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In March 2018, LiveAlumni welcomed our guest host, Derek Clark, at a Hot Topic Webinar. Derek is the Senior Director of Advancement Services from the University of Georgia and has been working in advancement with UGA for over 11 years.
Derek and his team have done a fabulous job of using LiveAlumni tools, in this webinar, he walked us through his team’s journey of incorporating LiveAlumni data into their fundraising system. He shared UGA’s initial goals and experience with this data as well as their final outcomes and his opinion on whether all the work is worth it. (Spoiler alert: it is!)
The Goals:
The University of Georgia’s main goal was to increase the volume and quality of their business relationships. To accomplish this goal in its entirety, they separated these goals into three phases:
Phase 1: Matching Data. Matching alumni data to an institution’s unique IDs gives added value and usability to the data. UGA’s team had various matching goals upon the delivery of their data.
Constituent IDs – Of their 130,000 public profiles, LiveAlumni was able to give them 70,000 high confidence matches against their institution’s IDs.
Employer IDs – They added employer IDs to company records which helped to streamline the importing. For example, if Coca-cola was listed several different ways, having the same employer IDs assigned to each company record made the importing much easier.
Matching Gift Programs – LiveAlumni’s matching gift information from Double the Donation ‘enriched the data they already had.’
Phase 2: Automation. They created an automated process for importing employment information into their system where there was no current employment listed on the record. This allowed for quarterly data refreshes to be automatically imported into their database.
Phase 3: Managing Changes. Once an institution embarks on such a large project such as this one, managing and updating the data is an important last step that requires continuous maintenance. UGA decided on updating changes to their LiveAlumni data on a quarterly basis.
The Data:
Derek and his team took many data points into consideration when integrating the LiveAlumni data into their database. He made note that there were more data points than he originally expected and he found quite a few of them to be unexpectedly helpful. Here’s a look at Derek’s data overview:
Business Relationships – Their main goal, automated by running LiveAlumni data against their database.
Business Titles – His team used an adapted Pre-Generated Query to query what they referred to as ‘C-Suite Employees’ – CEOs, CIOs, and other senior executive titles.
Matching Gifts Organizations – Again, LiveAlumni’s matching gift information gave them additional organizations and extra details for many programs.
Company Information – They found company size helpful and company website details helped them utilize email domains as an alternative way to match profiles.
Interest & Volunteer Involvement – This is their current project that they are hoping adds to their success.
Helpful Data Points:
Photos – Great for identifying constituents
LinkedIn URLs – Enabled them to match constituents with similar names
Name Changes – Divorce, marriage, nicknames, etc.
Business Emails – Enriched emails as an afterthought and it filled in quite a few holes
Outcomes:
The hard work involved in incorporating data into your database is worth it. Here are some of the benefits UGA has seen over the past few years:
844,731 active constituents in their database, up from 480,000 4 years ago
176,000 constituents in LiveAlumni
160,658 employee relationships. This has more than doubled from 2016, which also means a significant increase in matching gifts donations from alumni employers.
123,641 constituents have job titles
34.7% of graduates have known employee relationships
1,568 ‘C-suite’ employees
121,361 LinkedIn URL’s
88,210 constituent photo’s
43,316 organizations, doubled from two years ago
LiveAlumni Users Campus-Wide
Derek’s team in advancement are not the only ones taking advantage of LiveAlumni. Here are the various users they have campus-wide:
Records Department
Prospecting Group
Development Officers
Various School and Colleges – business school, law school
Career Services – This office had more than a 90% return on an outcomes survey with assistance from LiveAlumni
We thank Derek for sharing his team’s experience and expertise with the data importing process. If you or your team have any great LiveAlumni success stories you’d like to share, we would love to hear about them!
Request Webinar Recording: If you’d like to request a recording of Derek’s webinar, please complete the form below.
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