The University of South Dakota Foundation
Foundation Pursues $250 Million Campaign Using Blackbaud Predictive Analytics Capabilities
Higher Education Institutions
In just a week of using it, the predictive analytics segments perspective donors into nice, neat groupings and provides data that shows the likelihood that donors will give and their target gift ranges.”
Since 1922, the University of South Dakota (USD) Foundation has raised funds for the development of University of South Dakota, one of the nation’s highest quality comprehensive state universities. Since the turn of the 21st century, donors have funded more than $250,000,000 in campus improvements and millions more for scholarships to help attract outstanding students, provide faculty support, and fulfill operating needs.
In 2015, the USD Foundation began Onward: The Campaign for South Dakota, a $250 million effort to provide students with scholarships and make investments in the campus ranging from updating athletic facilities to improving student life.
In order to reach the ambitious goals of the Onward campaign, the USD Foundation needed 90% of donations to come from the top 10% of its donors. Unfortunately, at the time of the campaign’s inception, USD Foundation didn’t have a sufficient number of major givers in its database.
Margaret Williams, USD’s director of prospect research, sprang into action, contacting the Target Analytics team at Blackbaud. Her ask: provide tools that will guide her team members to find and cultivate the right potential donors in order to meet their ambitious fundraising goals.
80% of Identified Households
allowed the Foundation to get to the solicitation phase, and 73% of those solicited gave a donation
Cultivating the Right Donors
Target Analytics uses social good-optimized artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to provide unmatched guidance. These capabilities are part of Blackbaud’s broader Intelligence for Good™ approach, combining big data, the expertise of Social Good Scientists™, analytics, and AI to offer customers unparalleled insights to advance their missions.
Through the implementation of Target Analytics’ principal giving service, University of South Dakota was able to identify several hundred households with the ability to give more than $250,000 a year. Previously, the University had thousands of perspective donors who were classified in the “major gifts” category but never had a way of honing in on those with such a high capacity to give.
If Margaret didn’t have access to these predictive analytics, she would have had to go through a manual process to determine a rough estimate of prospects’ total wealth. This would have only provided a broad bucket of people in the same socio-economic range without any idea of their philanthropic interests or how they chose to give. Thanks to Target Analytics, Margaret has a group of people who are most likely to give and have the highest capacity to do so, allowing her and her team to focus their cultivation efforts.
After identifying the households, Margaret and her team began concentrating on cultivating those specific donors. Of the 160 households identified as top prospects, 80% moved to the solicitation phase, and 73% of those households gave a donation to the Foundation. From those donations alone, the University raised over $67 million for the campaign.
“The predictive analytics are unbelievably effective at identifying donors with the capacity to give, which allows us to concentrate our visits and provide a high touch rate to the donors who respond well to it,” Margaret explained.
Ongoing Success
Although Onward: The Campaign for South Dakota is coming to a close, the Foundation is still seeing donations roll in from the donors identified by Target Analytics. Furthermore, the Foundation’s major gift officers have a newfound confidence in donor outreach thanks to the power of Intelligence for Good.
“Our major gift officers trust that these predictive analytics and artificial intelligence capabilities can get them in the right living rooms and sitting with the right people who really want to make a difference by donating to the University,” Margaret said.
Using Blackbaud data and predictive analytics has changed the Foundation’s approach to fundraising, driving more and more transformational gifts to the University. Thanks to the efforts of the Onward campaign, the Foundation can begin thinking about how to make the school even greater in the future.
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