Welcome, everybody. I'm just going to give a few seconds for people to trickle in from the waiting room. We have a pretty tight schedule, so I'm going to go ahead and get us kicked off while people are coming in. Welcome, everyone, to Reimagining Frontline Fundraising Lessons in Strategy and Change Management. We're delighted to have you here today. Before we kick off, I just wanted to cover a couple of very brief housekeeping notes. This webinar is being recorded, and you will all receive access to that recording afterwards. We will also be taking questions as we are able throughout the webinar, so please use that Q&A box as your questions come up. At the end of the webinar, we do have a brief evaluation, which we'd be really grateful if you could take the time to complete. And with that, and without further ado, I will go ahead and hand it over to Mike to kick us off. Hey, everyone. I'm Mike Nagel. I'm with Evertrue, and I'm going to serve as your host and emcee today, but it is definitely not about me. It is about the amazing team at the University of Memphis, and we're going to be sharing their story and how they're reimagining frontline fundraising, scaling personalization across the giving pyramid, and how they've made those changes in some of the early results. And so we're excited to chat about that work, and this is work that anyone can apply at your own shop today, tomorrow, next week, next year, to personalize more donor relationships, to ultimately drive to more engagement, to more visits, to more asks, and more philanthropic support for your institution. Can you all see my screen? Thumbs up? Yeah? Okay, great. I'm also going to bring in the chat here. We have a really critical question at this time of year that we're going to ask everybody who's watching to drop into the chat. First off, say your name, your institution, where you're with, and what is your favorite holiday movie? Okay, so your institution, your name, institution, and your favorite holiday movie, I think we have access to the chat. And so we'll drop that there. We'll get that going. And then, as Christy mentioned, please also use that Q&A feature. So there we go. Yeah, University of Memphis, Preacher's Wife, let's go. While this is all coming in, I'm going to ask the same question to my esteemed colleagues who are speaking today. Tara, Kimberly, Catherine, can you introduce yourself, your role, and your favorite holiday movie? Tara, you're first. Thanks, Mike. I'm Tara Jones, and I'm the Senior Vice President for Advancement here at the University of Memphis. And I've been here since June the 1st, and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit. But my favorite holiday movie, and I'm actually going to pick two, Mike, if that's okay. My first one is It's a Wonderful Life. I'm a big Jimmy Stewart fan, and I have to watch this every year and actually watch it on Christmas Eve every single year. But I will have to say that A Christmas Vacation, if that is on when I'm flipping through the TV, I have to stop and watch it, because I think I can quote every line, but that's another favorite of mine. Two very different ones, but for different reasons. Absolutely love it. Both are in heavy rotation in our household, as well as I see, you know, you, San Diego. Who else? A Christmas Vacation, Leanne at Saskatchewan Polytech. Love it. Kimberly, next to you. Okay, I'm going to say two as well. So Elf is my all-time favorite favorite when I'm decorating my Christmas tree that is on, you know, and on repeat to make sure that I get to watch it, because smiling is my favorite. And then the other one is The Grinch, but not like the various, we like the real-life Grinch one with Jim Carrey. And my daughter and I, when we have like Grinch-themed parties, and it's always one, we always have to watch that during the Grinch-themed sleepover. So those are two of our favorites. I love it. Almost as important, what's your role? What do you do? Oh, thank you. I mean, yes. So I'm the VP for Philanthropy at the University of Memphis, and that affords me the opportunity to work with our major gift frontline fundraisers, principal gifts, planned giving, and then Catherine and our gift processing team. And so thank you for having me here. I've been at the University of Memphis now for about 13 years. Amazing. It's a great team. Yep. In this role for about six weeks. So, yay. Congrats. That's awesome. It is a wonderful life. Indeed. Excellent movie choices. Catherine, you're up next. All right. I'm Catherine Heughan. I'm our Prospect Development Analyst at the University of Memphis. I've been here about five and a half years and for four and a half years in my current role. I guess I'll say two also because, you know, there's always plenty of time for movies at the holidays, but it would be a Christmas vacation. Again, like Tara said, you kind of can't stop. If it's on, you're going to you're going to take a pause. And then probably a Muppet Christmas Carol, just because Michael Caine is so very serious and the Muppets are so very not serious. And it's just a great like classic holiday story with Muppets. So that's it. Man, y'all are mentioning my absolute favorite movies. The one I will add is was introduced to me by my wife. Her family every year watches Scrooge with Albert Finney. It's a musical like the 1970s. And yeah, so it is available on Amazon. We bought that for like three bucks a few years back and we watch that every Christmas Eve as well. I'm Mike. I do sales at Evertrue. My background is in advancement. I spent the last 14 years in advancement, six and a half years at Phillips Exeter Academy, which is a prep school in New Hampshire where I live. And for the last eight years at Evertrue, mostly in a marketing role. So you may have seen me on a webinar. If you're seeing me again, I apologize. And we're going to have some fun here today. I do want to feature a couple responses. Robert from Notre Dame says Elf, but really it's Die Hard. Like very, very, very good response. UB Emmett Otter's Jug Band Christmas. I don't know that one. So I'm going to have to look that one up. Very, very good stuff. All right. So here's what we're covering today. We're covering the pyramid problem. And so this is something that Evertrue has seen across the industry. And we're going to talk about in a little bit. But there is an expectation of personalization when it comes to our donors and our constituents. And we are under delivering when it comes to meeting that expectation. Memphis is going to talk about how they are addressing that problem, how they're leveraging personalized outreach at scale at all levels of the gaming pyramid. Giving you some tips and tricks, some ideas that you can implement at your shop or in your own role to deepen donor engagement and build pipeline. And then how they're driving team buy-in. So if you want to address a problem and if you want to make organizational changes to do so, that requires dedication and effort on the internal side of things. And so we're going to get into the nitty gritty about how they've not only seen success, but made some of those changes. So that you have a blueprint to go back to your shop. And here's the problem. We live in a world where personalization is table stakes. It's the absolute bare minimum expectation. You think about all the organizations that you support or patronize