The importance of advancement services by Joanna Watts, Director of Operations at the University of Melbourne. Joanna has over 25 years of experience in the higher education sector, both in the UK and Australia. She joined the advancement team at the University of Melbourne in 2017 to head up the operations team and provide leadership in the areas of organisational development, human resources, financial management, policy and governance. Joanna is also the Deputy Chair of the Board of Tier Australia, an international NGO. She's also a fiction writer in her spare time. Welcome to this session on the importance of advancement services. I'm Joanna Watts and I'm the Director of Operations at the University of Melbourne. Before I start my session, I just want to do a shout out to Sue Birch, who is the former Director of Advancement Services at the University of Queensland and now runs Sue Birch Consulting. She and I ran a session jointly at CASE-APAC and some of the material and the graphics from that session I have incorporated. So I want to thank and acknowledge her for allowing me to use some of her designs. So the brief that I've been given is to talk to you about advancement services, what it is and why it's important. And I've also been asked to share about data. Data is a really important aspect of all the work that we do in advancement. But what do we measure? How? Why do we need it? And how do we use it? And I'll cover that later. To explain advancement services, I thought it would be helpful to give you an analogy. If you think about advancement as a human body, the arms and legs are the fundraisers and the alumni relations staff who engage with alumni, prospective donors and donors. The brain of the human body will be the leadership, your director, your chief advancement officer, whoever is in charge of the team and their direct reports. The blood that powers the organism is the CRM. There are a number of CRMs in advancement and they vary in sophistication. And many of you may have heard of Razors Edge, Salesforce or Advance. Those are some of the main types of CRMs that you find in advancement. But the fundamental purpose of all of them is to support the work that we do and to enable the frontline staff to get out and conduct their work. At the heart of the human body or the organism is advancement services. And what do people in advancement services spend their time on? They are actually a group of people who have to understand advancement from end to end. And often they're the only team in advancement that have that wide, broad knowledge of what goes on, because they have to support everybody in advancement. But if you ask people outside advancement services what that team does, they may well say they manage the data. If you have a look at that word cloud, data is the biggest part, but it's not all that advancement does in terms of advancement services. The advancement services team have a lot of activities and a lot of areas of responsibility. And some of them are called out very broadly on that cloud around prospects and funds and systems and gifts and mapping. And there are many, many smaller pieces to that word cloud that you can see as well. So advancement services staff have a huge body of knowledge and expertise across specific fields and functions. The interesting thing about advancement service offices is that there are no two that look the same. Some of these functions represented here may appear in your advancement services team at your institution, and some may not. Some things might look quite different. So prospect research is one that might sit in advancement services where you are, but it could also sit in development. Reporting and analytics often is part of advancement services, but sometimes is embedded with other teams such as the alumni relations or the fundraising staff that are being supported by that work. Gift management also often is an advancement services, but quite often can be associated with donor stewardship and so can live in the donor stewardship or donor services team. It's really important to know which components, which functions are part of advancement services at your institution. And you can see then what maps closely to the functions displayed here and what might be very different. I would encourage you to have a look at what your advancement services team looks like. What are those advancement services staff responsible for? And what might live elsewhere in other parts of advancement? When you delve into the advancement services team, you'll find a whole lot of staff with very interesting titles. These position titles are just a sample that was taken from the session that was run last year at CASE. And some of those titles will give you a pretty good clue as to what the people in the team might spend their time on. If you are a CRM and database specialist, it's fairly clear that your work is going to involve supporting the CRM. If you're a prospect researcher, then you're probably looking out for information on prospective donors. But if you're a business operations coordinator, it might not be so clear what your role is about and what you focus on. So good idea to ask questions about what those staff do. Behind the titles, there's a whole lot of skill and expertise sitting in advancement services. Some of the advancement services team will have very specialist functions and therefore very specialist training is required to undertake them. You might have someone who's a qualified accountant, who looks after the gift processing team and function, and also interrates with the university and the budgeting and the finance processes that the university requires of advancement. You might have people who have software development