Many students join fraternities to make connections that last a lifetime. For fraternity leaders, these bonds influence an important aspect of your fundraising: alumni giving.
Your alumni ...
5 Steps to Run a Successful Higher Education Fundraiser
School pride is a unique loyalty unmatched by other motivations of support. People take pride in their schools by cheering on their athletic teams, making family traditions out of attending ...
5 Tips for Revamping Your Fundraising Strategy for 2023
With New Year’s resolutions fresh on everyone’s minds, it’s time to revitalize your fundraising to maximize your organization’s potential over the coming months and beyond.
Your calendar may be completely ...
Wealth Screening for Nonprofits: The Complete Guide
Here’s a common scenario: A nonprofit university is planning a capital campaign to build a new Center for the Humanities. Knowing that most effective capital campaigns rely on large initial gifts, the university wants to raise approximately 50% to 70% of its campaign goal during the campaign’s “quiet phase” before moving to a broader public one.
However, the fundraisers are in a bind. Reaching out to everyone in their database would effectively push the campaign public before raising the necessary base funds. On the other hand, they don’t have the time or resources to manually go through each alumni profile in their database. Moreover, they may not even know who their wealthiest donors are.
Luckily, this is the situation for which nonprofit wealth screening was born. With more than ten years of wealth screening experience, AlumniFinder has seen the robust impact wealth screening and data-driven intelligence can have on nonprofit fundraising. This guide will explore the fundamentals of wealth screening for nonprofits. We’ll look at:
What Is Wealth Screening?
How Does Wealth Screening Help Nonprofits?
What Data Should Wealth Screening Include?
Wealth Screening
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Nonprofit Data Appends: A Comprehensive Guide
Although they may not think about it, nonprofits interact with data on a daily basis. From the number of weekly volunteers to donor email addresses to communication preferences, it’s absolutely essential for nonprofits to work with clean, complete data points in order to raise money, market programs, and achieve their missions.
But what do you do when your organization’s data is limited or incomplete? While you can certainly collect data by sending out surveys and forms to the contacts in your database, this process is often slow and ineffective in gathering the data most valuable to your nonprofit.
That’s where third-party data appends, buying data points to supplement your nonprofit’s existing records, can come in. With data appends, the sky’s the limit. This guide breaks down the various elements of the data append process for you to be able to append your nonprofit’s data with confidence and ease. We’ll look at:
- Nonprofit Data Appends FAQ
- Types of Data Appends for Nonprofits
- How Data Appends Can Help Nonprofits Raise Money
- The Best Data Append Service for Nonprofits
As you read through this guide, consider the data you already have in your database. Ask yourself: What data points do we use the most often? Do these data attributes contain any errors, inaccuracies, or duplicates? What information would make our jobs easier and our outreach more effective? Your data appends will be more impactful when your existing data is clean, accurate, organized, and up-to-date.
Nonprofit Data Appends FAQ
Data appends represent a big unknown for many in the nonprofit sector. You probably have a sense that your nonprofit’s data is essential, but anything beyond a tertiary look can also be scary and overwhelming. In this section, we’ll answer all your burning questions about data appends and the data append process. Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room: Why should nonprofits care about data?
Why is data important for nonprofits?
For nonprofits big and small, data is critical in making smart fundraising and programmatic decisions.
The Essential Guide to Alumni Giving and Fundraising
Between small recurring gifts and large one-time donations, alumni giving often makes up the largest segments of university fundraising efforts. Who’s more motivated to donate to your university than the individuals who were once students themselves?
Keeping this in mind, this guide will review the current state of alumni giving, the best practices for engaging your alums, and the most effective ways to increase your alumni giving rates. We’ll also review the tools that make it easier to reach your fundraising goals. Here’s what to expect:
- Why is Alumni Giving Important?
- Exploring Alumni Giving Rates and Trends
- How Can Prospect Research Help Find Top Alumni Donors?
- Alumni Giving Best Practices
- 5 Helpful Alumni Giving Tools
As we walk through these steps, you’ll likely find yourself exploring the quantitative and qualitative information you have on your alums. Before making any programmatic decisions, however, plan to conduct an audit of your alumni database, remove outdated and duplicate information, and enhance your data with additional wealth and philanthropic indicators. Then, you can be confident that any changes you make will be based on the most accurate, thorough data possible.
Why Is Alumni Giving Important?
Alumni giving is important for two primary reasons: it offers crucial support to the important work your university does in educating the leaders of tomorrow and it’s a key indicator of your university’s financial health. In this section, we’ll cover how alumni donations tend to be directed and used by universities, plus the major benefits of developing an alumni giving program.
How Are Alumni Donations Used?
There isn’t just one type of student that graduates from your school. Likewise, you don’t have only one type of alum. Your graduates have gone on to be biologists and writers, farmers and professional athletes. In many cases, alums will direct their donations to a specific program or department that was meaningful to them during their studies. In fact, restricted gifts make up 93% of giving to universities.
Overall, alumni giving generally funds:
- Scholarships. If an alum received a specific scholarship or support during their time at your university, they’ll often want to “pass on” this opportunity to current and future students.
- Construction costs. Usually, alumni interest in funding construction projects piques after the kickoff period of a capital campaign to fund a specific project, such as a new science center with up-to-date technology or a state-of-the-art theater. Alums are particularly apt to give to buildings for which the name (e.g. the Alumni Hall) will acknowledge their contribution.
- Research projects. Funding faculty research can be attractive to your alumni, especially when it’s framed in the context of its impact on students and the broader community.
- Operational costs. While the day-to-day operations of running a university aren’t as sexy as new experimental research, they are just as important! Because of this, operational costs generally end up being funded by unrestricted donations.
By engaging the diversity of your alumni community, you’ll be able to attract and direct resources across your funding priorities.
What Are the Benefits of a Strong Alumni Giving Program?
Even though the majority of alumni gifts contain restrictions, they are still incredibly valuable to your university. So why exactly is it important to build a strong alumni giving program? A thriving program allows you to:
Access a broad range of support that adds up to make a big impact. Relying entirely on one income source can become a big problem if you suddenly lose that stream. Alumni giving helps you avoid that risk by diversifying your fundraising efforts across a large body of donors. Moreover, small gifts can really add up. For example, in a given year, an annual fund made up of $500,000 in small donations can have the same financial effect as
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