as a customer. Target, Amazon, Southwest Airlines, for me, they know who I am and they treat me like they know me. I get deals suggested to me based on my past interactions. On a customer service level, they know what my point status is and they help treat me accordingly. Catherine, Southwest lover here, we're a small minority. Look, I live next to a small town where they've been for a long time. And it's really easy for me to fly direct to almost anywhere I need to go there. So people expect a personal experience and they get frustrated when they don't receive it. And so that is one of the reasons we're seeing a massive decline in donor participation over the last three decades. We are seeing a huge gap in personalization and the donor experience. So across the industry, about 2% of all constituents at higher ed institutions are managed by a gift officer. When they are managed, it is often one of the best, most personalized experiences that you can have. Somebody that works at the institution that you care about most, asking you how you want to invest in the success of students, faculty and programs at that institution. However, too few receive that type of engagement. And even if a prospect is assigned to a gift officer, one of the hidden secrets is one out of every three assigned prospects is not at Memphis. This is across the industry. One of the three assigned prospects had zero interactions in the last year. So that means our very best prospects are not getting outreach. In the last year, seven of 10 assigned prospects refused fewer than three interactions. Eight of 10, this is industry-wide, had no meeting. Tara, I'm going to tee you up here. If you came into a shop, like you're coming to a shop and you're evaluating everything, and if you saw this lack of activity, which you're not seeing, but if you did, what would be your reaction as the incoming leader of the team? Momentary panic. Because I know we're probably going to drill down a little bit more into the donor pyramid, but I think that different shops have a better handle on different segments of the pyramid, but the whole part of that is super important. And I'm excited to talk about the ways that we're approaching that, not only with our major gift officers and those in the middle to high level of the pyramid, but also with our digital gift officers. And that's the lower level of pyramid. But we really are taking advantage of some of the ways that we're able to engage via Evertrue with our principal gift donors and our strategies surrounding there. So how do you know which piece of the pyramid to start with is an important piece of it. But this is something that the data show, but also that anecdotally that we're hearing from our prospects and donors, and even beyond that, our alumni and friends for whom we haven't put into a prospect or donor category yet. Yeah, yeah. It's really about, at every level, we want to deliver this personalized experience to absolutely everyone. How do we scale that and do it in ways that meet that donor where they're at? The principal gift prospect treatment probably doesn't go to somebody like me who donates $25 a month to their alma mater. But there is a level of personalization that we can deliver to move those relationships forward. And so we're really talking about how y'all at Memphis are attacking that pyramid, attacking in a very nice, nurturing, engaging way. And so, Kimberly and Catherine, we're going to talk about free Tara joining the team. You saw that there was a problem. Not a problem. You saw there's an opportunity in the pyramid. Y'all have a lean team. And maybe, Kimberly, if you want to talk a little bit about staffing and structure. But you had about 1% of all donors assigned, and you wanted to do something about that. So, Kimberly, I'll tee you up, and then on to Catherine to add some more color. Yes. So, we do have about 9 to 10 frontline fundraisers, so major gift officers. And that includes our principal giving director as well as our planned giving director. And so it's a lean shop. And we were recognizing that many of our, you know, so we have our portfolios are about 70 to 100 people. That's just not enough people. We were not reaching out to enough people on a regular basis to be able to engage them in the right ways. And so, you know, way back when, many, you know, several years ago when we started our partnership with EverTrue, we had the opportunity to engage two DXOs. And I think that we were all sort of learning at that stage sort of what that looks like, how to staff that, how to engage between the, you know, the donors who have capacity for sort of those mid-level donors versus the major gift donors. And we didn't do it great the first time around. And so then what we discovered was that we really needed to make sure that we were making an effort, an intentional effort to connect our DXOs with our major gift officers so that they now are invited to the same meetings. They're hearing the same things. They know that they are a collaborative team and have a collaborative approach. You know, we, there are times where one of our DXOs partners with one of our major gift officers, and they go on a visit or they go, they put together a presentation and submit those at the same time. In fact, one of our DXOs and I just hosted a suite together last Saturday. And so, you know, just really kind of thinking about what are the opportunities to make sure that we are thinking strategically and keeping our donors needs front of mind and using all of the tools to be able to make that happen. Yeah, we have a quick question here, which is what is a DXO? So we're going to talk about that a little bit, which I think is a great question. I mean, so 1% of all prospects covered a little bit below the industry average. You know, Catherine analyzing the data sees the opportunity in the pyramid to dramatically increase coverage or X coverage by adding just two people who are then going to manage in a fully remote capacity, although sometimes not remote if you're managing a suite together with Kimberly, remote capacity and moving people through the pipeline. We're going to talk about what that looks like. But Catherine, do you want to add a little bit about why the decision was made to try to deepen coverage of the pyramid and to engage new prospects? Yeah, you know, we always any advancement shop, we're always getting back all of these really great ratings and this great research from various vendors and various partners. You know, Evertrue has great layers of additional data about engagement and involvement and interest. So it really was about how do we how do we how do we take, you know, the top part of the pyramid in terms of people that are already giving to us and further that relationship with them? And it's just not it's just not sustainable for, you know, a major gift officer. Realistically, like there's only so many hours in a day. There are only so many phone calls you can make. There are only so many visits you can go on. So it really became about what are the what are some tools and resources and programs that are available that can take that more customized, specialized focus engagement and and apply it to more people in the database. So it gave us the opportunity to make sure that donors that we have who are who have been giving to us for 50 consecutive years, like