Digital

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

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:

Leadership (having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place),
capability building (building capabilities for the workforce of the future),
empowering workers,
upgrading tools (giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade), and
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

Determine where your leadership fits in. With whom should you start conversations?
What does a 5-year road map look like for your organization? Who’s involved?
Inventory your technology tools and vendors. What’s their purpose? Did you find any redundancies or gaps? What are they meant to achieve?
Where are your teams organically partnering? Are there cross-functional teams that need support, or silos that need disruption?
What does the talent pipeline look like in your organization? Remember DEI as you assess your next steps.
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.