Hello, good afternoon and thank you for joining us. My name is Brooke Sahls and I'm part of the central stewardship team at Yale. And I serve on the district one cabinet for case, helping to bring professional development opportunities to our district through in person gatherings and virtual educational programming like this. Today, we're going to dig into the topic of innovation through collaboration, focusing on how frontline gift officers and donor relations and stewardship professionals can build highly effective donor centered projects to move the needle on giving. Each of our teams are going to spend about 15 minutes sharing some case studies. And then we're going to have plenty of time to ask questions. Our goal is for you to leave not only inspired, but with some concrete idea of how you might tackle your next great idea. And with that, let's meet our presenters. Starting with MIT. Corey, take it away. Yep. Thanks, Brooke. So I am Corey Spentek and I'm the senior director of donor engagement and stewardship at MIT. I'm currently in my 18th year at the Institute and have spent the last 11 years focused in the donor relations space. Before that, my earlier days at MIT, I was doing trustee relations. And then I moved into advancement, supporting our highest level volunteer fundraising committee, the Corporation Development Committee. That's actually where I first met my colleague, Nicole, who's joining me here today. And we've been partnering on engagement strategies ever since. In my current role, I lead a team that builds strategic stewardship and engagement programs tailored to the needs of our donors, as well as our frontline fundraisers. And I work really closely with fundraising colleagues across the Institute to create meaningful experiences that help deepen relationships and support the philanthropic partnerships that drive MIT's mission forward. I'm super excited to be here with you all today and to share some of the ways we've approached collaboration and hopefully spark some ideas together. And to you, Nicole. Thanks, Corey. Hi, everyone. I'm Nicole Baker. I'm a principal giving officer at MIT. I'm currently in my 13th year here at the Institute. My team is regionally based and New England is my territory. So in addition to strengthening alumni connections to MIT, I also work with donors who have the capacity of making gifts of $100,000 or more. Before MIT, I spent six years at the American Red Cross, both in Boston and in Connecticut. I've served in various roles, but ultimately settled on major gift work. I enjoy building the relationships and helping prospects make an impact. Thank you, Case, for having us today, inviting us to speak. And I look forward to our discussion. I'll turn it over to Gracie and Carrie for their intros. Hi, everyone. I'm Gracie Herbert from Miami University, and I am currently serving as an associate director of donor engagement. I started at Miami in 2022, and I like to share that I'm also a 2013 graduate of the university. In my role, I create individualized stewardship plans for donors in partnership with our frontline fundraisers. And I also work amongst our team of donor relations and stewardship staff to continue to create individual and unique personalized donor experiences to strengthen relationships, but also to communicate the impact of their giving to the donors. And so I'm excited to be here, and I'm glad that Corey and Nicole partnered with us to bring this case collaboration together. And thank Case and Brooke for bringing us all here together. I'm going to pass it over to my colleague, Carrie, who's been a great partner for us in stewardship as she serves on the front line of our fundraising. Thank you, Gracie. Hello, everyone. I'm Carrie Powell. I'm the senior director of development for what is called our national team at Miami University. I have been at Miami in a variety of major gift roles for the past eight years, and I spent the previous nearly a decade at the American Cancer Society in Cincinnati. The role that I occupy now is to co-manage a national team of gift officers placed across the country where we have large concentrations of donors and alumni, but I also have a large portfolio of major gift opportunities as well. Thank you so much for having me. So I think we are up. So next slide, please. We wanted to give you some quick background on MIT and our advancement structure to set the stage. So for the current academic year, MIT's student body includes just about 12,000 students. A lot of that composed of our graduate student body, which is about 7,300 students, and then our undergraduate student body is around 4,500. MIT's endowment stands at around $24.6 billion, and our annual fundraising goal is $500 million, which helps support various initiatives across the Institute from research to campus development. I also wanted to tell you a little bit about our teams. So Nicole and I are part of the Central Development Office, which is called Resource Development. The Office of Individual Giving, where Nicole resides, has primary responsibility for the cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship of major gift prospects and donors. The members of this team work closely with MIT's administration and faculty, the many areas of resource development, the development efforts in the schools, and the Alumni Association to cultivate gifts of $100K or more. Three frontline teams serve distinct regions, both domestically and internationally, with approximately 24 frontline fundraisers supported by a very strong administrative infrastructure. And as Nicole mentioned in her intro, she covers New England. And then the team I'm on is part of a larger team called Communications, Events, and Donor Engagement and Stewardship. We focus on building and sustaining strong relationships with MIT donors to help ensure continued philanthropic support. We like to use data and research to guide our work, especially when creating individualized stewardship plans for our top donors. Our goal is to provide meaningful updates, access, and experiences that show the impact of giving and deepen donors' connection to MIT. We also develop tools and training to support our fundraising colleagues so donor engagement feels thoughtful and consistent across the board. The Donor Engagement and Stewardship team is composed of 12 people, and we are structured in three sub-teams, Acknowledgements and Writing Team, Impact Reporting Team, as well as the Engagement Team. Before I hand it over to Nicole, I just want to briefly say that MIT's model is highly decentralized with development staff embedded across schools, departments, labs, and centers. And that means there are fundraisers and donor relations professionals working in lots of different corners of the Institute, often focused on specific areas or donor groups. My team partners closely with these colleagues to share tools, best practices, and strategies that help ensure donors have a cohesive and