Benchmarking

Make best practice assessment a best practice

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By Maureen Procopio

I spend a lot of time gathering best practices from peers, sharing what I’ve learned with colleagues, and encouraging best practice implementation throughout my organization. Nonprofits and institutions wanting to elevate their performance can effectively achieve this through best practice research.

Connecting with peers and aspirational peers will show you new ways of doing things. Applying an enterprise approach to best practices will ensure that implementation is successful.

Selecting your peers

Many higher education institutions have their own standard peer sets based on various metrics and university system standards. This is a great starting point if you’re unsure of which schools to pick for your assessment. The UO has eight designated peers, but UO Advancement’s aspirations span beyond what those eight institutions could teach us. Over the last four years, I’ve conducted 25 advancement-related studies, engaging over 55 organizations almost 120 times. If I stuck to the eight identified peers, they’d be sick of us.

I had to redefine who a peer is. The first step involved having clarity about what I was researching. Depending on the question being researched, my options vastly expanded. Emerging trends occur at many types of institutions, regardless of whether they’re public or private; have a large endowment; are in a particular region; have a certain amount of students, or raise a boat-load of money. If you stick to just the “biggest” and “most,” you may overlook some opportunities.

Expand the standard peer group

If you decide to move beyond your standard peer group, these tactics will help you do that.

  • Ask your colleagues for their connections. They know who is doing good work. Prompt them for both higher education and non-profit recommendations.
  • Search archived and current conference offerings for speakers, vendors, consultants, and other experts. It is a treasure-trove of connections. For example, APRA and CASE, Meeting of the Minds,  Nonprofit Marketing Summit.
  • Search for relevant best practice articles and papers. These often reference institutions and organizations that are doing good work in the relevant practice. I’ve found many aspirational peers by looking up vendors’ highlighted client articles.
  • Ask for peer recommendations as you talk to institutions and organizations. A good rule of thumb for best practice outreach is talking to four or five organizations in total.

An enterprise approach to best practice research

You’re accumulating a lot of best practice insights, ideas, and recommendations that will impact several areas of your organization. Now what?

The act of benchmarking your institution against peers requires cataloging the various best practices and the outcomes that are being considered. My birds-eye view on UO Advancement put me in the unique position to connect leaders throughout our organization regarding two elements:

  1. Project impacts on the enterprise: Of the best practice assessments we’ve conducted what are the intended and actual impacts on the enterprise?
  2. Outcome overlaps throughout the enterprise: Where are the tactical and strategic overlaps occurring among the assessment outcomes?

Communicating about project impacts and outcome overlaps will help deepen your enterprise-level understanding of where you are and where you want to go.

These two steps below will help you effectively recognize best practices impacts and achieve successful implementation for your enterprise.

1: Project impacts on the enterprise

Illustrate enterprise-level project impacts by plotting best practice projects along your pipeline continuum. This shows enterprise aspirations for change and its impact on various constituents and internal teams. In the example below, there are best practice examples under the engagement, LAG, mid-level giving, major gifts, and principal gifts teams and constituents.

The yellow box lists technology and organization-level projects. By seeing impacts throughout the enterprise, leadership teams can better understand the current and future state of the organization and potential investments, which set the stage for implementation.

2: Outcome overlaps throughout the enterprise

Exploring enterprise-wide best practice outcomes sheds more light on implementation planning. It helps you recognize where there are potential overlaps and similarities of recommendations.

Identifying themes

Common themes will emerge as best practices accumulate. Thematic outcomes will naturally align with experts, and these may align with already established task forces within your organization, such as reporting or data governance. Be prepared for these common themes:

  • New or enhanced policy decisions;
  • New or enhanced communication practices;
  • Deeper examinations of DEI implications, observations, and insights;
  • Talent investments, professional development, coaching, and training; and
  • Digital investments: technology upgrades, and improved & enhanced data practices

Seek economies of scale when making resource and investment decisions. Where this could emerge:

  • Active involvement of a DEI committee can advise and guide when outcomes have unintended equity and inclusion impacts. Project leads will benefit from inviting this committee’s participation on an “early and often” basis.
  • If a best practice outcome involves similar vendor investments, combine forces when making those decisions.
  • Talent and organizational decisions may have impacts that overlap across advancement services. These decisions (either upsizing or downsizing) can find the best success with economies of scale.
  • Outcomes often affect policies. Consider setting up a standing policies task force.

