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:
- Website content management
- Email (defined primarily as “outbound only” and not “intelligent”)
- Events management
- Online giving
- 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:
- Vendor selection: How did they select their vendors? What other vendors did they consider?
- 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?
- 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.
- Future state: What is the peer’s aspirations when it comes to future technology enhancements and investments?
- 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