly one of the one of the kind of tough conversations that we had to have is that for a long time our organization was very focused on constituency based fundraising. Is identifying a priorities of a dean or priorities of campus, and then really leaning in on who looks like somebody that might want to give to this area. And over the last few years, we've taken a more generalist approach. So it's really talking to the donors about what they care about, talking about being very donor centric. And one example that often comes to mind is the fact that with four campuses and 62 academic units, you really are have a tough time finding anybody out there in the world anymore that hasn't been impacted by things like COVID, cancer, infectious disease. And so our medical center, which had been primarily focused on alumni and graduates of the medical center and had just started getting in the grateful patient space a few years ago, we're now realizing that somebody that looks like a really good college of business donor, their real passion is actually cancer research. So instead of giving them a whole bunch of giving opportunities that are College of Business specific, let's ask if they be interested in learning more about what the University of Nebraska as a four campus entity is doing to tackle cancer. And we found that the donors are way more to talking about the things that they care about now. That means that for some areas, particularly religiously affiliated units, the Newman Center, the Lutheran Services Center, Greek life people love their Greek affiliated areas, athletics. We have had to take donors that tell us that actually what I really care about is the Newman Center or I really care about Kappa Kappa Gamma, or I really care about the rowing club at UNL. And we will track down what gifts can do to make a difference in each of those areas. Sometimes that's libraries, sometimes that student affairs, sometimes it's the student health clinic, but it's really focusing on what the donor cares about first and then bringing them to where they go. And my last point on that is that with a four campus system, there's always that tug of war of, well, I wanted to give to my campus and are we sharing my campus priorities with them? And we have found that people that look like the most perfect prospect for one campus, one college ends up being super affiliated with another campus. And we could have never predicted that from the data in our database, whether it's a child that went there or a family member that went there or, a just a connection that they have personally and professionally, that it's connected them to that campus. And we wouldn't have found that out if we had just led with I'm calling on behalf of this college and this Dean's priorities. Great. Thank you. Can you remind us how many new contacts per week is recommended to give to polio? Is 25. So we recommend if you have someone solely dedicated to this work to add five to cadence per day for 25 per week. And then after you update your health screenings before embarking on this project, if so, how far in advance and what screening tools breeds? What a great question. So we kind of the the answer to this is a little verbose, but let me let me go down this path. We actually did our last wall screening in 2020. We used Wells engine to scrub a majority of our database, which did a few things that helped us segment. It helped us really focus in for what later became the gift Academy donors that had a five year giving capacity of 100,000 plus had a propensity to give score of one. And we're in a major gift decile of one. So this was kind of like the best of the best, how you take hundreds of thousands of folks in our database to really identify what I think was about 6 to 7000 people that were like these are the best unassigned individuals that you have. As you can remember where this happened right at the beginning of COVID, when our organization went into a hiring freeze. So we spent about 18 months trying to drip some of these folks into portfolios with our major gifts staff. And what we often heard from our major gifts staff was, what's the priority here? Should I be closing the guest? The people I've been working for five years, taking the dean to these cities that I'm supposed to be bringing them around to, or do you want me calling this person who hasn't given since 2007 just because they have a high wealth rating? And so it was only, you know, two years later, so right around 2022 that the work that Leah and her colleagues were doing kind of had everybody going, Wait, this works. So if we can take a segment like those 6000 people that are, well, screening told us we should be focusing on, can we take the Dxo approach and just slide it over to this population of people? And as Leah shared, it has been working. And so we have not to get too far down a rabbit hole, but we've asked ourselves like, how can we do this with other populations? Can we do this with graduates of the last ten years? Can we do this with graduates outside of the state of Nebraska that have children that went to school here? So legacy programing, a parent program that follows the same type of outreach process to get as many meetings and anecdotal information as we can. Right. So referring back to our portfolios. Question then additional follow up for Nick. How are you handling transitions in staffing with such large portfolios outside? So there's kind of two answers to that question. One of those how we're handling staffing transitions. And then the other one is like, how do you handle the actual portfolios that when these things are transferred? So I'll take the first one and then