Framework for success

Establish a framework for best practice implementation throughout the enterprise, making time and space for experimentation and innovation.

  • How will we follow up on the next steps?
  • Can we empower staff to experiment, innovate, and communicate about their needs and barriers?
  • What are the measures of success?
  • How do we empower success and outcomes?

An everyday best practice

Normalize best-practice exercises and conversations among teams. Create space for conversations in a meeting. Who’s done any best practice outreach? Have you connected with a new peer or institution? What have we learned? Are we implementing the best practices?

Add a section to your advancement’s intranet or team space. Implement a learning session for the impactful and interesting outcomes. Sharing in different ways will meet the diverse learning styles of colleagues.

 

By Maureen Procopio
Senior Director, Campaign Strategy and Institutional Benchmarking
University of Oregon Advancement
541-346-2061

Engagement Vendor Assessment

maureen

By Maureen Procopio

3 Steps to Success

Today’s most pressing advancement technology decisions are focused on successful alumni and donor engagement experiences. The vendor and software decisions to meet today’s needs cannot lock you out of a future of innovation. Advancement teams are facing decisions to invest in new or upgrade existing software right now. Top of mind for many advancement organizations is donor and alumni engagement solutions – it can be mind-boggling! Finding the right blend of services to meet your organization’s engagement needs can feel downright near impossible.

If your organization aspires to do more, faces the end of a contract, or recognizes gaps in meeting donors’ needs, it’s important to assess your options then make a confident selection for your alumni and advancement team. You must retain control of your future without taking away growth options.

Here are three steps to help you compile a peer-informed report with experience-based insights for your stakeholders to use in making vendor investment decisions. Bonus: Take a look at my software vendor comparisons and insights to further inform your recommendations.

1.      Know your organization’s “why”:

Knowing why you’re doing something is always practical, especially when it involves extensive budget, time, and staff resources. Assessing and recommending vendors is no exception. Here are some considerations:

  • Are you selecting a new vendor to replace an existing one? This could be the case when a contract is coming to its end. Investigate the current vendor and its offerings to know what options you should consider in a replacement.
  • Is your organization reaching new heights? Engagement and development teams are expanding their tactics and need new technology functionality and tools.
  • Will this new software be a part of a current suite that your organization has already acquired? Knowing how well the vendors’ software integrates with other technology is important.
  • Do you need to level-up your current alumni engagement experience? Your organization is ready for enhancements and innovations in engagement but has some gaps in the experience that need to be fixed.

2.      Focus on specific functional needs

Next, you need to know what you’re looking for. This will go hand-in-hand with your “why.” What functions are relevant for your organization? Will this align with or impact a CRM conversion?  Alumni and donor engagement vendors and products are plentiful, offering myriad functions and solutions. Go into your assessment knowing what your organization’s functional needs are so you stay focused on the right product options. For example, my examination of the vendor landscape focused on five key functions:

  1. Website content management
  2. Email (defined primarily as “outbound only” and not “intelligent”)
  3. Events management
  4. Online giving
  5. Marketing automation

3.      Connect with peers on their experience

Now that you know why you’re assessing vendors and what you’re looking for in a vendor, talk to institutions that are doing what you want to do. My internal stakeholders suggested a few peers to call, then I added to the list. Connect with consultants. I called my EAB rep who is up-to-date on emerging practices in engagement. When you do your outreach, focus on the functional areas important for your vendor assessment. Build questions to get information based on:

  1. Vendor selection: How did they select their vendors? What other vendors did they consider?
  2. Software/hardware integration: How well does the selected software integrate with the peer’s CRM and existing software? Does the peer find overall enhanced engagement as a result of investing in the vendor’s software?
  3. Vendor responsiveness: What have been the peer’s experiences with the vendor’s customer service and technology delivery and upgrades? Ask for positive and negative experiences.
  4. Future state: What is the peer’s aspirations when it comes to future technology enhancements and investments?
  5. Other peers: Who does the peer consider to be best-in-class for achieving engagement outcomes and approaches? Connect with those peers as well.

Compile these user experiences, collating the patterns and insights as relevant to your audience. Deliver these findings to your vendor selection team to better-position them in making a data-informed decision.