meaningful experience no matter where their gift is directed or who they're connected to at MIT. We handle stewardship for the centrally held funds, but when a fund resides in a specific department or school, stewardship is a shared responsibility between the fundraiser and their development partner in that area. It's a highly collaborative model that relies on strong communication to keep donor engagement thoughtful, consistent, and well-coordinated across the Institute. With that overview in mind, I'll now turn it over to Nicole, who will introduce the donor case we'll be sharing today. Next slide, please. Great. Thank you, Cori. Okay, so as we shift into our case study, I wanted to provide the context to why we chose this story. We thought this case would be interesting to share because it highlights how every donor has a unique approach to giving, and for many, that approach is deeply personal. This story focuses on the stewardship of someone who has a preference for privacy. I'm sure many of you have donors who look similar. They intentionally choose to give quietly, preferring to stay out of the spotlight. This donor is driven by a strong sense of purpose and a genuine desire to make a difference, and not by the pursuit of recognition or praise. Rather than large public displays of thanks, he appreciates gestures that are thoughtful and aligned with his values. Now, let's look at this donor a little bit closer. If you look at the slide, he holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, graduating in 1978. He's the founder and CEO of a privately held company. He is married with three children, and he has strong family connections to MIT. His mother, his brother, his sister, brother, and daughter, one daughter, all attended MIT, and he remains an active volunteer. At the end of the calendar year in 2018, this longstanding donor to MIT significantly increased his annual giving from six figures to eight figures, and Corey and I needed to partner in order to elevate the stewardship. Next slide, please. His first significant gift to MIT was $22 million, and included allocations for two of our schools, the School of Science and the School of Engineering. In addition, he supported the Office of Open Learning. I thought this slide would be helpful for everyone to see just his background. Not only was the size of the gift extraordinary, but the allocations were as well. As you can see, under the School of Engineering, he supported fellowships, faculty research funds, capital support, and the mechanical engineering department, and then under the School of Science, he supported fellowships and the math department, and for the Office of Open Learning, he supported a discretionary fund. I mention all these allocations just to give a sense of how varied his gift was and how it spanned many schools and departments across MIT. This really was an amazing gift for MIT. However, it was going to be a unique challenge to steward this type of gift, and I was really grateful to be able to partner with Corey on this. Next slide. So, here were the questions that were top of my mind once the gift closed. I called Corey as soon as it closed so that we could brainstorm about the following things. The donor supports numerous areas across MIT, so how can we steward with one unified voice? He had mentioned to me his intent to do more for MIT in the future, so I truly believe that good stewardship is cultivation for the next gift, so we wanted to make sure we got this right. And, as I mentioned before, the donor does not want large or public displays of thanks. He was not interested in press releases, signing ceremonies, or any such event. So given all this, I asked Corey what might be a meaningful way to say thank you. Corey's plan was to create a stewardship narrative. This became our guiding plan for the stewardship touches in the year ahead. We mapped out a few ideas and made sure to focus on the timing, like which things were we doing and when were we doing them. We wanted to ensure that every few months he was hearing from MIT, one way or another, and leading up so that we were leading up to the following fall when I would be making the next ask. If he could see the impact of his giving, then it would certainly make it a lot easier for making the next ask. So first and foremost on that stewardship plan was Corey's idea of creating an impact report. This would include letters from students and updates from the various departments. I particularly liked this idea. It was a personalized keepsake and a wonderful suggestion that aligned really well with how this donor liked to be thanked. Corey will now get into the details of how to execute such an undertaking. Next slide, please. So as Nicole shared, our stewardship strategy for the donor has always emphasized a holistic and personalized approach with this annual impact report playing a central role. We ensure the report highlights the breadth of his support and its tangible impact across the Institute. This unified presentation keeps the donor connected to the outcomes of his giving in a meaningful way, all without the need for public recognition. A stewardship officer on my team spearheads the report process from beginning to end. Over the years, the process has become more streamlined and our partners across the donor's areas of giving now anticipate our content requests, which is incredible. My colleague is usually kicking off the annual process about now in the spring in order to have it ready to be presented to the donor in the fall. The report reports on the previous academic year. As you can imagine, after hearing all that this donor supports, it's a test in coordination to get what's needed from all stakeholders by the designated deadlines to keep it on track. This donor continues to make annual gifts between $10 and $20 million, and as a result, the report has grown in content and length over the years. It's now a whopping 242 pages and includes a cover letter from the MIT president, along with updates from all graduate and faculty support funds, plus the other funds he supports. And we know because he's told Nicole, he reads it from front to back, which of course is music to my donor relations ears. Next slide, please. So we would love to show you an actual page from the report, but because it includes personal donor details and student information, redacting it would strip away the essence of what makes it meaningful. So instead, we're offering you here a glimpse of some photos and some representative quotes from MIT leadership that were included in the report. We're fortunate to have a very talented in-house design team that's developed a suite of report templates we can tailor in different ways. The real magic, though, lies in the timing and the personalization. By structuring the report around well-timed, intentional stewardship, we've created a rhythm that strengthens this donor's ongoing commitment to MIT. He stays deeply connected, engaged