I'll kick the second one over to Leah. When we went into this, we anticipated these to be high turnover positions. That was one of the things that we really wanted to focus in on making sure that we were documenting content reports really, really well so that the fruit of these efforts were not wasted. So we did a heck of a lot of training around quality contact report writing. I am happy to say that two years into this effort we have not lost anybody who has engaged in one of these positions in our organization. We have had two promotions that have come out of this. Leah, who was a dxo, became then the director of Dxo and the head of our gift academy, and we had another dxo that took a major gift officer position at our Big Ten. And we really felt for me personally, I think I felt very proud that 18 months into their time here at the University of Nebraska Foundation, they had a resumé that could say, I have conducted over 100 visits. I've upgraded people, I've retained people, I've identified major gifts, I've worked on plan gifts, I've taken complex relationships and stewarded them personally. I've talked to scholarship recipients and faculty members, and I've gone to campus to shoot videos like there was a lot of experience that they were getting in that first 12 to 18 months that really served them well when interviewing for other development roles. But of course, with that transition, Lauren, you've got, you know, 700 households that are now I've met this person and maybe talk with them for a few months and now I'm hearing from this other person. So I'll let Leah take how we've kind of managed that in the interim. Yeah. So when we had our last year, they'll be promoted to the Big Ten campus. We actually worked really closely together to identify of those in her portfolio, how many have actually engaged with her, how many she had an actual conversation with her, who is she built a relationship with? And in those conversations, if any of them, as she working towards documenting a plan, get they on that journey. So keep them keep working them, get that gift to closure so that we can honor that donors final wishes and the ones that she has engaged with, she as well as another de-facto partner together to do a warm handoff. So she called or she sent a video to the donor either or, depending on who it was and their level of engagement. And she let them know about her transition and who would be reaching out to them. And the current the XO. He then created an introductory video of themselves and he said, Hi, I'm the person that our last director said that I'd be calling and I'm looking forward to connecting with you to continue the relationship. And so it's a very warm handoff. The others that didn't engage then our Prospect Information team is really kind of scrubbing that data to see should they remain assigned or should we bring in additional annual leadership giving donors are in a bind. I would also add that just from a talent development and a talent recruitment lens and having these dxo scenarios in our organization, they understand our Sera, they understand how to reach out, they understand how to manage relationships. So they are extremely sought after because of the fact that they don't require a lot of training once they jump into a made you deaf role, which I think for many of us that are hiring development staff from outside of higher ed fundraising, it provides a really good first 12 to 18 months to say you're focused on reaching out to people and you will learn based on what you hear from the donor, how to take these next steps with them. Right. So can you please share with us some tips for prospect researchers looking to develop leadership and giving and major giving pipelines? Yes, I think that and this is actually something that we're working on here over the next few months is getting in a regular rhythm of scrubbing your donor database. So I'm a I'm not a huge fan of looking at gift logs daily because of some of the issues that we talked about earlier on in our or in our presentation, most notably that during high volume times it just seems insurmountable. Like, oh, my college to honor gifts last week, I can't reach out to all to of these people. And then you'll have times where you're not getting hardly any. And so trying to figure out a way to look at donor segments, maybe on a monthly basis, to take a look at your entire all the donors that have been brought to the organization over the last month and then rating them on things like lifetime giving to the organization, their wealth screen or their wealth rating in your system. Is it their 15th gift to the organization? Is it their first gift to the organization and trying to segment out where is the population that we want to focus in on? Because everybody's got different priorities. Some, whether it's an alumni association that might be looking for new young alumni to recruit to a young alumni academy, you might want to look at that donor base, scrap by age and scrap it by first gift as the people to serve. Reaching out to to start inquiring What prompted this? Are you interested in engaging in other ways, but then thinking that we do use a lot of qualifiers every time we look at this? We mentioned a few of them earlier. We are we aren't necessarily that interested right now in looking at those gifts that are attached to athletic ticket premiums just because, A, we don't have access to the ticketing database. So if we get talking to somebody who bought their seats and we say, tell me about why you gave this gift, and they might say, it's not a gift you made me give it. And they might say, Hey, I actually want better parking