Engagement Vendor Assessment

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

5 ways to elevate your advancement shop in 2021

By Maureen Procopio

Let’s be proud of our 2020 accomplishments, and enter 2021 in the thrive-mindset; in the be-bold-mindset; in the excel-mindset. Here are five ways that will help get your advancement shop there, five ideas that are worth investing time and resources into.

 

1)     Forecast gift revenue to gain and give better insights

Pipeline forecasting is often based on a fundraising definition rather than a gift revenue calculation. Strategic insight for annual and campaign planning focuses primarily on pipeline forecasting.

Tactical insights are derived from asking: What is our gift revenue forecast? It is valuable to understand how past, current, and future fundraising performance was affecting revenue, especially as 2020 showed itself to be so unpredictable.

Organizations seeking to expand into gift revenue reporting should start thinking about how their fundraising data interplays with accounting and revenue data.

The nugget here is not to remove pipeline forecasting from your toolbox; rather it’s to add gift revenue forecasting. It will give you the ability to respond quickly in emergencies and unexpected situations, while still planning for the long-term.

UC Berkeley and Williams College are doing some good work in this area; Michiel Westerkamp, president of Raising Insight is an expert in this area.

 

2)     A healthy organization is reflected in its metrics and goals

Establish metrics and goals that support your organization’s values as well as the health of your pipeline. What mattered pre-pandemic is different than what matters now.

Integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) principles alongside development priorities in metrics and goals. This must be top-down and recognized advancement-wide.

For instance, the UO’s advancement team is actively fundraising for five DEI initiatives focused on specific diverse campus populations. Each initiative has goals to increase alumni and donor engagement, raising funds from a broad base of mid-level donors. Metrics and goals are established at individual and unit levels across advancement.

Expand and strengthen your pipeline through various pipeline engagement, development, and growth strategies. Establish metrics and set goals that endorse and encourage the proper outcomes.

Don’t allow a rigid reporting platform to sabotage your good intentions.  If you’re changing metrics but are delayed in changing the reporting dashboard, clearly communicate what metrics are new and what metrics are no longer relevant. Lack of clarity around metrics and goals affects morale and satisfaction

 

3)     Invest in digital transformation for advancement services

What does digital transformation look like for your team? It should include investments in new and existing technologies to expand the pipeline, talent investments for effective implementation of digital programming, and removing silos among your various teams. Make this the year to inspire, innovate, experiment, and create. Your advancement services team will make that happen!

 

4)    Seek and share information with your team and colleagues

Teams are most effective when information is shared openly and freely. This will save time and money. If you have access to information from other units, divisions, teams, or leaders, think about who needs that information (such as data, reporting, access to people or meetings, updates to processes, etc.).  Find ways to combine it with other information to make it more powerful.

What is the one piece of information you are missing that will bring you to the next level? Seek out that information. Conversely, what is a piece of information that you have that can help a team member or another unit operate better? Be proactive in offering information and squash any hoarding tendencies.

 

5)     Position your organization for DAF payouts

Donor Advised Funds received 12.7% of individual giving in 2018, but distributions from DAFs are not keeping up. When will we see reforms that require DAFs to distribute donations that benefit mission-driven charities? Organizations receive DAF gifts at a higher rate by expanding attempts to solicit gifts from DAFs. Partner with your friends in prospect development to develop a strategic plan.

 

In closing…

Some of these ideas will take more time and more resources than others. Establish a taskforce to elevate for 2021. Nothing changes if nothing changes. Here’s an updated picture of Ginger, who hasn’t changed.

 

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

Digital Transformation in Advancement…It’s What you Make of It

By Maureen Procopio

A sophisticated advancement services organization goes hand-in-hand with striving to be a digital maturing organization. Digital transformation can be such an overwhelming concept, but it’s really what your organization is ready to take on, and more importantly, where your leadership will actively plugin and support.

Digital Maturity goes far beyond simply implementing new technology by aligning the company’s strategy, workforce, culture, technology, and structure to meet the digital expectations of customers, employees, and partners. Digital maturity is, therefore, a continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape.”