on his own terms, and continues to see the impact of his generosity, all without needing to step into the spotlight. The timing of the impact report is key. We decided to deliver it one month before Nicole plans to have the next gift conversation, which is typically around Thanksgiving. And this timing remains crucial to our approach. That kind of behind-the-scenes connection builds long-term loyalty. It keeps the donor aligned with MIT's mission and inspired to keep making a difference year after year. If anyone's interested in the process details or how we put the pieces together, I'm more than happy to dive into the weeds during the Q&A or after the session. Very briefly, I also wanted to note that in addition to this annual comprehensive report, the deans of both schools, the School of Science and the School of Engineering, send the donor announcements introducing that academic year's fellows, complete with bios and photos. It's a simple but very personal way to highlight the direct impact of his support right at the start of each academic year. All right. We'll go on to the next slide. And so we've also identified additional low-lift ways to keep the donor engaged and feeling connected to the impact of his giving beyond the impact report. And so, you know, sending him news articles whenever the fellows are featured in the press or institute publications, and honestly, that happens pretty often. Sometimes it feels like there's a new mention every other week. While it's a simple gesture on our end, it's incredibly meaningful to the donor. These touch points help reinforce the success of the program he's invested in and remind him of the role he plays in supporting these students' journeys. We also mix up who the message comes from, which adds a nice personal touch. Sometimes it's the dean or department head reaching out, and other times it might come directly from Nicole. That variety not only keeps things fresh, but also helps the donor feel connected to the broader community he's supporting. Overall, this is a great example of how small, intentional acts of stewardship can go a long way in deepening a donor's connection. This approach is part of a larger stewardship plan that Nicole briefly mentioned earlier. We have a robust, individualized stewardship plan program in place, which is crucial for understanding donors' giving, the stewardship they receive, and the overall engagement due to the scope of a donor's support. So in addition to this narrative plan, we also create complementary stewardship tasks for the relationship manager, Nicole in this case, to ensure that two to three meaningful touch points are planned and executed over the next 12 to 15 months. And speaking of recognizing his ongoing commitment, as part of this personalized stewardship, once he contributed a million dollars, he became a member of the MIT Charter Society, which is our lifetime giving society. For members of the Charter Society, one of the key stewardship tasks we partner with fundraisers on is coordinating the presentation of the limestone gift, which is an original piece of MIT's main group, which is very cool. So we'll go to the next slide. And Nicole, I'm wondering if you can share a bit more about the additional ways we engage and steward the donor. Yeah, sure. Thanks, Cori. OK. In addition to these wonderful stewardship touches that we've already mentioned, the donor also enjoys meeting with faculty and senior officers at MIT throughout the year. He has an annual meeting with MIT's president. It's usually early in the new year because his gifts close usually at the end of the calendar year. He is also often asked by the president to attend private dinners, small events, and he certainly is seen as a valued member of the MIT community. And it's also worth mentioning that this donor remains an active volunteer at the Institute. These roles help keep him connected and make him feel like an insider. He serves on two visiting committees. These are advisory-type committees that each department at MIT has, and it's a coveted volunteer role. And he also serves on the School of Engineering Dean's Advisory Council. All right. So to move things forward, we're going to transition to where things stand with the donors giving today. So that 2018 $22 million gift that started this story was just the beginning. As Cori mentioned, since that time, the donor has continued to contribute, I'm sorry, continued to support MIT with annual gifts ranging between $10 and $20 million, which has now brought his lifetime giving to over $100 million. I'm going to turn it back to Cori to share about the wonderful stewardship project that she has spent a year coordinating to recognize this significant $100 million milestone. Next slide, please. Oh, wait. Actually, I think we're on the slide. Stay on the slide. We are. Yeah, we're good. So yeah, to recognize this truly transformational philanthropy at MIT, we established a special protocol in 2018. So donors who reach $100 million or more in lifetime giving are honored with the presentation of an Oculus Glass tile from the original MIT Dome. For this donor, we have the opportunity to carry out this meaningful tradition. The Oculus tile is a beautiful and symbolic reminder of how their generosity has quite literally helped let the light in at MIT, fueling countless discoveries and advances for the Institute and the world. You'll see photos of it on this slide. It's a patterned glass tile from the original oculus of the MIT Dome, paired with a custom-made companion book. These tiles were preserved during the Dome's 2014 renovation and offer a powerful connection to MIT's history. They date back to 1912, when alumnus William Bosworth designed the Dome and the core of the main campus. Originally, there were over 1,000 tiles. Today, only about 30 remain, making them a truly rare and fitting tribute for donors at this extraordinary level of giving. Each tile is artfully encased in bronze, crafted at MIT's own Forge and Foundry, and presented in a custom box, along with a customized book that shares the story of the oculus, the creation of the gift, and also highlights the specific impact of the donor's generosity. It's uniquely MIT recognition, personally presented by the president. The oculus has been presented in a variety of settings, depending on the donor, ranging from large events to intimate dinners at the president's house, and even one-on-one meetings in the president's office. For this donor, Nicole has arranged a personal meeting with the president later in May, where he'll receive the oculus package. I know I can speak for both Nicole and I that we're super excited to see this special moment come together. So I think we have a couple of minutes to take any questions before we turn it over to our Miami colleagues. Or you can save them for the end. That's fine, too. The first question that we have is, will this donor continue to receive such comprehensive stewardship in