or I want different tickets. And we don't have the ability right now to deliver on that. And we've also over time, we have resisted first time donors just because a lot of those were memorial gifts. But now that we're getting in a regular rhythm of repopulating these donor bases with regularity, we are looking at Memorial Gas because we want to talk about why did you get this gift? Do you plan on giving it again in the future? How can we show impact over the next year to really recognize the reason that you gave this gift to try and turn those memorial donors into more consistent and upgraded donors over time? So wrapping up and one final question, and it is how often are you telling you data to identify these donors? In fact, the pipeline is an annual process to see it. Anyone else should be added. Well well, that's a that is that has changed. So when we started our XLP program, we looked back three years. And so that's where we found that 2300 individuals. Then it took us about a year to get through all those. So we weren't adding anybody new because we're just trying to get through the 2300. Then as we add, then when we get to the end of the first year, we added everybody that we missed over the last year. But what we're finding is that it's kind of tough to have that stewardship if you're reaching out to somebody in April that gave a gift in July of 2022 to say, Hey, I recognize you just gave, I give I'd like to schedule some time to talk to you more about that, their life and giving a gift since last summer. So we are transitioning now that we've kind of gotten through the 2300 households. Then we got through the gifts that were made last fiscal year. We are going to start populating these portfolios every month, but that will also change our cadence a little bit because don't want to feel like some of the online retailers that we've worked with in the past where you make a purchase now, immediately people are calling you going, would you like to add this? Would you like to upgrade? Would you like to get the service protection plan? So we want to make that first outreach to say, Hey, my name's Leah Swen, I'm reaching out to you from the University Nebraska Foundation. I recognize you gave a gift. Very meaningful. What an awesome gift. I am going to work with you over the next year to learn about your interests, to show you the impact that your gift is making, and to work with you to make sure that your philanthropy now into the future is meaningful to you and to your family. So that way they're getting to know Leah's face. They're getting to know that, like you're part of this program in this process now. So when she does start that cadence, six, nine, ten weeks later, they're expecting it and they know who they should be interacting with from the University of Nebraska Foundation. Awesome. I guess people just don't want to ask some stupid questions, which we love. So what was what would you say is the biggest success you've had with this program? Increase in donations, identifying new major donors, retaining donors in that accessible. Not only are you go ahead with that. That is such a great question. Personally, I feel like the greatest success is really growing and developing the next generation of major fundraisers. The teams are phenomenal. They're eager, they want to learn. They're working incredibly hard. There's they're just such a joy to work with and they get to have so many conversations and you get to learn about so many different ways to give. You know, we had a donor who wants to give us potato farm in Alaska to us. So that's interesting. And then the next day you talk to someone who wants to give us their home in Martha's Vineyard. So you just have so many opportunities to learn how to become a really great fundraiser. So that's one success. And then I would say as we look at the original 2300 households, our ability to retain those that were assigned to us, we hit 79%. Our goal was 90 was really audacious, but our giving team does a phenomenal job and their retention rate that year was 62 and so we just felt so proud that we were able to hit 79 and it just kind of fueled us to hopefully hit a higher percentage this year and we're on track to do so. And then I would also just say the plan giving space that was not an original bucket that we thought that we would be working in uncovering, but we're really helping our plan, giving team and university build that plan, giving pipeline. And, you know, we had one team member alone who in like a six month span, he, he documented the 3 million in plan giving. And so just those exciting wins and those untapped areas of potential have just been really a highlight of the program. I would add something that Leah said earlier that resonates, I think, across our organization is that we all sleep better at night knowing that somebody is paying attention to these donors. I think, you know, when we started running the analysis years ago to see if this was a feasible program, you would find somebody who had given $500 but lived in Delaware. And when you start going, why hasn't eBay reached out and learned about this person? It was, well, nobody travels to Delaware. So just because they live in Delaware, we're not going to try and learn about them and and get in front of them and steward their gift in a meaningful way. And so the fact that we can, with confidence, say that every single $500 donor to the University of Nebraska Foundation has been attempted multiple times through multiple modalities. For us to get a 1 to 1 relationship with is that now when we look up donors in our database, you never find these like diamonds in the rough. You go, Wow