The full story:
With alumni and potential donors living across the country, travel has always been an essential part of the job for Trinity gift officers. However, it could take as long as two to three days to plan a trip, and it was an extremely manual process—gift officers would request a list of prospects in their territories, receive a spreadsheet, and then sort the prospects by zip code to narrow in on specific areas.
So, how has EverTrue changed this process? According to Major Gifts Officer Paul Cox, he can now plan a trip in an afternoon. Using EverTrue’s map and segmentation features, he is able to “pull a prospect list for an area in five minutes, do a sort, and then as fast as people respond via phone or email, I can have a trip planned.”
If he’s on the EverTrue mobile app, he simply draws the boundaries of the area he wants to visit—such as Houston—then he applies capacity and engagement filters to narrow down the resulting prospect list. This makes it easy for Paul to schedule filler visits with engaged mid- or low-level donors—especially since EverTrue supplements Trinity’s home address data with LinkedIn data on prospects’ work locations.
Planning travel isn’t the only area where EverTrue has helped Trinity improve. With the ability to access detailed constituent profiles in EverTrue, Paul and his colleagues have been able to build stronger relationships with their contacts.
Before EverTrue, Paul would travel to meetings with paper notes and personal files of donors. Since these files contained a lot of sensitive data, he was able to ing only a small amount of information about each donor.
Now, Paul doesn’t need to travel with loose paper because he can access all of the information he needs securely in EverTrue. On the road, he uses the mobile app to review useful details, notes, and contact reports about each constituent before a meeting.
The profiles also include Facebook data, so Paul is able to see what type of university content each constituent has engaged with—helping him gain an understanding of the constituent’s potential interests and affinities. Paul has even set up a saved segment that alerts him whenever one of his assigned prospects engages with Trinity’s Facebook content. That way he can follow-up with his prospects and start conversations appropriately.
“Whether or not they’ve been donating, these alerts let us know that the constituent is active with us on Facebook—so we have an idea of their engagement level before we go out and see them,” he said.
Paul’s Favorite Saved Segment:
As the Trinity advancement team continues to rely on EverTrue for their frontline needs, they have been able to take advantage of several new features—including My Portfolio, My Trips, and contact reports search—to better prioritize their fundraising efforts, build the donor pipeline, and close more gifts. With modern software and great data at their disposal whenever and wherever, the Trinity team is able to spend less time on data wrangling and more time on what matters most: building relationships to achieve their mission.