yes, that those people are rolling into a portfolio. You can see Angela, you know, her video. And one of her favorite things to do when she first starts engaging with somebody is really like kind of dive into their giving history. So it doesn't become necessarily about the amount of money that the people are giving to the university, but it's about their connection back to the university. And of course, that's with an you know, that's with an eye towards cultivation and qualification and engagement and increased giving. But it means that that four percent of the pyramid that lands in management are really genuinely managed. So I think that that's what the DxO program, what these donor experience officers have been able to provide. And then it's also given us kind of additional ideas and tools to use for our major gift officers to say, like, what are some of the things that the DxOs do? How does that translate? And what does that look like from from a major gift perspective in terms of that cultivation? So what are the what are the things that we can celebrate? You know, the giving milestones, things like that. So that's that's where we've seen the pyramid move to. Yeah. And we're going to talk about some specific ROI that your team has seen. But I can say that across the board, there are 50 plus organizations that have leveraged donor experience offers officers to manage portfolios, like massive portfolios, managing them through proven cadence based outreach in order to get into their inboxes, to have the meeting, to say thank you and to find out, you know, where their philanthropic, future philanthropic interests lie. And we see on average nearly a 50 percent year over year increase in funds raised in the very first year of a program. And folks retaining at levels anywhere from 12 to 20 percentage points above average just by receiving that personalized outreach, even if they're not responding like people are craving this type of work. And so what Memphis is doing, what other shops are doing are following cadences, which is just a touch point plan. Anyone can do this. Technology helps make it easier. But if you think about, you know, the work of a fundraiser, you're already following a cadence. It's just a habit that you have in your head. So to get to that first visit and then to follow up on that visit, to make the ask, to follow up on the ask and close the gift. And so technology can help propel this forward. We know that it takes six and a half touch points to book a meeting with a cold prospect. So if you are a fundraiser, if you're a gift officer and you're thinking about, like, am I doing those touch points? What is my plan to get there? You need to have one in order to do that. And when you do, you start to see tremendous results. Not only is Memphis covering four times more prospects, but Tara, as you're analyzing the data, when you first joined the team, what did you see? So when I came in, I saw I'm a data nerd, Mike. And so I was super excited for us to have the fiscal year 24 numbers closed. I started on June the 1st. June 30th was the end of our fiscal year. And so I kept saying, when are we going to be able to close the book so I can really dive into the data? But what I was most struck by as we were looking not only with, you know, what are the channels for which we are receiving the most philanthropic support? So, of course, you have your principal gifts, you have your major gifts. But I really wanted to look at our annual giving group and see where we were getting most of our bang for our buck, if you will. So with the different channels that we had within annual giving, what really struck me was the DXO line item. And it was six times the revenue of the other annual giving channels. And so I thought, OK, well, there's something here. So the technology is working. And is it also that we have the right people in the right seats to be able to do this work? Because the approach with digital gift officers or digital experience officers is that it can be a different approach and different mindset. And if you're talking about really being able to scale, to have managing over a thousand prospects potentially within your portfolio, how can you do that? And like you said, in your mind, we all have the, I need to reach out, I need to follow up, I need to make sure to send this information to this person and you can either put it on your calendar or you can just open your computer and have these cadences ready to go. And so when I saw that it's six times the production in terms of the dollars, I really thought we really have something here. So let's dive deeper and see how we're being able to utilize that. So Kimberly and Catherine, and there are two digital experience officers that you just saw in a couple of slides before, they really leaned in and are following how it should work and are having great success with that. And so that really piqued my interest because I think that in the past several years, lots of different institutions across the country have experimented with digital gift officers or digital experience officers or whatever you want to call that role that really is not the ones who are going out and having the face-to-face conversations, but it's the ones who are focused on the bottom part of the pyramid to build up to the major gift and the principal gift officers. But we've got to create those relationships and not just expect that the first time we visit someone, they're going to give us a million dollars, right? So we need to be able to follow that. And so they are building meaningful relationships through this strategy and this platform. So I, that again, that piqued my interest and have had some deeper conversations about that, but I'm thrilled about the production in that channel. Yeah, and so the million dollar gifts will come. We know that's going to come because we're going to follow this process of polite persistence, continued engagement over the life cycle of the prospect. We know also that we saw the great results last year. This year, shout out to your team, you're on pace to 2X fundraising. You're at a pace today that's going to 2X that fundraising from Travis and Angela that we saw last year. So that's just absolutely amazing work. I think the next step and really where, I'm going to turn it back to you, Tara, in just a second to talk about the expectations that you have at Kimberly that you have for like managed prospects and how we want every prospect to be treated, whether they're at this leadership level, getting personalized outreach at scale, or whether the principal and major gift prospects or in the foundation of the pyramid. Our ethos at Evertrue is like, how do we build a structure? How do we find partners in this industry that wants to build a structure that's moving donors up as well as down through disqualifications? And Catherine will talk about that in a moment, the pyramid. And so we at Evertrue put together, I'm not going to talk about our platform but if you're really interested, you can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Mike Nagel. It's like bagel with an N, happy to connect you to the right person. But what I did want to talk about is Memphis is part of this early adopter community. These shops that are looking to define the future of frontline fundraising, which is high volume personalized outreach