Customer Stories:

Enhancing Donor Relations at UNC Chapel Hill

Who:

Brandy Polo, Donor Relations Officer at UNC Chapel Hill, spearheads the transformation of endowment reporting at the university. With her expertise in donor relations and commitment to delivering an exceptional donor experience, Brandy plays a pivotal role in streamlining workflows and leveraging innovative solutions to simplify the endowment reporting process.

The Challenge:

Endowment reporting season poses significant challenges for advancement shops, including UNC Chapel Hill. Compiling accurate reports, coordinating with stakeholders, and managing complex data across disparate systems often lead to time-consuming processes, potential errors, and increased stress for donor relations teams. Ensuring that donors receive comprehensive and impactful reports that showcase the impact of their contributions is crucial, but the traditional methods of reporting can be inefficient and cumbersome.

Why evertrue:

To overcome these challenges, UNC Chapel Hill turns to EverTrue’s ODDER (On-Demand Digital Endowment Reports). ODDER provides a streamlined solution for compiling and delivering personalized, digital endowment reports directly to donors via email. By centralizing fund data, facilitating collaboration, and ensuring secure delivery, ODDER simplifies the reporting process while enhancing the donor experience. UNC Chapel Hill recognizes that leveraging innovative technology is essential to their annual giving, modernizing their endowment reporting practices, and meeting the evolving expectations of their donors.

The results:

The implementation of ODDER at UNC Chapel Hill has yielded exceptional results. Donors have responded positively to the shift towards digital reporting, appreciating the convenience, accessibility, and ability to easily share reports with their networks. UNC Chapel Hill has witnessed increased donor satisfaction, engagement, and transparency through ODDER, allowing the university to showcase the impact of donor contributions effectively. By embracing EverTrue’s technology, Brandy and the UNC Chapel Hill team have successfully simplified the endowment reporting process, strengthening donor relations, and positioning the university as a leader in enhancing the donor experience.

Endowment reporting season can be one of most stressful times of the year for advancement shops. And it’s also one of the most critical. The UNC Chapel Hill team used ODDER (On-Demand Digital Endowment Reports) by EverTrue to simplify the endowment reporting process, improve workflows, and set up their team (and donors) for success.

Informing donors on what fundraisers did with their money is no small feat – but it’s an important one to get right. Most organizations are handling thousands of funds and, most of the time, the systems gathering the data don’t communicate with one another – leaving the door open for a lot of mistakes when compiling and writing endowment reports.

Taking the stress out of endowment reporting

There are three key steps for simplifying and de-stressing endowment reporting:

  1. Compiling data and collaborating with stakeholders to get accurate information
  2. Simplifying the process to understand who needs a report and when
  3. Taking a step back and asking, “Is there a different way to approach endowment reporting that can make life better for all involved?”
 

ODDER provides on-demand digital endowment reports that are personalized and securely delivered to donors via email. In ODDER, there are no complicated portals to maintain or new processes to adopt – rather, the tool allows donor relations to compile all fund data efficiently and accurately in one spot, collaborate on report edits, and send to donors securely by email.

We know what you may be thinking: Top donors are accustomed to receiving printed versions of endowment reports, so they’re going to be thrown off when they see their fund report in their email inbox.

Well, get this. Since launching the ODDER tool three years ago, our partner institutions have sent over 400,000 digital endowment reports and only 0.3% of donors have requested a print copy.

In fact, organizations like UNC Chapel Hill have found that their donors have preferred receiving their reports digitally.

As a very large and decentralized institution, compiling data and building reports at UNC Chapel Hill was a heavy lift across the board. (Disparate systems, copious spreadsheets, and too many cooks in the proverbial fund reporting kitchen.)

For the UNC Chapel Hill team, ODDER’s endowment reports streamlined cross-team collaboration and fund data collection, and garnered an incredibly positive response from donors. Donors have voiced excitement to receive a digital report that’s easy to share with their friends and family, and that they can access at any time from their phones or computers.