Ryan Marshall is a prospect development analyst at Concordia University, Saint Paul, a Lutheran liberal arts university in Minnesota with 2,650 undergraduate and 1,875 graduate students.
After lowering tuition by $10,000 several years ago, Concordia’s 12-person advancement staff has worked tirelessly to increase fundraising dollars to keep education affordable for its students. Last year, the team raised $1.7M for the annual fund and $4.2M overall from contributions of more than 2,000 donors, 721 of which were new.
With Concordia focused on finding new donors, securing more meetings with engaged alumni, and growing year-over-year contributions, EverTrue is Ryan’s go-to destination to find prospects and help plan trips for gift officers because it’s easy to use and contains all the data he needs within a single constituent profile.
"EverTrue gives me access to more data points and allows me to connect them in new ways. I've been able to find prospects that I wouldn't have otherwise. The amount of time the platform saves me opens up different opportunities for engagement with my team."
Ryan Marshall, Prospect Development Analyst, Concordia University, St. Paul
The full story:
All of the Data in One Place
EverTrue saves Ryan time by displaying information from multiple sources. He doesn’t have to visit a half-dozen different screens in his database or other websites to get a complete picture of a potential donor.
“A lot of the information I’ve come to rely on as a researcher is right in front of me. Until you start using EverTrue, you don’t realize how valuable that information is. For example, just a single click takes you to Zillow or the county website to see home values. That’s really beneficial to me as I’m trying to decide if someone is a viable major gift prospect.”
“We import all of our interactions (contact reports) into EverTrue. So as I am researching our unassigned constituents, I don’t have to go back and forth through several screens in our database. I have all of the interactions right there on their profile, which helps increase my efficiency.”
Surfacing New Prospects With Custom Searches
Not only is all the information in one place, but EverTrue also helps researchers like Ryan uncover giving potential by building complex searches in just a few clicks—queries that would be impossible to perform in a traditional database.
“My favorite search in EverTrue is one for people who have ‘raised their hand’ online. I’m looking for alumni who have recently updated their contact info via our e-newsletter, interacted with us on Facebook, but haven’t yet made a gift. That search gives me three data points that don’t overlap anywhere else except within EverTrue. Engagement with those alumni is huge!”
“We also use the LinkedIn employment information section in EverTrue to parlay relationships into introductions. For example, if a gift officer is visiting a company with multiple alumni, we run a search for that company to give us new names for additional filler meetings.”