skills, who sit within your IT or your database team. You may also have people who've developed some very specialist skills and capabilities, but they've actually developed them through their work in advancement. So people in prospect research, people in project management, and people in information management may all be people who come from different areas of the university or different walks of life and have found themselves in advancement and are now developing skills in those areas. As well as their specialist skills, advancement services staff are required to have very broad general knowledge. I mentioned at the beginning that this is a team that understands end to end everything that goes on in advancement. So that means they have to be across the fundraising methodology and practices at your institution, as well as the alumni relations methodology and practices. They'll also need to know about tax and privacy. They're often the go to people within the team. So often the first point of inquiry goes through advancement services, or you'll find a lot of staff find their way to advancement services for general questions where they don't understand perhaps how to do something in the database, or they need further training. So this team often develops a lot of guidelines and how to guides on how to use the systems that you have within advancement, and then how to train and support new staff during their induction. All of that, the specialist functions, the specialized capabilities that staff have, as well as the broad general knowledge is brought in to support the delivery of every advancement program. It would be hard to find any activity in advancement that doesn't involve input from advancement services. A fundraiser going out to meet a high net worth individual who is a prospect for the organization is going to need a lot of detailed information from a prospect researcher. An alumni relations staff member who's running an event is going to need data on who to invite. Comms person sending out an EDM or a newsletter will need to be able to segment that data and send that newsletter or EDM to the right group of people who's going to be interested in what's in the content. You may have a project that's going on, perhaps around reviewing the giving vehicles that your institution uses, or perhaps a new policy that's set up around fundraising, or some guidelines documents around how to record volunteers in your CRM. All of those kind of activities are going to need input from advancement services. Which is why I say advancement services is at the heart of advancement. But advancement is an integrated organism. It can't function well without all elements in good shape and working together. Fundraising and alumni relations staff need advancement services to function and to be able to carry out their jobs. But advancement services wouldn't exist without fundraising or alumni relations staff. I encourage you if you're in advancement services to think about the work that you do, and how what you do supports the fundraisers, the alumni relations staff and the marketing and comm staff in your advancement operation. How can you help them to do their jobs better? And if you're in one of the other areas, how does your work affect other teams? And what do you rely on advancement services for? I'd like to talk a bit now about the data. If we describe the CRM as the blood that pumps through advancement, oxygen, the data is the oxygen for that. We need data to enable our communication and engagement with our alumni. We need to be able to record information about the constituents, what they've attended, what they participated in, what gifts they've given. And we need to think about the activities and the programs that we've run, and be able to assess them to measure their outcomes and determine the ROI. And there are also some very important compliance requirements that we have within advancement. And we need to have the data to be able to demonstrate we are compliant. So I've put here some typical measures of data that is tracked and measured within advancement. This is by no means a sum total of what would be tracked and measured. And I would encourage you to have a look at what your institution is particularly interested in and is following. The alumni count is a very interesting measure, because this is not something that advancement can control. The alumni will be the students that have qualified and graduated through your courses. But there may be other definitions of alumni, sometimes staff, former staff, and others can be counted as alumni. So there will be a total number in your database of people who qualify as alumni. But just having them sitting there doesn't help very much at all with your activities. You need to be able to reach out to them in whatever form you want. So measuring the contactable alumni count is really important. How many alumni in your database do you have email addresses that are reliable, phone numbers that you can count on or postal addresses for that you know you can use. Contactable alumni count is something that is measured very closely, because it demonstrates the success of the programs that you have. And it also enables you to calculate an alumni participation rate of the people that you can reach how many are actively engaging with you at any one time and through which particular programs. On the fundraising side, it's important to know how many prospects you have in the system and of those how they're moving through the prospect management stages, how many are in cultivation, solicitation, and how many have given gifts and are now in stewardship. You're probably going to be tracking the funds that you raise in any given year. And your institution