at scale at every single level of the pyramid and working with us to build out what that vision looks like. And it's not us like as a technology company, it's Catherine in monthly meetings, like telling us like, oh, this is what the team needs. And then seeing if like we can go in and fill that gap. And so I really just wanted to thank the University of Memphis for being leaders in this space and on this journey and excited to be digging into that today. Because this is a shared vision where we're all learning for each other. That's why one of the reasons, there's two reasons I work in advancement. One is our work and your work and everyone's work, changes students' lives. It elevates families out of poverty. It changes life trajectory. And the other thing is, we're not competing against each other for the most part. We're sharing what works and teaching everybody there. And so Tara and Kimberly, like when you think about the experience that your DxOs are delivering, consistent personalized outreach, how does that apply to the major gift principle level? How do you want those donors to feel? Well, I'll jump in and then certainly Tara, feel free. So we, you know, probably about two years ago, so in April, May, we have what we call, and I think that we're gonna go through this in a little bit. We have a major gift bootcamp. And so it's an opportunity to sort of like level set and make sure that we are prepared for the upcoming fiscal year. Closing the year strong, ending the year even stronger. And so one of the things that we were really looking at several years ago was how can we build on the, kind of like continue the success that our DxOs are having through this cadence and how can we do that ourselves? And so, you know, Mike, you mentioned, this is something that you can sort of create on your own if you are really organized and structured and kind of make it happen. And we attempted to do that. We attempted to like, you know, have copy paste go kind of messages and kind of, but it's a lot to manage. And so as we have continued our relationship with Evertrue, it was wonderful to be invited to sort of talk through some of the needs that we have to help our major gift officers learn from our DxOs and apply those kind of structured messages for our other donors. And so, you know, so we are excited to be able to incorporate, you know, especially for warming up our new donors. So looking at our prospects and then really taking the prospects through a very structured, consistent cadence so that there is that polite persistence for, you know, day one, yes, here we go. Day one, I'm going to connect with you on LinkedIn and give you a call. Day two, I'm gonna send you an email. Day three, I'm gonna do this. And Evertrue has made it so easy to make those things happen where literally you can open up your computer and at the start of the day, and you know what you're supposed to accomplish. You don't have to go to the spreadsheet. You don't have to go to your calendar. You don't have to go to the sticky note that's next to your computer. It is right there. And it's connected to the donor's record. There's even AI that will help you sort of craft your message. And so then you're able to kind of make those daily things, kind of check your box off, and then you can kind of move to the next thing that you need to do as far as working on a proposal or going to a lunch or something along those lines. And so in thinking about how we have embraced this on our team, you know, I see, I saw Jonnell at the top of the, at the top of our, I think she was the first person to mention. Her favorite Christmas movie. We identified a few people on our staff who either kind of are, were already thinking about this and thinking about cadence-based work, or sort of, we were kind of also calling it buckets, you know, buckets of work. And then we also pulled some people who were struggling with technology and brought them together to say, hey, let's figure out how to really utilize this tool so that we can make sure that all of our people across the board are finding, are finding success, utilizing the resources that we have to help you do, to do your work. Because really, you know, a major gift officer is wonderful, building relationships, connecting with people. But I think sometimes that organizational piece is the hardest part, because it's easy to ignore it on your calendar. But if you have a checkbox to like check off, then you feel real good. So that was sort of kind of how we got started. Yeah, I think it's, it's taking, we talked about this a little bit earlier, but what's already in your head, like you've been doing this for a long time, you know, like what you want to accomplish with a prospect, but then optimizing it so you can free up the rest of your day to get to everyone else. Yes, exactly, exactly. And you started, oh, actually, I wanted to put this up. So a couple of people are asking about Authentic West, Salesforce, I mean, yes, Everture works with all of those platforms, Raising Zen to NXT, we work with a lot of shops on NXT. If you are not looking at software, that's okay. Like this, if you use the QR code on your screen right now, and go to the DX starter kit, you will get a template of what a cadence looks like. You can put that into a spreadsheet and apply that to your own work today. And I would challenge everybody on this call is that like, if you are, even if you're not managing a portfolio, take 10 donors and try to intentionally engage them over the next three months, just 10 people. You're gonna, if you're able to do this in a politely personalized way, you're going to get to meetings, you're gonna elevate their experience, you're going to better retain their gifts, and then maybe even pass leads onto the fundraising team. So, so yeah, so this is exactly like sales. How do you make the outreach feel authentic? That's a great question. You know, Kimberly, I'd put that back to you. Like you're following a template, you're following a plan. Like what, how are you delivering the donor experience that you want to deliver? Well, you know, I mean, I think it's exactly the same way that you would in, even if you weren't using this plan where you are going to learn about the, learn about the donor, potential donor. You're going to spend time doing a little bit of research about who they are, look them up on LinkedIn, find out what's important to them. And I think it's really, you know, so step one is let's get the meeting. Let's try to book this meeting so that we can have those one-on-one deeper conversations and understand, you know, what was exciting about their experience at the University of Memphis? What gives them joy in giving philanthropically? You know, what kind of makes them excited about investing in our students or our campus? But the step one is that you have to be able to get that, you have to get that meeting to be able to do it. And so I think what the cadence-based approach allows for our fundraisers is that it keeps us on track and it also highlights different mechanisms or different platforms for outreach. You know, so some people may be really queued in on LinkedIn and there is a step that includes LinkedIn. Some people may just prefer a phone call or like the phone, text, email combo. And so what I think the, what has been most meaningful for our group is, again, keeping