Are you sitting on a pile of benchmarking reports for FY19 that you received over the last couple of months? And to top it off, you just closed out the current fiscal year, which means you need to start the reporting cycle all over again while making sense of last fiscal year’s benchmarking reports.
Join the club! Receiving, understanding, and utilizing benchmarking reports takes a bit of practice and some coordinated effort. It all starts with surveys.
Upping your benchmarking competency will elevate the grasp of your organization’s performance, especially how it compares to your peers.
Actively engage in your data
What data do you need to understand your organization’s performance? More than that, what analysis would show you whether your organization is trending in the right direction?
Focus on surveys that provide analysis that shows performance over a period of time, as well as a comparison against a cohort of peers.
Submitting the surveys and receiving the reports have the potential to overwhelm organizations with a lot of information. Because of this, UO Advancement created a survey steward and liaison role. Responsibilities include streamlining our survey submissions and making sure we submit the right data at the right time, for the right things. But the most important part of this role is to make sure we use the results by actively engaging in the data and analysis.
In this context, when an institution is actively engaged in results, they have identified the most ideal ways to capitalize on how to use it for benchmarking, strategizing, and decision making especially for the decision-makers. How has your organization traditionally measured performance against peers? How has your organization tracked your performance year-over-year? Are you putting strategic analysis in front of your leaders?
Partner with the experts
Connect with the experts behind the data. Understanding survey requirements and the nuances of your data will better prepare you for using the results and analysis. You may learn that there are segments of data you do not submit to particular surveys. Knowing this upfront and the reasons why sections were skipped will help you prepare for the output better. It may also help you become a better data advocate.
Build and nurture relationships with colleagues who have the expertise that you need for reliable and accurate survey submission.
- Database experts who will pull the data for the surveys,
- Colleagues involved with data governance and those with knowledge of data definitions,
- Advancement operations colleagues with access to and understanding of budgets and staffing data,
- Fundraising colleagues with knowledge of fundraising definitions and policies,
- Alumni relations colleagues who conduct engagement activities and have knowledge of recording these activities in your database.
Know the definitions of the survey terms and what the surveys are measuring and know what they are not measuring. To make the annual survey process smoother each year, create documentation to achieve a standard annual approach.
The VSE
What is it? The Voluntary Support for Education survey collects data on fundraising at U.S. public and private colleges and universities, as well as K-12 organizations.
Why it’s important
Acquired by CASE in 2018, the Council for Aid to Education managed the VSE from 1957 through 2017. Suffice to say, this is a rich source of data that you can use to benchmark your institutional fundraising performance longitudinally, against peers, or both. Consultants and news outlets turn to VSE as a standard source of the charitable sector’s performance.
Accessing the data:
Activate your DataMiner account which gives you access to the raw data and standard VSE reports. This is free with your CASE institutional membership. Next, invest in the 2019 Voluntary Support for Education digital publication which includes trends, analysis, and outlooks for the year ahead. It’s worth the investment (discounted with your CASE institutional membership).
VSE Tips:
After reviewing the annual publication and CASE’s 2019 press release, think about your institution’s performance in particular areas of interest. For example, in 2019 alumni giving declined and foundation support increased. This could be interesting to look at for your institution. Perhaps your institution made increased efforts and investments in planned giving, and looking at the average value of bequest intentions or realized bequests for your institution will reveal insights for your stakeholders.
The AEM
CASE’s inaugural Advancement Engagement Metrics survey was launched in 2019 and the results were just released.
What is it?
This survey looked at alumni engagement through a common framework across four modes of engagement: philanthropic, volunteer, experiential, and communication.
Why it’s important?
There has not yet been a standard measurement of engagement in our industry until now. This survey tool aligns with the CASE study on Alumni Engagement, which standardized engagement as a metric.
How the UO is using it
The UO is assessing how to use this information. Right now, we are reviewing the results and baseline outcomes from CASE. Additionally, we pulled the set of raw data from Dataminer to look at the submitted data to understand the landscape of AEM responses. Internally, the UO is identifying how we can close some gaps in data collection to improve on more robust survey submission for FY20.
Consultant benchmarking studies
What are these?
Consultants (e.g., BWF and GG+A) and collaboratives (EAB) are paid partnerships that conduct organized benchmarking studies either annually or as requested by the institution. For example, EAB conducts an annual Advancement Investment Performance Initiative which analyzes participating institutions’ advancement FTE counts, salary ranges, resource investments, budget allocations, fundraising performance, and other data points. They couple this with VSE analysis to report on institutional ROI, cost to raise a dollar, fundraising performance by gift range, etc.
Why they’re useful
The unique coupling of fundraising and budgetary investment data creates analyses to help organizational leadership better understand performance. Also, being in a consulting relationship allows your organization to capitalize on the relationships that these firms have developed with industry experts and leaders. Their perspectives can add unique context to the data analysis and deepen your knowledge of what’s happening in the field.
How you can apply the findings
Consultants know how to talk to leaders and make the analysis relatable. When leaders understand how their performance compares to their peers, it adds a layer of intelligence to the analysis than if they were just looking at the plain VSE data.
Bringing it together
Getting stakeholders’ attention:
Combining information that is top-of-mind for your leadership and stakeholders is your priority. Avoid drowning anyone in data, reports, or analysis. What will help your different audiences be strategic? Decide how to present the data visually and concisely. Here are some considerations and ideas.
- Present information as a story and in bite-sized chunks. Use your consultant or CASE experts to help you with ideas.
- Compare your organization’s annual fundraising performance against the VSE grand total fundraising over 5 years. The interplay of annual fundraising totals and VSE grand totals are interesting. Fundraising is volatile year-over-year, but it can have a stabilizing effect on the VSE grand totals, as a lagging effect.
- Compare VSE grand total for a set of peers and aspirational peers. Are there outliers for your institution or other institutions? Research the context and note it for your audience.
- Include alumni giving, foundations, organizations breakouts.
- If your organization has a consulting partnership, ask about the available benchmarking reporting. Will they recommend a set of peers or can you select your own?
- Engage the internal experts that you partnered with to access and pull the data. They will have interesting reporting and analysis ideas.
Surveys are the basis of achieving your benchmarking competency. Without surveys, your institution cannot be consistently and continuously measured.
Share your benchmarking ideas in the comments. Happy benchmarking!
By Maureen Procopio
Senior Director, Campaign Strategy and Institutional Benchmarking
University of Oregon Advancement
541-346-2061
Great post, Maureen! I think your emphasis on avoiding “drowning anyone in data, reports, or analysis” is key.
I love data as much as the next guy (maybe a bit more!), but I’ve seen leaders at countless institutions complain of “data, data everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” Sometimes, too much data is just too much!
Your bite-sized presentation tip is a smart one. Ditto with taking the long view over 5 years. In the end, it’s all about the big picture and what we *do* with the data we’re given.