Georgian College Channels Alumni Engagement for Increased Giving with Blackbaud’s Predictive Analytics

Gaining Essential Insight in an Instant

Associate Director of Donor Relations and Operations Liz Rejman is responsible for managing the mixed portfolios of donor prospects for Georgian’s four front-line fundraisers. Rejman saw a big opportunity to convert strong engagement across the donor community into more major giving. “With so many people in our database, we can’t possibly get to know every single individual,” Rejman explained. “With Prospect Insights, we can instantly see who the top 20 or top 100 individuals are with the greatest likelihood, affinity, and capacity to give so we can conduct deeper prospect research on them.”

Identifying High-Likelihood Donors with Ease

Among Georgian’s top fundraising priorities is a campaign to support the college’s 39 skilled trades programs. This includes a major renovation of the college’s Centre for Skilled Trades at its Barrie campus, expected to positively impact 1,000 students while freeing up 7,000 feet of lab space for new initiatives and innovation. With a goal of supporting the regional labor market by addressing the shortage of skilled tradespeople in Ontario, these programs provide the college with opportunities to build strong partnerships with industry and community leaders. As these new relationships are established, Georgian uses Prospect Insights to help them steward contacts who have a high likelihood of donating to the campaign.

“Prospect Insights helps us identify individuals who may be engaged but haven’t been inspired on a philanthropic level yet,” said Rejman. “It allows us to maximize the resources we have—to go through a list of individuals and identify very quickly those to invite to a cultivation event, assign to a fundraiser, or bring forward in a conversation about strategy to further engage them.”

Driving Fundraising Efficiencies with Artificial Intelligence

Rejman sees Prospect Insights as a valuable tool to help the Georgian fundraising team further systematize portfolio review and management. Prospect Insights helps fundraisers understand when and why a prospect should be released from a portfolio, with the ability to reassess at a later date. Prospect Insights also showed relationship managers that they had been focusing on prospects not likely to give, which allowed them to reduce portfolio sizes by 10%.

“Sometimes fundraisers work on intuition and disparate pieces of intelligence. Prospect Insights gives us a systemic set of criteria to assess capacity and affinity,” said Rejman. “With more targeted prospect lists, we can spend our time building high-value relationships in an authentic and meaningful way.”