they gave a thousand bucks. Leah or somebody from her team reached out multiple times and they were unsuccessful in getting that meeting. But hey, we tried. So now annual giving will solicit them. We hope they give again and then we'll try the process over. But we don't have these individuals anymore that give $1,000 and then you go to their interaction tab in our CRM and you see that nobody has ever reached out to thank them, meet with them, or show gratitude for my organization. It's great to hear someone. Celeste So in these introductory emails and in those videos that you said, what exactly do you say? Or do you have any tips of, things to include in things? Yeah. So we first start, if we're able to, thanking them for the gift that they made and we let them know the impact that that gift had. And then we go into explaining our role. You know, we are here to build relationships and resources for the university and that we'd welcome the opportunity to meet with them, to learn their story, learn why they made the gift that they made and the impact they were hoping to achieve and continue having philanthropic conversations. And then the video is pretty similar. The messaging really isn't all that different from what's in the email into the video. It's just in the video we get to personally introduce ourselves and they get to see our face and who is actually reaching out to them. So when they do book that meeting and they jump on Zoom with us, it's not the first time that they're meeting on screen. What does surprised you the most about this program and are there any have there been any surprising outcomes? Great question. I think one area that maybe we didn't anticipate was with our giving day. And so we have the four campuses all have a giving day. And really leadership and giving is such a great space to secure challenged donors and as we know, challenged donors really encourage others then to give to areas that they're passionate about on the giving day. And so this team sits on those steering committees. We seek challenged donors. You know, we then steward them. We keep those challenged donors up to date on the progress. And so that's just kind of been a fun pocket that, you know, we didn't originally anticipate this team would dive into, but we found a lot of success with it. And I got to say, like a lot of it's been the I think the first surprising one was how many people would take the meeting, getting meetings is hard, and I think that we learned that 20% is awesome. I think the other thing that really surprised us was that the teams were able to keep up. I think we went into this going, Let's just learn, let's set a standard, let's lean into the data and see if somebody's falling behind or somebody just can't can't manage this many relationships. And everybody has really bought in and continue to do these relationships. And I'm really high standard. So that was really helpful and then the just response from the donors, the fact that they wanted to meet nobody, nobody's been offended by our outreach or not. Many have been offended by our outreach. Not many have been offended by the plan. Giving question by upgrade question. Of course they want to talk to us. They gave to our organization and they want to know how they can best be of help. They want to make sure their philanthropic dollars are making a difference. And if there's a different fund or a different amount, they want to hear that. And that's the difference we feel like between this approach. An annual giving is an annual giving is very static. And so you might put it, would you give consider $500, $250 or $100 to these six funds? And instead by having a conversation to say, oh, you care about D-I issues in the College of Education at this campus? Well, how would we have known that if we hadn't had a 1 to 1 interaction with you? Now we can position those initiatives from that college in an ask that would be meaningful to the donor in ways that our annual giving processes couldn't couldn't do in the past. So it sounds like it's a lot of care for others and which can be a little bit intensive. How is your staff reacting to this process and especially any existing staff that you've had before in clinic structure are It's a mixed bag. I think that the biggest thing that we're learning is that this can be done, that reaching out multiple times through multiple modalities is the most successful way for us to get visits. And so for major gift officers who haven't done a lot of prospecting over time, who are going, hey, I need new qualified prospects and how do I go about doing this? I think the amount of discipline that it takes to be successful at this can be intimidating. But I say that on one side and then I come back and say, The fact that we've hired people with almost no development experience and they can do it and have this type of success is also breeding a lot of confidence to go, Wow, you got one of these addresses identified six planned gifts in the first four months. How are you doing that? I just ask every time so that like in some cases goes. I haven't identified six planned. Yes. So is there something in the data here that I'm that you're getting better leads that I'm getting? And then we're also realizing there's a lot of confidence that comes with. That's it. All you have to do is ask, well, maybe we should start asking more. So I think as an organization, it's been a big culture shift for us to see how successful this has been, because now we're hiring more and more DSOs and radios over time, because we understand that this is the way to build relationships at scale. Do you have any tips for setting yourself up for success