them on track, reminding them to utilize all of these other platforms. And then the message can be very personalized to them regarding their experience here, the area that they studied, maybe even kind of past communications that we've had with them. But really step one is get that meeting and then you can have that personalized conversation with them. And then after you have the personalized conversation with them, you can go into another cadence that allows you to continue to set reminders so that you are allowing yourself time to better understand the donor and the donor's desires and the impact that the donor wants to make on our campus. And so the organizational system is amazing and the AI just helps make sure that we are kind of tightening up our communication versus all the words like I would, you can imagine because of all I'm saying. So anyway. I use AI all the time to make myself and my emails like far more succinct. And so, you know, Amy Vance is asking, you generate major gifts with this. And so Catherine, I mean, this is something that every shop should be doing. Like what does our qualification look like at the major gift level? So major gift officers, you got your portfolio, you're working your portfolio. We got to bring more people into them. So Catherine, do you want to talk a little bit about that qualification process and what that looks like? Yeah. So, you know, we identified the need to qualify more major gifts. Like we identified that qualifications was an area at Memphis that we needed to spend more time. Something that tripped us up a little bit though was kind of what does that look like for the fundraisers? How do we kind of incorporate that type of qualification activity for brand new donors into their kind of regularly scheduled work? So what we do in prospect research and development is we'll assign, you know, anywhere from 25 plus prospects that have been identified via research to a gift officer over the course of a full fiscal year. You know, the goal of course is a minimum of five qualifications. Ideally, we're going to see more than that. And what we found that we've been able to do is put them, there's a cadence now, there's a cadence now where I can say, here's, you know, here's an alumni. They have strong ties to the Memphis business community. Research indicates they have a capacity to make a major gift. You know, these are some of the other areas of support that we've identified. This is what they've supported in the past on campus, put them into a book of meeting cadence. So it's not about, it's not even necessarily initially about like qualify them or disqualify them. It's about, can we just get a meeting with them? And so they're able to roll through that kind of initial cadence and that lets me know on the back end of things, who's kind of moving through. So who the fundraisers pulled from that pool that they're now ready to start engaging with and start qualifying. And, you know, we found in some instances, there'll be moments where the fundraiser will say, this person's been non-responsive. We've gotten to the end of the cadence and I haven't gotten a response. Let's go ahead and pull them out and just mark them as non-responsive for now. And then like a week later, the fundraiser will get a response to one of their outreach. Recently, I mean, like it was like six weeks later, a fundraiser had somebody call her back and he was like, I'm so sorry. I got your voicemail a few weeks ago. It's just been wild. I'd love time to talk. And, you know, you had mentioned a faculty member whose work I'm really interested in. You know, can we get something set up? So I think that, so what we've seen from all of that then is an increase in the types of meetings that aren't just focused on asking for a gift or stewarding a gift. We've really seen an increase in the types of meetings where the fundraisers are sitting down and getting to know the new donors, the new people that are ready to start being engaged. So we have qualified, you know, 22% more major gift prospects. These are people who have a, like I said, a research or field capacity that would indicate that they could make a gift above our major giving threshold. And then aside from that, you know, we've also seen an increase in disqualifications. So at the University of Memphis, what we say is, you know, or our kind of rule of thumb is that someone's not disqualified until you've had a conversation with them. So it's not, if someone's non-responsive, they're not disqualified. It's just kind of a not right now situation. But we've had kind of a significant increase in engagement with people. And for the most part, you know, it's that they're probably just not ready to make a major gift, but there are still engagement opportunities that are discovered through those conversations or potential volunteer opportunities or other ways that maybe people want to be involved with the University of Memphis. So they're disqualified for now as a major gift prospect, but we have the opportunity to get them to the place where they're most comfortable with how they want to engage. And so I think that that's also a big tie into what the donor experience is, is that we're meeting them where we are, where they are and where we are. And we're also just not then kind of letting them fall off the map once they've said like, oh yeah, I'd like to make a gift to the university or that they've said, yeah, I'm really ready to get more information about this. Well, you know, we kind of have the boxes checked and we're moving somebody through. So that's really been, you know, that's really been, I would say like the benefit. And it is down to what we found that supports what we'd been hearing for years, which is it takes more than one or two phone calls to sometimes really get somebody's attention. And it's about the type of information that's being shared. It's about the way the person's being contacted. You know, we get responses back and we find out that a person prefers text messaging. We get responses back and we find out that someone's moved or that they've changed jobs. So all of this kind of discovery and qualification information has led to a stronger understanding of who we have in that top of the pyramid. So instead of just saying we've got, you know, a hundred thousand records with people rated above $50,000, well, we still have all those records, but we're pulling away from that and knowing who from that group of people is actually going to be someone that wants to provide a significant level of philanthropic support. So I think that that's a really big component to the work that we've been doing. And then that helps, you know, as Tara said, she is a data person and my area produces a lot of data. So, you know, that also helps us in conversations with Tara kind of saying, this is what we need. This is where it looks like we're going and helps Kimberly in her conversations too. So it's a long answer to the qualification question. No, I think this is just like phenomenal work that every team needs to be like, think about. And I think every team is, but if you don't have a plan in place, the work doesn't necessarily get done. And so that's the beauty of those cadences. Tara, I'm going to ask you, like, you know, you're assessing the health of the organization. You're in here, you're thinking about the future. The