Ashland University, a private university in Ashland, Ohio.
Ashland University is committed to growing its donor base to hit its annual giving totals. Yet, the Ashland advancement team had limited capacity insights or ways to easily surface additional donors in addition to originally identified top donors.
Led by Matt Gullatta, Ashland University’s director of advancement services, the team purchased EverTrue to help the entire team more effectively find new donors and prioritize portfolios.
The full story:
Matt was drawn to EverTrue for three big reasons:
1. To aggregate difficult to maintain information with the known data from their database.
2. To sustainably distribute that data to those who need it most in an intuitive interface (which, in turn, enables end users to leverage data without IT/advancement services constantly intervening).
3. The ability to access the information on mobile devices, which their database provider did not offer.
“The implementation team was great to work with,” Matt said. “The entire experience was easy to follow, painless, and actually pretty fun! Jenna, our implementation specialist, was really great helping us set up our custom fields and automation between our database and EverTrue.”
“We’re trying to enable our team to interpret the data themselves without someone doing it for them. Our database is not something we can put on an iPad or a phone and put someone out in the wild. You need to have a VPN to look it up. EverTrue is secure enough, it’s intuitive enough, it’s user friendly enough.
I think that the best part of your approach is that EverTrue is a tool that is only as limited as the creativity of those who use it. Other vendors give constraints, but we were presented with some great outside-of-the-box applications for EverTrue (e.g., sending postcards to those who have liked Facebook posts). While everyone shares a similar task of soliciting major donors, they all wear other diverse hats in very different areas. However, the entire team is able to see the value that could be added from EverTrue to their various areas.”
“Thanks to EverTrue, we’ve been able to more effectively team up with our marketing team to really see which messages resonate better with alumni. With metrics around post engagement, we’ve started to grade our posts to really be strategic with our content. And we’re now able to track who is initially engaging with us, how frequently they’re engaging, and what they interact with. It’s another indicator that we can track and measure alongside giving.”