the future, given the approximately 250-page report? Nicole, I'll take a crack at this, and then maybe if you want to jump in. I would say yes, because we know he reads every page and likes the detail. And we know we're doing something right, because he continues to give and give at higher levels. So I do anticipate that we will. In general, we do about eight of these comprehensive reports for most generous donors to MIT who support areas across the Institute. So there's really a reason to bring it centrally and to bring it all together. And they all look different. And with some of the donors who receive these comprehensive reports, we have been arming the relationship managers with questions around, is the donor still happy with receiving this report? Would they like to see something different? What about moving it from an annual to an every other year? So we are starting to explore that, just because we have been doing all these comprehensive reports annually. But I think the biggest thing is just checking in with the donor to make sure it's still having an impact on them. But yes, for this donor in particular, I do believe we'll continue to do it. Fantastic. And we have another question. What type of software do you create your impact reports in? So for our top donor reports, we currently just, our design team makes these really beautiful templates that are in InDesign. And so we're able to really manipulate them as needed. And they've given us a bunch of different formats. I think the file is like 120 pages long. But the report templates, we do a combination of narrative and photos and quotes. And so we're really able to play around with it. For our scholarship and fellowship and professorship reporting that we're responsible for, we have a homegrown system that our IT team developed and created. It's extraordinary. And so for all of those ships that I just mentioned, we're doing all of that in that homegrown system. Do you know approximately how many tiles have been given out at this point? I think it's been around eight or nine individual or donor couples that have received the Oculus package at this time. I should really look that up. But I think it's around there. It's almost a dozen. Getting closer. And one last quick question is, how many staff worked on the MIT report? And how do Cori and Nicole track the stewardship plan? Is it located in the CRM? Yes. So I will start with that second question first. So the stewardship plan does live in our database. MIT is still using advance. We're very behind the times. We will eventually be moving to a Salesforce-based database. But our stewardship plans, our individualized stewardship plans for the actual donor live on the donor side of the database. And so we were intentional about storing them there. Because this is where most everyone goes, including the frontline staff. I'm sorry, Brooke. Can you remind me what the first half of that question was? Oh, is it in here? Yes, it's how many staff worked on it. Oh, right. So we have one person on my team who spearheads it. But of course, it takes a village. So we're coordinating with both of the schools and all of the other areas that he supports that we do report in on. So like I said, we're starting about now to really collect all of the information. For instance, one of the schools will do their own outreach to all of the fellows. We give them basically an email template that they can email out to the fellows. So we're getting the same sorts of information. So we ask them to provide information on their background, where they came from, and then what kind of research they're doing. And then we also ask if they're willing. It's completely optional to include a thank you or what receiving this fellowship means to them. So one school is doing it themselves, and then we handle the other school. And basically, that's just a mail merge that we're using. So hopefully, that answers the question. Fantastic. I think we'll jump on over. And we'll have more questions at the end. So please keep dropping your questions in the chat. Thank you, Brooke. And thank you, Corey and Nicole, for sharing about that partnership for that donor experience. But also, I think what's important to highlight is the cross-campus partnerships as well. Before we jump into telling more about how Carrie and I have partnered for donors amongst our entire teams and also across our own campuses, we just wanted to share a little bit more about Miami University. And yes, we are located in Oxford, Ohio. We're about seven miles from the Indiana border. And to give you a little bit more context of our location, we're roughly one hour north of Cincinnati, two hours west of Columbus, and two hours east of Indianapolis. Miami University was founded in 1809. And a common phrase you may hear alumni say is that Miami University was founded before Florida was a state. It's one of our big claims to fame. And no, we don't have palm trees around us. So from its founding, we were identified as a public IV. And currently, Miami is home to about 16,500 undergraduate students, so a little bit different of a population than MIT. We're also a public institution. We have a small graduate student population. And we rank third amongst all public universities in the United States for undergraduate teaching, as well as we're 12th among all US institutions for public universities and four-year graduation rates. And we have been identified as a top 35 best college for future leaders. Now, when those future leaders graduate, they join our alumni population of about 240,000 people. And more importantly, on our fundraising side, we like to talk about how there's about a 13% alumni annual giving rate. And what that means for us fundraisers is that we have the opportunity to have self-identified individuals in our pipeline, which allow us to cultivate future major gifts, as well as also have stewardship opportunities for broad-based communications, as well as individualized experiences. So as we advance to the next slide, we'll share a little bit more about what fundraising looks like at our university. And so fundraising here is known as university advancement. Unlike MIT, we are a centralized advancement shop. So it's nice to be able to get to see two different ways that institutions work. Because as we know in fundraising and higher ed, everyone operates a little bit differently for the needs of their donors and their institution. We have around 120 full-time employees. And that includes alumni team. We have our donor relations shop I'm in, a marketing team that's in-house IT, and our development officers as well. We have around 36 gift officers. We also, you'll hear us say development officers in our world. And that serves different constituencies. But then we also have generalists who help support fundraising initiatives across the university. And our donor relations shop has a team that focuses on acknowledgement letters, broad-based communications, from