before winning a program like this? Yeah, so we took a lot of lessons learned when we onboarded myself and the other those for the ideal program. And that's where we kind of crafted out that gift academy. And what that was was three weeks of immersive training on learning how to be great development officers. We had about 26 people in our organization present on a variety of different topics that would allow this team to get up and running within three weeks. So there'd be an outreach and three weeks and they started booking meetings by week five of starting. And so that training really gave them the tools and help to start building the confidence for when they were to get a constituent on the phone. Right. And then what have been your biggest takeaways from these meetings that you've been able to schedule with people? Every conversation is so different. I think the the most important thing that we ever take away is really learning why they're giving back the impact that they want to achieve and helping to ensure that's happening. A lot of times in these conversations we have donors or just giving to general funds because they don't know where else to give. And then you have a great conversation and they talk about how studying abroad was their favorite thing from their college experience, and they want to help other students have those same experiences. And so coming back to that donor and being like, This is what I heard you say, I don't know if you knew about this fund or this program, but I wanted to present this to you as an opportunity for you to give back and ensuring that you have that follow through and then having that conversation with the donor and seeing their excitement. And then it gets even better when they actually do change the fund that they're giving to. And then you get to create a stewardship piece and present that to them. And just seeing like that light bulb in their life or their eyes light up, that's it. Just so incredibly powerful. I would double down on that because in leading or just observing even our annual giving team here at the University of Alaska Foundation, we have over 14,000 funds. So we can't solicit for all 14,000. But we do know that we have a fund that will match donor intent and donor interests if we can uncover the donor intent, the donor interest. So I think what has happened is that we can only solicit for so many funds. So then a donor gives to a dean's excellence fund in this college. And the natural assumption is that they love that Dean, they love that college. That's why they gave to it. But when you get talking to them, you start finding out that the real passion is actually something else. So being able to draw the line in the parallel between a donor and I'll just use the brief example that Leah worked on. We had a donor who gave a $1,000 gift to the library at our university, Nebraska at Omaha campus. And when Leah worked with this individual to bring in that gift of $1,000 to the library, she uncovered that her real passion is helping kids that are coming out of the foster care system. And through that conversation, it has led to a seven figure gift conversation around helping children out of the foster care system. We can do that. We can work with campus to make sure that we are creating scholarship opportunities for that population. But we would have never uncovered that if we just kept soliciting that donor for the library. So it's really listening in to the answers to the questions we're asking and then crafting a personalized plan that can ultimately deliver a great experience for that donor. Great. Have you found any differences across different age groups or other demographics in terms of how people respond to different outreach methods for the introduction? Oprah Cadence, excuse. Yeah, it's a great question. I would say it seems like maybe an older population isn't as comfortable jumping on a Zoom call, but with an asterisk. The pandemic was kind of a blessing in that way, where so many people now have the Zoom app on their phone that they're comfortable using it, they understand it. It's become a more common way to connect with others. But I would say, you know, older demographics probably still prefer just connecting on the phone. They don't want to deal with the technology as we're testing texting right now, which is actually we're getting a really great response rate with it. More specifically, our medical campus. So maybe the other one, but that's kind of been an interesting modality to test that from like an age demographic side of things. There really isn't anything that jumps out drastically except for maybe the tech that we're using. Yeah. So I want to thank you for sharing such amazing conversation. Some great tools, takeaways to be able to compute at these institutions, etc.. We had excellent conversation. Help these guys enjoy this conversation as well and wanted to extend a great effort to thank you so much for coming. And do you both are either of anything else appropriately thankful to you Lauren Christie and all of case for giving us the opportunity to share this. This is really exciting work on behalf of our institution and our development staff across the board and our donors are are benefiting from these approaches. And we're just so thankful that others in the organ in our industry are interested in learning more about them. Thank you so much. So have a great afternoon, everyone.

fundraising

donor stewardship

personalized outreach

tracking donor interactions

measuring success

retaining donors

planned gifts

major gift prospects

University of Nebraska Foundation

engaging potential donors

increasing donations