Vendor comparisons and insights (a layperson’s perspective)

As mentioned above, I focused on five key functions: website content management, email, events management, online giving, and marketing automation. I presented the following vendor and function comparisons based on my peer interviews and research observations.

Top Vendors by functionality

The top vendors listed below by functional area are based on the number of times vendors came up as being used at an organization, or those vendors who appeared to be “emerging leaders” (signified by asterisks *). Additionally:

  • Database of record was a by-product of my research in conjunction with the other information shared and was interesting context, therefore reflected below.
  • Single service ecosystems are those vendors who offer most or all of the features studied. It was important to note these separately.

Side-by-side Comparison of Ecosystems

There are a handful of single service ecosystems that provide the features of interest in this study. Some of these vendors have additional functionality including that of a primary database of record.

Integration

  • Salesforce is known for seamless integration of other applications using an API, while other vendors make it harder to work outside of the ecosystem. The Salesforce model allows customers to build an ala carte system, based on the needs of the organizations. Interviewees noted that Ellucian and Blackbaud made integrating other applications “challenging” if these applications were not a part of their native ecosystem.

Vendor support

  • Blackbaud was noted as approaching their business units as separate entities making it difficult for cohesive integration even among their applications. Anthology received a positive technology report card when working on specialized requests; and a subpar report card for module upgrades and communications about outages.

Future state

  • Hivebrite is the newest to emerge in the integrated ecosystem space with positive reviews on its growth and vision. Anthology has yet to expand into marketing automation which was observed as the next important investment for institutions aspiring to be in the next-generation engagement and fundraising space.

Ecosystems vs Decoupled Vendors

  • EAB’s 2020 “Navigating the Advancement Technology Vendor Landscape” report was an informative resource to further understand software features by function, industry definitions, and examples of institutional adoption of software.

Best practices

Database of record / CRM Upgrades

  • One institution that uses several decoupled service vendors was in the middle of upgrading its CRM of record in the next two years and decided to consider email and event vendors in tandem with the database decision. “It would be frowned upon to do two conversions that ultimately impact the workload of the conversion and implementation teams.”
  • A non-profit/non-higher ed organization’s decision to select Blackbaud as their CRM/vendor was to “capitalize on the marketing automation while maintaining traditional modes of engagement.”

Vendor couplings & observations

  • One higher-ed institution noted they “actively moved away from Anthology Encompass and adopted Hivebrite,” a newer vendor aspiring to compete with some of Anthology’s features.
  • Institutions that use Salesforce continue to use other events vendors. Cvent emerged as a leading event management tool for institutions that partnered outside of their primary (native) single-source ecosystem. Anthology users most often implement the native events module.
  • Email functionality seemed wishy-washy: a hodgepodge of decoupled vendor options emerged but no trends prevailed. This led to an expansion of the study to consider marketing automation and multi-channel communication vendors.

Marketing Automation: Achieving the donor journey

  • These tools aim to provide consistent, high-quality, and personalized digital experiences for constituents. Once institutions recognized the power of marketing automation and the ability to span multiple channels, they graduated from their email vendors.
  • Several institutions in this study actively engage in marketing automation using Salesforce (Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud).  These institutions are focused on donor journeys, customized multi-channel communications based on AI, and strategic resource planning.
  • One institution is actively working toward marketing automation using Salesforce Marketing Cloud to build personalized messaging to create donor and stewardship journeys. The process utilizes AI and multichannel marketing, in-house developers, and links up to their Salesforce CRM.

Conclusion

There are options: Your organization can choose several decoupled vendors; a single source ecosystem, or a hybrid of both. But remember, budget and time are important considerations. Teams must understand the technical skills required to support the backend and sustainability for each solution. Consider your organization’s strategic vision for digital transformation: What does current and future talent look like? What does your advancement organization want to become? Investing in technology to achieve who you are today must also have an eye on your aspirations for tomorrow.

 

 

By Maureen Procopio
Senior Director, Campaign Strategy and Institutional Benchmarking
University of Oregon Advancement
541-346-2061

What’s Your Benchmarking Competency?

maureen

By Maureen Procopio

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.

  1. Present information as a story and in bite-sized chunks. Use your consultant or CASE experts to help you with ideas.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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?
  5. 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