future is probably not to raise less money. You know, there's going to be increasing demands and challenges placed on the university. So as you think about like this qualification work, and as you think about even like this next slide, we're going to show, you know, as the major gifts team has adopted cadences, you've seen twice the average number of monthly meetings. Like as the leader, what does that, like, how do you feel about this? And like, what does the future hold? Yes. So of course I like seeing 2X of production, right? So that's fantastic. And I think somebody asked the question a little bit earlier, like, are, is all this leading to major gifts, major gifts, actual versus just being, getting people into these cadences. And so we, now that we've seen like two times the meetings, now I'm really interested as the next data point, how is that translating to our yield of dollars and new fundraising dollars in and new gifts in? So that's like the next phase, which you've got to have, you've got to have engagement comes before investment. So we've got to have this engagement, these meetings all as the first piece of it. And that's going to, I believe, like you say, we're not going to have less dollars. We should have more dollars since we're intentionally engaging the right people and in the right ways. And so that's the part I'm really interested in seeing. How do these two more visits, how's that going to translate into knowledge at the end of this fiscal year and or as we're leading into the next fiscal year? And so, you know, a year from now we're going to gather together. We're going to watch It's a Wonderful Life and then we're going to go into It's a Wonderful Life Memphis edition where we talk about, you know, the major gifts that have come in. All of this is brand new, right? The indicators are there. The leading indicators are there. The next step is to bring in those major gifts, which, you know, I think the average close rate or average time to close for a major gift is 18 months, you know, varies by shop. So all of this is leading indicators of success that's to come in the future. And what Memphis is experiencing by following these cadences at the major gift level is not unique. I mean, it's unique and it's incredible, but it's also like we see this across the industry. Major gifts, officers who've been traded on cadences book are more active and book more meetings than their counterparts. But it's also not about like just cadences. It's like how do we structure and curate the principal gift? I mean, my goodness, think about the spreadsheets and the prospect plans and where they live and all the things like Tara, Kimberly, like it has to have you pulling your hair out in terms of like how we manage the and curate the principal gift prospect plan. So can you talk a little bit about where you want to go, you know, by doing more internal collaboration with your team? Yes. So I'm going to jump in, Kimberly, before you, because I'm super excited about this opportunity, because I see this as a real, real plan and strategy that we can get our arms around as it relates to principal gift fundraising. I'm excited about digital experience and digital gift officers and thrilled about our major gift officer increases and our visits and what we hope will be the dollars that follow. But this is something that, you know, principal gifts is a different way to do that. Because if you think about each principal gift person, you can't necessarily put them in a maybe a pre constructed cadence. But what we started doing this summer, again, I started June the first on June the third, I had had two of our principal gift prospects independently pull me to the side and say, we are getting, you know, one week, somebody will call us and ask for $50,000 in two weeks, somebody asked me for $250,000. So these are not insignificant amounts of money. And they are very kind hearted people. So they keep saying yes, but they said there's no strategy. And it doesn't seem like your team is, is talking to each other as it relates to this. So you need to get it fixed. So I was like, yes, I'm day three, and we will get it fixed. So we started having principal gift strategy meetings this summer and continuing those into the fall. And we brought together, you know, so generally, a major gift officer, for the most part, is going to have that one to one, the person's going to be interested, maybe in supporting something in that, in that unit or that college. And so they're gonna have that. But when you're talking about principal gifts, most principal gift donors make gifts across your entire organization, or get around multiple designations. And so this is where I think this, this is going to be fantastic. So we pulled together all the we say, okay, this is the principal gift prospect that we want to talk about. We looked at the past giving brought in our partners on campus, including athletics, and really said, okay, how to what are the best ways that we can curate a concierge experience for these principal gift prospects so that we can get them into a queue that we're that we are having consistent and special cultivation along the way. So we created spreadsheets. As we all do, we had our plan. So it's like now, okay, so Kimberly's holding up the spreadsheet. So we've got to have a way to systematically make sure that we're following up on this. And so we had a conversation with our partners at ever true. And we said, What if we can take those plans, and then not necessarily put them into a cadence, but to assign tasks to the multiple people who are responsible for cultivating these individuals in this way. And that we've kind of just started that the past couple of months, but I think that's going to be a game changer for us. So instead of one person holding the spreadsheet and having to update and follow up with all the people, she's able to then assign the task out. So Kimberly has an assignment for these things. And you can see that on the screen, I'll have an assignment to follow up with somebody as it relates to that. And so it's in the system, it's the reminder, you have all the access to that. And I so I hope that we're gonna be able to report that we were able to utilize this functionality. And we've had great success on closing principal gifts. So stay tuned, because that's going to be, you know, a year to two to three process as it relates to gifts at that, that level of, and right now we are principal gift levels a million dollars and above. So, but we think that this is going to be a great strategic way to have meaningful opportunities for those people. So I've had the pleasure of using Basecamp and Asana and Airtable and Notion and all of these different like tools, and it's less around prospect management and more product management. But like Mike does this, Tara does that, Catherine does this, Kimberly does that. And that's well and good. So whatever your organization is doing, you need to have some sort of system in place that's ideally not a spreadsheet owned by one person for tracking all of this. If it happens to be baked into the tool that you're using for fundraising outreach, then that is like a huge win. Kimberly, I mean, I know this, you're, we're showing this example here. Is there anything you want to add before we jump to the next topic? I will, I will just point out a few