videos to storytelling, a quarterly giving tribute magazine, and also our individualized stewardship program. Currently, Miami is in a $1 billion campaign for love, for honor, for those who will. And what we found is that it's incredibly important that as our frontline fundraisers are on the road, that all of our teams are working together, specifically our donor relations shop, to support the relationships and create a consistent donor experience. As we advance to the next slide, I want to share a little bit more about how we create consistency amongst those donor experiences. So as I've mentioned a few times already, individualized stewardship is really the core of my role. And I am part of a team that seeks to provide personalized donor experiences through partnerships with not only our frontline fundraisers, but campus partners, to really highlight the giving of those major donors. Our process includes a team of three. That includes two donor engagement staff, myself included, and then our senior director of donor relations. And we really lead this whole process, yet we make sure that it's very collaborative so that we know that we're working together to incorporate the appropriate donors. That stewardship will make an impact in their past giving experience or in their future giving experience. We've recently, in the past year, aligned so that we're supporting our gift officers even closer through our campaign priorities. And that's through a tiered system. Starting at tier 3, which really any donor who is given is already in, those are donors that will receive any kind of standard stewardship based on their funding. Our tier 2 is for donors that have made major gifts in the past, might be in a pledge cycle, or stewardship might not be top of mind for the relationship, however it is important. And we schedule out one to two touch points throughout the year. And then tier 1, which are really those higher need donors that we see development officers working with actively, those are donors who have made a major gift in the past. They're likely to make a major gift before this campaign closes. And also stewardship will really support that relationship. So we are using stewardship through that cultivation process to lead to another gift. And really, this process occurs through a quarterly cycle. We meet actively with our DOs that we have plans with. And then we also do a lot of outreach in between, whether those are emails or chats or text. It just depends on the preference of our development officer. One thing we want to highlight is we talk about above and beyond standard stewardship. Standard stewardship for us is any process that really is widely served and already occurring, like our annual scholarship letters that our director of scholarships creates or our endowment reporting process. So that above and beyond standard stewardship looks like milestone celebrations. That could be for us birthdays that end in fives or zeros. And we choose to celebrate those birthdays that really make a difference in the relationship with the donor. And it could be even fund milestones. Elevated impact reporting is another tool we use. And then connecting with beneficiaries. One thing I'll note, being located where we are in Southwest Ohio, we can't always get our donors to us. They have busy lives as well. And so we've really leaned on implementing digital strategies to help take campus to them wherever they are in the world. So we've really started to utilize Thank You, a video platform, to really highlight not only our campus partner relations with our donors, but also student beneficiary stories. Now, I'm going to pass it over to Carrie as she shares two different case studies about ways that we've partnered together. Thank you, Gracie. Next slide. I'm going to highlight two recent examples of this partnership in action at Miami University, specifically between Gracie and I. One partnership allowed us to unlock a larger gift. And the second was focusing on doing right by our donors by focusing on relationship repair. So our first donor, donor A, was a married male, late 70s. He received a bachelor degree in sociology and a master degree in college student personnel from Miami in the late 60s. He was intent on becoming a college professor. But the day he graduated college, he stayed unconnected to the university ever since. He went on to a career in the military and then into the corporate career, specifically in the IT side, until one day post-retirement a few years ago, he called into our main advancement line with a curiosity about what the role of scholarships were on our campus and if someone could please call him back to discuss. Next slide. That led to a series of cultivation conversations and realizing this was a donor who had major, major gift potential for us. And through some good cultivation work, we realized he has a passion for the education workforce. Though he thought himself a future college professor, we learned that he did one year in a classroom and realized that was not for him. But he was really passionate about the role that educators play in supporting our society. He was also really passionate about the role of STEM, considering his career in the military and in IT and in his Ohio grassroots. So that led to the creation of a blended gift, major gift, and almost $2 million that went to Ohio-based students interested in going into a STEM educator field. The size of his gift commitment allowed him to take advantage of some matching gift dollars, which was beautiful because that meant that his gift got awarded immediately so that we could have the honor to start stewarding that gift right away. Because this was a first-time donor who had never given a gift to the university and was starting out strong, he also had never worked with endowments. So a lot of our initial stewardship focused on onboarding him to the donor experience and gleaning from him, like we do all donors, what are you hoping to get out of this? What's the impact you wanna have? And then we have fine-tuned our stewardship plan around that. Like MIT's example, this donor was not one for pomp and circumstance. He's a no-frills donor. He was not interested in having his name splashed across gift announcements, but he was willing to share his story anonymously in gift publications. This is an area of campus or teacher education area that isn't rife with billion-dollar prospects. And so he appreciated the need to storytell here in hopes that a fellow alum could see themselves in his story and raise their hands to wanna give too. So we ended up framing his initial gift publication and hand-delivering it to him. Again, very few people come through Oxford, Ohio by happenstance. So we delivered this to him, a group of us went, and we also did a champagne toast to kick off the activation of his fund. And come time for his first birthday, once we got to know him, Gracie and I were talking about what would be a nice way to