Ashley Hall is a lean machine that offers robust programming and a worldclass education to students, so the availability of products that streamline staff processes are always important.

Recently, school leadership identified opportunity for improvement in fundraising, which impacts everything at Ashley Hall, from its robotics and offshore leadership programs to its scholarships and partnerships. The school maintains a 100% faculty and staff donor participation rate. This in turn perpetuates giving across a database of parents, alumni, families, and community members. What Ashley Hall needed was a way to increase its donor recruitment, become more effective in donor retention, and continue to increase gift size.

At the same time, the school’s constituency has been growing. With an influx of new students and more parents came a need for better customer service. Ashley Hall wanted a better way for teachers and staff to engage with them in a clear manner on a regular basis—a hub where all records and information could be housed and accessed easily by teachers, parents, students, and administrators. A longtime customer of Blackbaud’s, Ashley Hall turned to the company for solutions to all of these needs.

Previously versed in Raiser’s Edge®, Director of Data Management Ann Barnett was thrilled when Ashley Hall implemented Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT® with Blackbaud Online Express™ integration to amplify fundraising efforts. Before its implementation, any staff member that needed donor information came to her. She would have to draft time-consuming donor prospect reports for each department before meetings. Now, all of Ann’s team members have the ability to access what they need anytime, on-the-go through their tablets and mobile devices, which makes the review process easier and staff meetings shorter.

Exceeding Goals and Improving Efficiency

Ann also discovered the new analytics component available with Blackbaud Online Express integration through the events module and volunteer tab. Previously, all of these modules would have had to be purchased separately, but getting them in this single system integration has made work more efficient and effective. Recently, a $25,000 donation was offered if the school increased spring phone-a-thon participation. Ashley Hall exceeded its goal, with 124 gifts coming in through Blackbaud Online Express. The solution automated a gift batch processing period that would have taken three days in a single step that only took an hour and a half. By saving this time, Ann was able to create more detailed reports using analytics to prove the value of the spring phone-a-thon.

Director of Philanthropy Sarah Evans immediately recognized that Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT was built for the professional fundraiser when she started using it. She loves the streamlined user experience and easy navigation. With her donor pipeline growing, Sarah loves the new features that Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT reveals every day, like donor ratings. It’s hard for one fundraiser to maintain close connections with a large number of donors, but he solution makes it easier. Everyone in the database is a prospect and the solution reveals their changing potential through real-time updates. Sarah has become a more efficient fundraiser because of it. “Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT serves the students, but it also serves me and has therefore made me a better employee and a better worker,” she says. If a board member has questions about a donor during a board meeting, she can pull out her tablet and provide an instant answer. If Sarah travels to meet donors, she can enter notes right away on her phone—this means she can import more details and facts into the system, helping her establish deeper donor connections. More efficiency means she can take more donor meetings in more cities and spend more time with students on campus.

Working Smarter with a Total Solution

Ashley Hall was continually hearing from its constituents that a need for better technology within its administration was at hand. The school was shuffling too many papers around, and unable to find the right information at the right time. Families and students are tapped into a digital world, constantly on the move, using their mobile devices to stay in touch. This is how they want to be contacted and informed, and Ashley Hall decided to embrace it rather than resisting. So the leadership team turned to Blackbaud and found its solution in Blackbaud’s education management portfolio. “The notion that, with Blackbaud’s education management portfolio, we would have one set of systems that teachers, students, and parents could access—it just seemed to make a whole lot of sense,” said Assistant Head of School Anne Weston.

The Blackbaud Learning Management System™ has certainly saved Ann Barnett a lot of time, too. Last summer, she spent three weeks uploading all of the required student information into her old learning management system. Now, Blackbaud Learning Management System has removed those duties from her office. That means Ann has three more weeks during her summer to focus on more important advancement tasks.

“By implementing only Blackbaud products, we now have a robust toolkit to confidently steward our constituency groups,” she says. By upgrading to Blackbaud’s new, comprehensive systems, Ashley Hall has not had to buy individual modules. The school has a complete package with the latest fundraising and administrative tools it needs to work smarter—all from a single service provider that offers excellent support and training, making the new software adoption easy and manageable. Because of this, Ashley Hall is able to grow all of the good it does for its students and its community.