things. One, oops, sorry for the overdue. You can see, but it's red. And so when I log on to my, open up my computer, I know that I need to send that report. Not throwing shade, this is real life. And look at all, what we didn't show is all of the checked off tasks, which you can kind of see in the bottom. So this is active. Yeah. So this is my real thing. And so, but it has been so helpful because, you know, as we were working through these multiple pieces of paper, the meetings were fantastic and we had, we kind of like built in all of the things, but, you know, this, this gets put in an, in a folder and then you go, oh my gosh, have I emailed so-and-so? Have I called them? So, so Hannah Waldman is our principal, senior director for principal giving. And so she was able to take these, assign them to me. Some are assigned to other individuals. And again, this just adds to the things that I know that I need to do, or I can look ahead. And as far as planning my time, I know that I need to schedule. I can schedule time for this, but also what's amazing about the task is that as you're creating them, you can schedule time and put them on your calendar, which is amazing because that is, you know, if it's on my calendar, hopefully it will get done. But there, Evertrue has really thought through kind of connecting all the dots. And I will say that as we were, you know, I mentioned the little group that came together of kind of our, our top users in, in the major gifts space, when the tasks first came out, adding to the calendar was not available. And that was something that they just mentioned over and over and over again and Evertrue listened. And, and I think that this has been available now for about four months, which is phenomenal. And just, there's, there's no reason in my mind that I'm not going to keep all of my tasks for my donors in the system because now everyone has access to them. I can see what tasks are, are available for my, for my employees. Catherine can see them. I can see what's overdue. We can see how many they've done. We can see who they're, you know, who they have tasks for and who's in a cadence. It's very, very helpful. And then just one additional thing that I will add is that in addition to, to these, these kind of cultivation plans, we have worked very closely. We have a donor who there are three of us who are working with him and we've created a stewardship plan. I took it from, we whiteboarded it out. I took it from the whiteboard. I put it in here and was able to assign tasks. And then now that way we're able to keep each other on track to make sure that we're meeting those needs. So I think somewhere in the chat, it was, it, you mentioned, where was the personalization? This sounds just like sales. To book a meeting, you know, you, you get, you've got to get the meeting first, but Evertrue really allows us now to make sure that in addition to thinking about all of the brainstorming that we have for, for, for creating these personal experiences, we now have a way of keeping ourselves on task to make sure that those personal experiences actually happen and that we're able to plan them out and put them on our calendar because, you know, sometimes a great idea is a great idea until you actually make it happen and you have to kind of like plan that work. So anyway, this has been a life changer for me personally. And I know that it has also been very helpful for, for my staff. So we need strategy and execution and this is where the execution comes in. Thank you, Tara. Yes. Strategy, personalization, scale, execution here. And then it's really about extending this. So we talked about going up to principal guests and now we're talking about going throughout the pyramid and we've got a great video that I don't know if I can play this. I'm going to hit play. Mike, we're not hearing the sound. I think when you, when you share screen, there should be a little checkbox to share the sound as well. So you might need to stop sharing and reshare if you want us to hear it. I did. So it might be my machine. That's totally okay. This is actually, I think, available on YouTube. So you can go to the University of Memphis YouTube and find the presidential video from President Hargrave talking about, you know, giving back at this time of year. It's a piece that almost every shop is doing one version of in one way or another. Tara, can we talk a little bit about how you took this message and went to everybody and then personalized that to segment it across the board to the right folks? Yes. And I will say, so this was a message that went out for our Giving Tuesday efforts. And we really had a focus. People could give whatever they would like to at the University of Memphis, but we had a focus on our student emergency fund and this tied into that. And we had the highest Giving Tuesday results in terms of dollars raised that we have or have before. So I truly believe it was the combination of this presidential message, plus our focus on the student emergency fund and our messaging around that, which was awesome. So we, yes, again, data person. So I'm like, what are the final numbers? But it's the largest Giving Tuesday that we've had today. And I know that, you know, Giving Tuesday is one of those things that people are like, should we do it? Should we not do it? Is it, you know, is it working? So we tried to add some additional personalization, if you will, to this. And I think that was made successful. And then we did some segmentation of messaging out to some different groups so that they would make sure that they saw this in a special way. And this is just one of the ways that y'all are leveraging video to get in front of folks. We find that when you add video to a cadence, it's two times as effective in booking meetings, 26%, excuse me, more effective at booking meetings. And so even when you think about the principal major gift level, you're using video to collaborate around athletics. And so yes, so that was something that I saw when I came in this summer. So we have a, as many of you probably do, we have a football suite that the president hosts at each of our home football games. And we thought, so we were very strategic on who we invite to that. And usually those are major gift prospects or donors and or principal level gift donors. So we thought, how can we make this experience even more beneficial to them? And so we had a message for football from the president that went out that, you know, said he's so looking forward to each person being there, but it was personalized to that individual couple. And that seemed to really kind of elevate our engagement as it related to that. We are doing the same thing for basketball. We have a suite for basketball as well, but we had one of our athletics colleagues do that. And so we're so excited to welcome you. Again, we focus on major gift and principal gift prospects and donors for that opportunity. But in addition, you know, we talk about elevating our engagement and getting more people to participate with us. You know, again, engagement comes before investment. And we had our head football coach did a thank you video inviting people to our alumni and friends tailgate. And so that we really saw an uptick on our participation. So, yes, you know, we are focused on raising money, but we've got to get people in the door to want to participate