honor him. He'd just gotten a ton of attention. We'd done a lot of work together to get this gift off the ground. And we decided we would fare towards a simpler idea. We sent him a box of Miami Red Cheryl's Cookies from Ohio. And I'm not gonna say that Cheryl's Cookies are gonna be the catalyst for your next leadership level gift. However, after all of the work we'd done, that simple birthday gesture led to a phone call from him a couple of days later saying, A, thank you, I devoured them. Two, all of this has led his wife and him to reflect back on the past year of working with us and realize that they felt confident that the legacy they wanted to have in the world was in offsetting the cost of attendance for future educators. That prompted them to double down on their commitment. Those are the best phone calls, right? That we never expect. So in essence, they have gifted their entire estate to Miami University and to this effort. And this is only a relationship that's two and a half years in the making at this point. And so he, through the course of committing the second size of his estate, has created a sister fund that's focused on first-generation students. Again, it's a very personal experience for him. So we are very much in the throes of focusing on continuing to steward this person who prefers anonymity and really just wants to make sure that his life's work is going to support students who wanna make a difference in future classrooms in the state of Ohio. So we're leveraging that Thank You video platform to provide messages to him from campus leaders, keep him apprised of what's going on with our education initiatives. And as his first cohorts for both scholarships are coming on board, keeping apprised of who these donors or who these recipients are with an eye towards, you will have a really beautiful milestone coming up in a couple of years as his first cohort graduates debt-free as they head into their classrooms. And that'll be a really beautiful milestone for us to celebrate. Next page. Donor B is a very, almost the opposite donor. This is a known entity, a big personality donor who's been engaged with the university for decades in a variety of roles up to, she was a foundation board member for years. And unfortunately, her experience with Miami soured on the donor side of the house. She had created a fund in 2005, aiming to support graduate and doctoral students in the educational leadership program. She wanted to support and offset the cost of attendance for those future principals and superintendents and school districts across the country. But because of a series of curriculum changes at the state and a series of staff and faculty turnover, unfortunately, her fund just sat there cold, unbeknownst to the people who took over next. Next slide. Thank you. Our fund auditor discovered this fund a couple of years after the fact and notified the new chief development officer for the college who was me at the time and the new department chair about this fund's existence, how it had accumulated a lot of distribution earnings and was being sat there unspent. This provided a great opportunity for that chair and I to strategize on a way to re-engage the donor that would be in the spirit of what she originally intended and get this fund activated and those funds back to the students who desperately need them. So we knew we were facing relationship repair, which started with an apology to the donor and a commitment to do right by her original intent. She was very open to that. Next slide. In the course of that conversation, we came to find out that the original intent of her gift in 2005 was to fulfill a commitment she made to herself when she was a student on our campus in the 50s. Someone who said, I will give a million dollars to this university, one way or another. And that was the original pledge for her 2005 gift. She also let us know that it was her intent to support as many students as possible. So she likes to spread her money to as many students as possible. So with that in mind, we revised the criteria to be in alignment with current curriculum and current programming to assure it was going to be awarded in a way that met her wishes and met a need on campus. And we kept her involved throughout that first year of her revised criteria. That culminated into, we invited her to come into a classroom. She's a lifelong student at heart, though she'd been retired for 20 years. And she got to sit in on a class that was full, coincidentally, of student recipients of hers. So she got to hear kind of what was going on in the current state of education, what our current superintendent's facing these days. And then they got to be introduced to her at the end of the class. And there was a lovely Q&A engagement back and forth. We took a group photo, framed it, mailed it to her. And throughout the course of that year, she started activating her pledge payments again. Until a couple of years ago, her fund ultimately reached her goal of a million dollars, which was cause for celebration. And this donor loves a celebration. And so we put together a really nice evening for her in her hometown. Again, we had to go to her, where we brought members of faculty who are engaging with her students, the dean, myself, and a couple of her close friends and siblings to a dinner where we did a toast to her, having achieved her first goal, her 65-year-old goal at this point, to raise a million dollars for the university. And in addition to that, we created and surprised her with a custom book that capped off this milestone. And it's not dissimilar from what MIT created, it's more of a look back as well. So we pulled from her old photos from when she was a student on campus, what the campus looked like at that time. Photos were incorporated from her years of volunteer experience up to, I think the most meaningful part for her, is we pulled together a comprehensive list of every single student who'd ever benefited from her fund. We did a sampling of student testimonials from past and present recipients on what having funding from this woman meant for their careers in education. And then we also reached out to past faculty and administration who she'd worked with throughout her history with us. She's a big personality, you don't forget this woman. And so we got a great response right back from all of those past administrators who pinned a letter to her as well that was included in this. I've learned from her friends and family this is her coffee table book. And unbeknownst to any guests that show up at one of her houses, she pulls this out and walks them through. Full of pride for herself as she should, but it's more than just a book and like patting herself on the back for making such an impact at the university. This is a lifelong goal that this woman had that through partnering in stewardship and donor relations with faculty, there were many people who were involved and continue to be involved in ensuring her