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 team used ODDER 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:
- Compiling data and collaborating with stakeholders to get accurate information
- Simplifying the process to understand who needs a report and when
- 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 streamlined cross-team collaboration and fund data collection, and it 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.