with us. And so we thought, how can we capitalize on the tools that we already have? And thank you is one of those that's in the suite of these products. And people loved seeing the they felt like it was a personal message to them from the football coach. And so we, you know, we're trying to take advantage of all those opportunities. And I think the lesson there is every shop has campus celebrities. You're going into bowl season, people are buying suites or buying tickets, who do they need to hear from the head football coach, the AD, you know, you can get like an athlete or two to record a quick video. I sent it to you so you can send out to the group. So as you think about that, or you're doing regional events and you want people to come who's speaking at that event, let's let them get a preview of that message in advance and then a recap after the fact. And so there's so many ways to leverage the people you have and the technology you have to create deeper, more personal relationships. Oops. So I popped that into the chat. Please continue to drop in questions. You can use the Q&A feature, you can use the chat. I think we're getting to everything. But now comes to really like the hard work of like, this is a massive change in philosophy, in adopting new tools, into trying to affect change. Like, how are you selling this vision internally? And, you know, Kimberly, in preparation for this, we talked a little bit about the carrot and the stick. So what does that look like? So, you know, we, as I mentioned, at first, really, we're kind of socializing this idea because we want to make sure that we are not, that we were not coming in and telling people exactly how to do their jobs or how to make sure that they are staying organized in the way that we want them to because my brain may work differently than Catherine's versus yours and Tara's. And so, you know, we really took time to share this idea and these resources in a very thoughtful and kind of soft way, you know, where we would say these are some, this is a great tool to use. This is a great way to make sure that you're staying on track. We would then recognize those that were using it because they were finding success and they were staying on track and they were meeting with people and putting our, the tools were allowing them to systematically put our donors' needs and interests first. And then we would make sure to intentionally highlight kind of lessons learned, how they did that. There were oftentimes that we would sort of have an internal kind of donor story where we were highlighting collaboration between a DxO and a major gift officer and sort of how that pipeline building worked. And we are seeing such success with those who are consistently using the cadences and those who are consistently using tasks that moving forward in 2025, we are going to say, hey, if you're going to, you know, for all of the people that you're booking a meeting with, we want you to use the Book of Meeting Cadence. So we're just going to go ahead and drop those people in so that you can move through the cadence work and we're kind of developing it as part of our processes. And then the same with the tasks. I am starting to use tasks. I know Catherine is using tasks. And so we're really identifying ways to incorporate these tools into our daily practices because we know that they work and it's easy to track and it's easy for me as a supervisor to use the signal dashboards to be able to see where people are and what they're doing and how they're utilizing it. Because it's always kind of like, what does everybody do each day? And this allows us to have a little bit of a window into that work. Yeah. And it's really about like, there's the 80-20 rule, like 20% of people will adopt something new right out of the gate. Actually, it's 20, 60, 20. 20% may never adopt it, but as long as they're hitting the metrics that you want them to, like, that's not a problem. And it's nurturing the middle group, which is the largest group, to win them over, to show them how their work can be done more efficiently and effectively, which everyone wants to do, leveraging something new and making people part of the process and getting folks excited. Now, I know we're coming up on the very end. It's my fault for missing a couple slides here about the journey and how to get there. So, I would encourage everybody to look at the link that Christy put in the chat. And I think we'll also follow up with in terms of like, how that process went. And also, I'm going to put Tara, Catherine, and Kimberly on the spot. Is it okay if people find you on LinkedIn and ask questions and do follow-up? I want to get to the top lessons and takeaways and then turn it over to y'all on, if you could each summarize in 30 seconds, like, what you learned through this process, what would it be and why? And then I'm just going to go in reverse order of my screen. Catherine, Tara, Kimberly. Catherine, what's your top takeaway? So, my top takeaway is that when there's, when there's, even if it's a rough structure to function in, people, it makes people more comfortable when they don't feel like they need to pave their own road, when they feel like they're kind of, that they've got sort of some guardrails and some guide, some kind of guide posts along the way, so that they know that there's an end point. Like, they know that there's a goal. That's one of my biggest takeaways from this. And I've seen that in action in the number of new donors that we're rolling into portfolios, into cultivation, who are now starting to pop up on our planned proposals. So, that's a big takeaway, is that having the, having that roadmap, I think, does help give confidence to the people that you're asking to kind of do this work. Trust the process. Build the process. Build trust in the process. Tara? I would say that we all have great intentions of following up with our prospects and donors in a very linear way, but things happen, and it gets crazy, and fall can be super busy for us as it relates to football, and now we're going into basketball season, and there are lots of different things going on. So, even when you think, I'm organized, and I'm going to make sure that all these things happen, having something that you don't have to think about, that you can enter your strategy in, so that you can execute, I think that is key. Yeah, removing the guesswork, for sure. Exactly. And I think, sort of building upon that, when you're able to remove the guesswork, but then also have a very easy way of inviting those to collaborate with you, so that we are meeting all the needs of our donors and our team, it's a win-win-win all the way around. Love it. I love the intentionality. I love the focus on data, putting the right prospects in front of the people, having meaningful conversations, creating the process, and going from there. So, Christy says, if I want to end it with a thank you for joining, we can do that. Thank you so much for joining. I'm going to go watch a Christmas movie. It's going to be fun. And Tara, Kimberly, Catherine, the entire Memphis team, thank you so much for the work that you're doing.

frontline fundraising

donor engagement

digital experience officers

personalized outreach

University of Memphis

Evertrue platform

fundraising strategy

Giving Tuesday

philanthropic success

technology in fundraising