Cultivating a Campus Through Giving

Learn how to create a giving atmosphere campus

Jacqueline's official title is Director of Advancement Services—but she wears many hats during her day. As she heads into her office at the public university, she sees visible reminders of her office's contributions to shaping students' daily experiences and future prospects. The on-campus food bank is open and busily serving students today, the result of one impassioned donor's giving. The rec facility annex is under construction after a successful capital campaign; it won't just meet accessibility standards but will include innovative, inclusive designs specifically for wheelchair users.

Fundraising has never been more important. The needs of colleges and universities are many and growing. Rising costs and decreased government funding make it hard to focus on institutions' broader missions without scaling back. Donors who have historically helped fill those gaps look different than they have in the past. They expect more from institutions they donate to, with increased care and transparency, and are often quick to donate elsewhere when their expectations aren't met.

Inside the Advancement office, Jacqueline's staff processes and manages gifts that arrive in various shapes, sizes, and complexities. Gift officers make sure that pledges are on track to be received, and kept up to date. Jacqueline partners closely with the accounting team to ensure that pledges are received, tracked, and accurately sorted into the appropriate funds. On busy days, Jacqueline "of all trades" even helps the clerks with gift entry. It's happening more often lately. Gift giving is becoming more complex, and recent college grads are defined by their commitment to new and innovative giving technologies: stocks, cryptocurrencies, charitable gift annuities, etc. These kinds of gifts take more discretion, judgment, and time to record accurately.

In the past, Jacqueline experienced a number of frustrations because her office's technology hadn't evolved with the times. Legacy systems were cumbersome, if reliable, but were shut down because of security concerns about old software. Shared spreadsheets were limited to only one person editing them at a time, slowing down the whole team. Jacqueline and her staff did try out somewhat newer tools—they offered only one way of entering data, which only works well for some gifts some of the time, and is painful for all the rest. And none of these solutions worked well for the Accounting or Advancement teams, whose own tools and systems were either incompatible or required daily manual effort to stay in sync.

But fortunately for Jacqueline (and all the people she works with!), her university now has Salesforce and has installed Gift Entry Manager (GEM). This solution offers:

• Multiple ways to enter gifts, which affords choices that streamline data entry for simple gifts, and can also handle complex gifts.

• Configuration options that help admins show only relevant fields and customize their display order, for faster data entry.

• Structured gift records that allow for multiple designations on each individual payment.

Today, Jacqueline and her team have a 360-degree view of their gifts and all their related data, and the right tools for each gift entry job. She works with her Salesforce admin, Joanna, who happily helps her customize those tools to show only relevant fields, saving her team valuable time and mental effort with each gift entered. She coordinates with other Advancement teams using the data and marketing tools already in Salesforce. Finally, she’s currently having conversations with IT, who are setting up an API to automatically retrieve gift records directly from her Salesforce org.

Jacqueline’s team is now able to handle the gift entry work without her help, and she has more time available to coordinate with other teams and lead her own!