Thought of the week: The data spiral of death

Data. It's kind of a big deal right now. Most higher ed institutions will admit they struggle with the reliability of alumni data. In fact, the 2021 CASE Alumni Engagement Survey revealed 79% of American institutions have low confidence with the data their using for communications.

At the same time, most schools would tell you they either ARE engaging in data-driven decision making (DDDM) or will soon adopt a more data-driven approach to their advancement strategy. However, how can we hope to inspire more alumni engagement and philanthropy through DDDM, if we acknowledge the data we're starting with is highly unreliable?

Here's where the click-bait article title comes into play. It's easy to measure EVERYTHING you're doing with regards to engagement/development. Events and experiences are supposed to be the entry point of the donor pipeline. A classic example of this are class reunions. Let's suppose a schools is hosting on-campus reunion for 10 classes, 5th to 50th, who each average 500 alumni per class. Even a television/radio major like me knows that's a potential attendee count of 5,000 alumni. Industry research tells us 10-15% of these alumni will actually show up. So, let's assume it's a great turnout at 15% and say 750 alumni show up. We throw a great party and these 750 alumni and their families have a great time. Even better, a significant percentage of these alumni make a gift to their class reunion campaign/annual fund. We celebrate and rightly conclude that reunion continues to be a driver for philanthropy, the data tells us so.

What might might not receive enough attention are the 4,250 alumni who didn't attend. More specifically, what percentage of those 4,250 never even knew reunion was happening because the email/postcard couldn't be delivered, or the email was never opened? More on this in a moment.

I've heard from more and more institutions how their advancement teams are drowning in data. I would suggest that part of the problem is we're measuring EVERYTHING and the result is a state of paralysis as we try to work with advancement services to figure out a home for everything we're measuring/collecting, which means we're actively learning from or acting upon the data.

Every school and business aspires to be a DDDM operation. But be careful not to get caught in a death spiral of data that leaves you trying to measure EVERYTHING and thus makes you more susceptible to incorrectly analyzing the data, or making decisions on data that isn't all that relevant to your mission. If 79% of schools have low confidence in their constituent data, then that needs to be the priority and it has to be addressed in a way that doesn't include an "update your alumni info" postcard or an invitation to a giant alumni directory that features no incentives for the alumni and a terrible user experience.

The data you seek is through affinity engagement. Creating space for alumni to reconnect with their most influential campus experiences. CASE has produced insightful metrics on the power experiences have on philanthropy, but you need better data to capitalize on experiences.

I work with several dozen institutions on their BrightCrowd books, which gives me a front row seat to the emails that come in requesting access to the books. (There have been over a dozen today alone) I'm not just pitching a product here, because I was a BrightCrowd client before I became an employee and my shop was able to update over 200 email addresses in the first 4-5 months of our books. THAT is the start of the pipeline.

In a recent Bright Ideas webinar, Kim Infanti of Syracuse explained how their injecting affinity strategy into email outreach. This approach helps tailor communications in a way that makes outreach relevant to the individual alumnus.

Data is a powerful ally for advancement, but you have to beware of data overload that creates more inaction than action. Instead, start with the top of the funnel. Segment your alumni based on affinity/interest. Turn the knobs to improve those open rates and even consider using BrightCrowd to inspire that coveted knock on the door from your alumni where they're throwing updated info at you so that they can reconnect with their people.

For more on DDDM pitfalls, check out this article from Forbes.

For more info on BrightCrowd, contact Keith directly at [email protected]