How The New School Activated The Giving Funnel Using Net Worth + Engagement Insights

Wouldn’t it be nice if prospects just came up to you and told you how much money they have, how much they’d like to give, and how they’d like their gift to be used?

That’d be amazing!

Sadly, that’s not how the real world works, so we have to leverage publicly available information to identify potential donors with major gift capacity. That’s getting harder, though, with the rise of donor-advised funds that conceal giving, inaccuracies that arise from basing scores on home values, and trusts that are hard to uncover.

That’s why we partnered with Windfall. They deliver super-accurate net worth calculations for households worth $1 million and above. And, like us, they believe in always-fresh data. They’ll screen your entire database monthly, keeping your team updated on ever-changing wealth insights. And EverTrue handles the integration for you, bringing that data directly into our platform — no new file ingestion required!

Ryan Bagley, AVP of University Development and Alumni Relations at The New School and 15-year advancement data management veteran, was one of the first customers to take advantage of this new integration. He shared how having Windfall’s net worth information in EverTrue helps his team activate The Giving Funnel, connect with more affluent prospects, and secure new major gifts. 

 

Watch the full conversation in this webinar recording. Or keep reading for the high-level takeaways.

 

 

From day one, Ryan saw the value of Windfall’s insights. With 270,000 records in their database, only 7,800 of The New School’s constituents were rated at a major gift level (their last traditional wealth screening was five years ago). With Windfall, Ryan found 38,000 constituents whose households were worth $1M+, giving his team a starting point to connect with new prospects or see which ones had the potential to increase their giving. 

Here’s what The New School is doing at each level of The Giving Funnel to turn their high-net-worth prospects to high-impact donors.

Engage

Fundraising starts with meaningful engagement. With more than 100,000 Facebook fans, The New School team uses EverTrue to see which constituents are interacting with their Pages, how often they connect, and what types of posts they’ve liked or commented on. This gives their fundraisers real-time insights into the engagement and affinity of individual alumni.

Qualify

Thanks to EverTrue’s saved searches, Ryan can send his team steady streams of new prospects from search results that combine engagement, giving, net worth, and more. That lets his fundraisers quickly connect with the best prospects. 

It’s a simple formula, really: engagement plus capacity equals the best prospects. 

Our own research shows that alumni who interact with your Facebook pages are 3.4x’s more likely to be donors and your major gift and leadership donors are twice as likely to engage with you online

Oregon State’s prospect research team tested this out and found that “cold” (never-before-visited) prospects were 78% more likely to take a meeting with a gift officer if they were already interacting with OSU on Facebook.

Assign

Once Ryan had built lists of engaged, wealthy prospects, he shared the 10 best, unassigned alumni with gift officers in The New School’s colleges. While his fundraisers can run searches and find high net worth prospects for qualification visits on their own, this set the team up for success and lets Ryan follow these newly discovered prospects through qualification and proposal stages.

Ask

On a recent trip to California, Dustin, a New School gift officer, planned his visits by starting with a list of engaged, wealthy constituents. He booked meetings with four alumni who’d never been visited before and received four- and five-figure commitments from each.

Retain

Now that his team can leverage new wealth insights, Ryan’s working to identify affluent donors who aren’t yet giving at high levels and then deliver personalized, one-on-one stewardship experiences.

For example, Ryan found a previously unrated donor who gave $500. Normally, that person would have just received a generic thank-you email, but their Windfall net worth was in the multi-million range, so Ryan passed the person on to a fundraiser on his team. The officer reached out, found out that the donor has established scholarships at other institutions, and closed a new endowed scholarship for The New School within days within days.

That’s the power of combing engagement with wealth insights in action!

Ryan closed out the webinar with a killer summary. And we’re going to leave this post with his conclusion.

“The one point I really want to make sure everyone leaves with: This is not your traditional wealth screening that we’ve all done and is painful, time-consuming, expensive, and stale by the time you’ve validated everyone,” he said. “This is new. This is different. The only reason I’m on [this webinar] is that I’ve found the data to be accurate. It can be trusted and you can use it right out of the gate.”

Learn More

If you’re an EverTrue customer, it’s easy to add Windfall’s net worth calculations and wealth insights. We handle the integration for you, so it’s just a matter of upgrading your account. Let’s talk if you’re interested!

And if you’re not yet a customer, let’s brainstorm together see if EverTrue + Windfall are a fit for your needs.

 

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