Similarly, as I tried to understand digital transformations in advancement, I learned that these also occurred in many spaces and on various spectrums.

  • Large scale database conversions in tangent with organizational restructures are on one end of the digital transformation spectrum. For example, a wholesale assessment of an entire advancement services organization and its relationship with data and its database, as it simultaneously embarks on a CRM replacement.
  • Incremental changes happening around the organization but not at a large scale are at the opposite end of the spectrum. Examples of these can be a gift services team moving toward a paperless implementation; a development analytics team providing business intelligence reporting for campaign assessment; the creation of cross-functional teams to create successful digital engagement outcomes.

Perhaps you recognize your organization in some of these examples?

Active leaders and other success characteristics

Any organizational transformation is more successful with leadership buy-in (or leaders who drive the transformation themselves) and their accompanying financial investments. With that, here are three resources that help underscore or jump start your own organization’s move toward digital transformation. All of these studies highlight the importance of leaders in any digitally maturing organization.

The Survey of Digital Media in Advancement, conducted by CASE and mStoner, Inc.

This research team talked with advancement leaders who set out to digitally transform their organizations. These are leaders who are “actively working to put in place people, practices, processes, and systems that would enable their offices [differently].” They found that a digital advancement operation:

  • Attempts to reach people where they are
  • Innovates in programming by using new approaches involving digital tools
  • Relies on digital analytics in decision making
  • Emphasizes digital communications internally and with stakeholders
  • Operates from the perspective of a single institution rather than a siloed department
  • Empowers staff to experiment, innovate, communicate

 

Achieving Digital Maturity, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Deloitte.Digital

Likewise, this study doesn’t assume that digital maturity is a destination; rather it’s a “continuous and ongoing process of adaptation to a changing digital landscape.” After surveying 3,500 leaders, vendors, and industry experts, they were able to narrow down the attributes of a digitally maturing organization. These are:

  • Organizing teams cross-functionally;
  • Looking out 5 or more years in strategic planning;
  • Scale small digital experiments to enterprise-wide initiatives;
  • Attract, retain and develop digital talent at all levels of the organization; and
  • Secure the right leadership with the vision necessary to lead digital strategy

Unlocking Success in Digital Transformations, McKinsey & Company

This study “points to 21 best practices which make a digital transformation likely to succeed.” These characteristics fall into five categories:

  1. Leadership (having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place),
  2. capability building (building capabilities for the workforce of the future),
  3. empowering workers,
  4. upgrading tools (giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade), and
  5. communication (frequently via traditional and digital methods).

With a dire warning that less than 30% of transformations succeed (yikes!), this framework will be important for change-makers at all levels of advancement to digest.

There are many questions for advancement organizations to consider regarding digital transformations. Not all organizations can enter this process in a large-scale process due to budget, timing, leadership buy-in, etc. But many teams can move the organization toward critical, incremental changes to become a digitally maturing organization.

 

Questions and ideas to consider

  1. Determine where your leadership fits in. With whom should you start conversations?
  2. What does a 5-year road map look like for your organization? Who’s involved?
  3. Inventory your technology tools and vendors. What’s their purpose? Did you find any redundancies or gaps? What are they meant to achieve?
  4. Where are your teams organically partnering? Are there cross-functional teams that need support, or silos that need disruption?
  5. What does the talent pipeline look like in your organization? Remember DEI as you assess your next steps.
  6. How does your advancement team build new institutional partnerships and capitalize on fresh information hubs and sources?

External resources

Talk to people! There are vendors, consultants, and experts ready to help. Oregon State University Foundation and the University of Colorado are farther along the spectrum of digital transformation and they’ve always answered my calls for help.

EAB has excellent research on the topic of Preparing for Advancement’s Digital Future. BWF’s Digital Fundraising Model highlights nine steps to identify, cultivate, engage, and steward donors.

The evertrue platform is used by many advancement shops, including the UO and OSU (read about their DXO pilot program), to create digital engagement officers to accelerate a personal engagement experience.

Sure, this takes time and money. But start talking to folks to inform what these next 5 years could look like for your advancement organization. Post your ideas and tools in the comments.

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