will want to know how that compares to previous years. And also how many gifts it's taken to get to those totals. There may be a lot of other things that your institution is interested in, perhaps a number of scholarship recipients, or the number of volunteers, or you may track other activities such as honorary doctorates and things that might be quite special for your university. Again I encourage you to think about what your university is interested in and to check out what measures they are capturing and how they're reporting them. Your university will probably provide regular updates internally and more broadly. So within advancement there may be reporting that you do on a weekly basis to your fundraising team to show the number of gifts that have come in and the activities around those donors. There will probably be university reporting more broadly and if you're in campaign they will be particularly reporting about the campaign results for that period. At the University of Melbourne we do a monthly report to our university executive which talks through the progress towards the campaign goals but also behind that set a lot of more detailed information about the gifts that have come in and where they're directed to. Talked earlier about compliance and compliance with privacy is really important. Not only do we have the Australian privacy legislation to be responsive to but also GDPR which is the UK privacy requirements. So making sure that you have compliance in your data is critical. We also use data to respond to benchmarking surveys and one of the most common and well-loved surveys that we do within advancement is the Australia and New Zealand case benchmarking survey and we respond to that every year at the University of Melbourne and the majority of universities across Australia and a number in New Zealand also contribute to this survey. It enables us to track what is happening across the sector with philanthropy and alumni engagement and to show longitudinal study of how investment is growing and how support private support is growing for universities through these channels. Knowing what and how to collect data can be tricky and there are often decisions to be made about the most appropriate way to manage a situation. The case guidelines and standards help us to do this and to determine the best approach. These guidelines become the advancement bible. They're currently being updated and they're going to become global guidelines standards. That work is being undertaken at the moment. There will continue to be an Australia and New Zealand chapter that sits alongside those guidelines for anything specific that we do differently that can't comply within the global guidelines. But data shouldn't be collected just for the sake of collecting it and in fact our privacy legislation calls that out specifically. We should only be collecting and storing data that is relevant to the purposes that we have within advancement. So what are you going to do with the data? That is the important thing. Even if you're collecting stuff that's relevant it's no use unless you're actively employing the data. Decision making is most effective when it is informed by your data. What does your data tell you about your stakeholders and what they are interested in? What they like to engage on and what they don't like to engage on? Finding the answer to that question can give you insight. If you segment your data you can identify certain groups and engage with those groups around specific activities, communications or programs and you can invite them to engage in certain ways and you can learn from the results that come back. What did people click on? What did they sign up to? What did they not respond to or worse what generated a negative response? This process enables you to refine your programming and your communications and therefore determine the outcomes and the ROI and what you want to carry on engaging in. Working in this way with your data enables you to deliver outcomes that are really positive for advancement and enable advancement at your institution to function more effectively. My recommendation that you get to know advancement services staff, I encourage everyone no matter what your role in advancement and where you sit to get to know the data that sits in your database to understand it and to really become familiar with it. So in conclusion I could say advancement services staff provide a service to the development and alumni relations staff. That at its most basic level is what advancement services is and does but it's much more than that. If you're in advancement services I encourage you to get to know your development team and alumni relations team. They need you and it's important that you understand how they need you. Remember you don't have a purpose without them. Advancement services staff are professionals who've usually landed in advancement by accident from other areas of the university or other professions such as IT. If you are based outside advancement services I encourage you to familiarise yourself with all that your advancement services team does and what roles that they play. What do they do and how does their work fit in with your priorities or not because this is a group of people with many demands on their time and a whole variety of obligations and responsibilities that fall outside of individual priorities that might apply elsewhere and we all need to be aware of the interrelationship between all parts of advancement. As an organism everything needs to work in harmony together to be able to function well. Thank you very much for listening and I hope you enjoyed the session.

advancement services

importance

fundraisers

alumni relations staff

CRM system