UNC-Chapel Hill surpasses goal for historic
metric-driven campaign ahead of schedule

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill upgraded its outdated legacy
constituent relationship management platform to Blackbaud CRM in a
new fundraising chapter that started in 2013. “Our former legacy product
was antiquated, and this provided us with the opportunity to work with a
respected technology company like Blackbaud,” said Jeff Hill, associate vice
chancellor for campaign management and marketing. “It also allowed us to
collaborate with other peer institutions to understand best practices and
maximize our impact.”

Carolina has a hybrid fundraising model which consists of 26 schools and units that each have a fundraising goal in the Campaign for Carolina, and a central organization that provides shared services as well as works with donors that
have broad interests across many units on campus. “Our schools and units have a lot of autonomy with how they frame their fundraising strategies,” said Hill.

“We knew that Blackbaud CRM could be heavily customized to handle our level of complexity and so that each school and unit could address distinct situations appropriately.”

Following their last campaign which ended in 2007, Hill explained that his
team recognized the need to become more data-driven to drive future
growth. “Implementing Blackbaud CRM was the precursor to this and, as
evident by our recent campaign success, was essential,” said Hill.

Working Smarter and More Efficiently

Carolina surpassed its ambitious $4.25 billion goal for the Campaign for
Carolina in January 2022, one year ahead of schedule, leveraging Blackbaud
CRM and benchmarking with Blackbaud’s donorCentrics. “During this
campaign, we put a heavy emphasis on fundraisers using the metrics and
data insights in Blackbaud CRM,” said Hill.

Many institutions rely on Blackbaud CRM to set the foundation for major
gift programs, prospecting, and to help development officers optimize
their portfolios.

“We’re no longer just chasing people we know and are conducting proper
analyses to determine which donors have the capacity to give,” said Hill.
“Without Blackbaud CRM, we wouldn’t have the data to work smarter and
more efficiently.”

Hill also shared that they used Blackbaud CRM to not only optimize their
development officers’ portfolios but determine if they were adequately
staffed. Using the data now available, his team was able to acquire the
necessary funding to add additional development officers.

Blackbaud CRM has already enabled Carolina to capture more, better quality
data. “We’ve been able to heavily scale the amount of information we’re
capturing on constituent records without increasing the actual amount
of time it takes to capture this information,” said Hill. “This shows just how
time-consuming and manual collecting data was before. We’re still all trying
to figure out the world of big data, but we’re in a better place to do that
because of Blackbaud CRM.”

Powering Future Growth

An additional benefit to partnering with Blackbaud is gaining access to an
extensive network of peers to collaborate with and learn from. “My entire
team is attending the Blackbaud Developers’ Conference, which we consider
the most valuable professional development we can get as programmers
and business analysts,” said Rick Root, the university’s director of application
development and support. “A long-term goal is to do a better job using our
Blackbaud solutions for data visualization, and attending this conference is
one way I know we’ll get there.”

As the team emerges from the campaign, they will begin to assess what has
and has not worked effectively over the past 10 years. They will also consider
what additional products to integrate with Blackbaud CRM to boost and
streamline efforts to capture data as they move into a world where analytics
and data intelligence becomes increasingly important for them.

“We evaluated many options and were all in agreement to upgrade to
Blackbaud CRM as it provides us with the opportunity to evolve as our current
needs change,” said Hill. “It’s not a stagnant product and isn’t the same that it
was in 2013 when we launched. This is probably the most powerful aspect of it
– the continued innovation and its flexibility to respond to our needs.”