gifts are having the impact that she wants. So we're also grateful for the partnership here. There are many, many students who continue to benefit from this work. And so a key partner with this particular fund is that manager of our scholarship work. She coordinates with all the student recipients to either pin a handwritten note, which we then box and ship to this donor. Or for those who are comfortable, we do thank few videos using that electronic platform, which is a wonderful way for this donor who has seasonal homes across the country. And again, isn't often traipsing through the university to be able to put the faces and voices behind the student names that she was receiving in her reports every year. All right, I will pass it back off to Gracie to kind of wrap up the Miami partnership here. Thank you, Carrie. I know that look back was fun for me and I have seen some chats too where people are talking about what a great story. One thing we wanna know is that we acknowledge that the future of fundraising is just here almost soon. And well, I mean, it's here, right? And so we wanna make sure that not only are we partnering together to ensure that we're stewarding donors who have made major gifts and might make future gifts, but we also wanna make sure that we're partnering and stewarding these donors to create consistent relationships because that's at the heart of what we do in our donor relations team. We really want to ensure that the stories that they're being told are ones that matter to them, but also connect with us across campus and support all of the relationships that make an impact from the gifts that they're receiving, but then also support that donor relationship. The biggest thing for us is as we enter the end of the campaign and the future beyond that, we really understand that this partnership that you've heard about is much more than just a collaboration between Carrie and myself. It's a collaboration of so many different individuals that come together to create all of these stories. And without those continued partnerships, we wouldn't be able to continue to be successful for not only our own goals, but our institutional goals and the relationships with our donors. So that wraps up our part, and I believe we're moving, Brooke, to open questions for everyone. We are. Thank you all so much for sharing your insights. We wanna kick off the questions with a question about for the Ohio team, who manages scholarship recipient meetings for donor A? How frequently, and are they in-person or virtual? The director of scholarship management who we spoke about throughout both of our portions, she manages all of that. She's doing the Lord's work, honestly. She, it's a ton of work. It's not easy. It's not always recognized, but she's pinging student recipients all of the time, and is also really sensitive to some students might need some prep before they engage with the donor. Some are really uncomfortable with engaging with the donor. So it really is trying to find the best match between are the donors interested and really getting in front of the students, are the students open to that and prepared? Some of them never having been in a situation like this before making sure they're going and confident with what to expect. But she coordinates all of that. A lot of the time that happens virtually by way of our rural campus situation. So we're doing it via Zoom like this, but sometimes where the opportunity serves us, we're able to host them on campus. If they're coming to campus for homecoming or an alumni weekend, and the student happens to be on campus, we try our best to maximize those opportunities because they don't often come back to Oxford. Fantastic, and a question for all of you for the annual caseload for the donor relations staff member, do you have a sense of what that kind of ISP caseload is and what the criteria is for kind of triaging, prioritizing and screening donors? I can take that first. So I think I mentioned our program is very robust and we are doing, so our criteria for individualized stewardship plans for all of the teams. So the team that Nicole is on, as well as all of the teams across the schools, we use a criteria of a hundred K or higher gift or new gift or pledge. And so that sort of triggers when we do an individualized stewardship plan. And there's someone embedded on my team that handles that. So if we don't have one already existing, they'll create a new one. And then if we have one existing, they'll just update it if the donor has made another gift. And then those are shared with the fundraiser who partners with that donor. For our principal giving team, it's a little different. We are not managing it on a monthly basis. We instead have an annual review with that team. And we are looking at specifically donors who are in the pipeline to make another significant gift. And so that's sort of our trigger for that. And so we used to meet with them over the summer, the principal giving relationship managers, but we've shifted. Last year, we shifted to the fall. Because by that point, they've completed their fiscal year planning and they really know who's on the radar for cultivation. Because we really look at these stewardship plans as a way to cultivate for that next gift. And so it's a unique structure at MIT. The relationship manager is really responsible to make sure that the stewardship is happening. And that's why with the stewardship tasks that I mentioned, so each stewardship narrative or plan has two to three stewardship tasks that we associate with it. And those are spanned out over 12 to 15 months. And these are tasks that a fundraiser can do. And so a go-to task that we typically assign for the fundraiser is, for instance, not in the donor situation that we explained today, but if someone gives to our electrical engineering department to say a fellowship there, the relationship manager will have a stewardship task that say, reach out to our school development officer in the electrical engineering department and about an annual update to so-and-so donor. So it's really, as my boss likes to say, belt and suspenders. We wanna make sure that all I's are dotted and T's are crossed. And we wanna make sure that donors are receiving the stewardship that they should be receiving. So Gracie, I don't know if you wanna talk about yours. Okay. Yeah, I'll jump in about Miami because we operate on a much smaller scale. We have a team of three that cover the individualized stewardship plans and two of us directly oversee households. For that tier one, as we've transitioned to this new structure, we aligned our maximum household limit with what our development officers carry, which is about 75 households. That splits between different constituent officers. So I support a certain amount of gift officers and then my counterpart supports the other half. And those quarterly meetings are really what drive our conversations. Each of the development officers truly have identified their donors through the criteria that we've communicated to them. So again, that criteria for us was someone who had made a major gift because we need something substantial to be able to personalize stewardship for. That gift officer is hoping to close a major gift with them before the end of this campaign because we're trying to focus on the here and now. And then also we want to know that stewardship is really gonna make an impact in this relationship because for some donors that might not be the case, but for other donors, the development officer really understands that by stewarding the past scholarship, this is really gonna move the next gift conversation forward. A little bit about how we are able to prioritize that. We don't have a CRM that unfortunately allows us to implement that. So we utilize Google Sheets and we've also started to somewhat use a project management system called Wrike. For us, we're able to make it work, but I will say it's not the end all be all. It's not like you can plug in on a person and make it super easy to just like plug in tasks, kind of like fitting a square peg in a round hole, but we're making it work for us as well as the Google Sheets. The Google Sheets are helpful because we can share those with our gift officers and use that as kind of the conversation for each of those quarterly meetings. Fantastic. Can I just add something? Brooke, can I just add something very quickly? So back to MIT, we developed early on, our individualized stewardship plan has been established since around 2015. So this has been an evolution over time. We started small and then expanded. That was always the goal. But one of the features that we introduced, which seems to be working well, and Nicole is a great, she completes the web form. So essentially when a gift officer closes a successful proposal in the system, the fundraiser will get a prompt. And so this is a web form that asks a series of questions four or five, nothing too much. And so the answers that the gift officers provide, then when they submit it, it comes directly into my inbox, into my colleagues inbox who actually drafts the plans. And so it's a great way to collect information in addition to what's already in our database. So that has worked out really, really well to get the information out of the gift officer's head. And that way we don't have to meet with them every single time. We've now gotten to the point where we can just share the plan via email and maybe there's a little back and forth. And gift officers always know that we are more than willing to come together to discuss anything specifically or brainstorm or come up with any creative stewardship that needs to happen. But the web form has really worked out well for us. And I'll jump in on that. For any shop that doesn't have that, I highly recommend it. I think it has really improved the communication between our two teams because it's a form that comes up as soon as I'm putting in the system to say the gift is closed, the amount, the designation, those types of details. And then once it closes, it says, here's your questions. And it gives me an opportunity while it's top of mind and also right before it goes to the stewardship team for the acknowledgement letter and all the other things that get triggered off of a gift closing. So it's a great tool and I'm glad you mentioned it, Corey. It's a good one. Just given our time and sort of jumping off that, one last question that we have is, do you have any advice for someone in a shop where they're looking to start up an effort like this or tackle an easy win? Corey, I can jump in and then I'll hand it over to you if you wanna add onto that. When I first entered my role at Miami and was an expansion of our team, we actually did a benchmarking opportunity. And I'm not saying you should benchmark, but I will say donor relations professionals are very typically friendly and willing to share across institutions. And so that's where Corey and I first met is that she shared a lot about MIT's individualized stewardship. And through that, we learned that, you can start at any size for your institution depending on what your goals are. And so if you support a specific college within an institution or you support the entire institution maybe select one to five donors that you have individuals that really deeply know so that you can create personalized strategies and also think about what your purpose of that relationship is. So if it's someone who has at the top of your pyramid and they've given cumulatively a ton to your university and you wanna steward them through a personalized experience, start there. And that's my advice. Corey, I'll pass it over to you if you wanna wrap it up. Yeah, I agree with all of that, Gracie. In terms of the individualized stewardship plan, I think it really, it's not a one size fits all. You can really cater it to whatever works for your organization. Sometimes, I will suggest like, is it the board of directors that you really wanna hone in on and maybe it's you start there. Or for us, we were in the silent phase of our previous campaign. And we realized we did not have stewardship information documented as well as we had cultivation and solicitation information. And so that was really the jumping off point for us. And we had to do kind of like some back work because as I said, 2015, we started this program and 2011 is when the silent phase started. So we really had a heavy lift at the beginning but once we were able to catch up, we were able to keep the momentum going. And I mentioned, eventually we knew we would wanna expand this and offer this as a service to our five schools and now we have a college. And so we didn't do that all at once. We kind of did it over time. COVID definitely allowed for that too since we were all like, what are we doing right now in this space? So I would say like, look to see. Also another thing, and I mentioned this too, is who are you cultivating for another gift? Obviously the people who have been super generous, they need to continue being stewarded even if they do not intend to give another gift. But that's another point that we look at. It's like, who is in the pipeline for another gift and would some like added stewardship or creative stewardship help move the needle and make that ask easier for our frontline colleagues? And with that, we have to be mindful of time and let everyone go. But thank you all so much for a really phenomenal and robust session. We will share out some follow-up information with everyone who attended and you can access it on the CASE website. I hope that everyone who has joined has left with some good ideas and inspirations for what I'm seeing in the chat. It sounds like it. And thank you to all of our presenters. Have a fantastic afternoon.

donor engagement

stewardship

gift officers

collaboration

MIT

Miami University

impact report

personalized stewardship

data-driven strategies

fundraising