1. Helping Fundraisers Help Themselves A Case Study on Contact Report Automation
Gretchen Dwyer: Executive Director of Leadership Giving, Amherst College
Elisabeth Parker: Senior Research and Prospect Management Analyst, Amherst College
Joshua Wallace, PMP: Senior Database Programmer, Amherst College

2. Agenda Overview of Amherst College Advancement Visit Reports - Before
Visit Report Form Development Process and Technical Information
Visit Reports - After
Other Ideas
Questions?

3. Amherst College Founded in 1821
Small liberal arts college in Western Massachusetts
Student body of 1,800
Under 25,000 alumni of record
Around 1800 students and under alumni of record

4. Amherst College Advancement
Includes Alumni and Parent Programs, Foundation and Corporate Relations, Advancement Communications, Career Center, Development, and Operations
Recently finished Lives of Consequence campaign which raised over $500M
Primarily work with alumni and parents of current students
Advancement office uses Colleague Advancement
When fully staffed, Amherst has eight frontline fundraisers including Gift Planning, Parent, Leadership, and Principal officers
Development – GD talk about Leadership Giving
Advancement Operations – JW talk about reporting, EP talk about Research

5. Visit Reports for Gift Officers - Before
Former Visit Report Form required the input of the following:
Donor name, giving history, progress level, next steps
Donor dog name, donor grandchildren name, donor grandchildren dog name
Home suitable for event, possible trustee candidate, good speaker for event, questions for research
Color shirt donor wearing during visit, color chair sat in during visit, color drink drank during visit
Donor strategy, cultivation notes, next steps

6. Visit Reports for Development Assistants - Before
Former Visit Report Form required the following steps:
Hassle Gift Officer to complete forms
Send Gift Officer blank templates to facilitate receiving of forms
Threaten Gift Officer with number of outstanding reports
Receive document from Gift Officer, proofread, enter giving history, recent gifts, gifts given during visit, suitable for events, etc.
Send via to CAO, DLG, Research colleagues, and various other stakeholders
Breathe sigh of relief. Start process again with next completed report.

7. Visit Report Workflow Overview- Before
Visit takes place
Gift officer takes notes on paper or in draft
Notes are transformed into narrative
Narrative is ed to assistant
Assistant formats document and inserts narrative
Officer edits and approves document
Assistant enters visit into Colleague and distributes document
Research saves final document into prospect file
Since there was no easy way to track filed visits, these numbers were compiled by a student worker who looked through eFiles. 144 reports were filed and 277 were not (421 visits).

8. Visit Report Reform – Planning Stages
Project Goals:
Increase data hygiene
Increase file rate
Increase timeliness of entry
Eliminate busy work
Process Goals:
Get buy-in from frontline fundraisers
Pilot web report capabilities
Make use of our resources
Resources in place: some narrative reports were already automated, links to allow automatic saving to prospect files were in place and maintained, push reporting had been in use for over a year
Do all of this without resorting to a punitive system!

9. Fundraiser Involvement in Planning Stages
Gretchen requested Senior Development Officer and Development Assistant involvement
Josh and Elisabeth created mock-up of form prior to first meeting with Leadership Giving team
Took feedback on design, but with a grain of salt
Demonstrated commitment to project lead to lower skepticism rates in end users
Open secret of college-provided iPads on the horizon helped the cause

10. Data Flow

11. Web Application Architecture

13. Other Options Pre-populated Google Form or Doc Access form
Report from database for background data – PDF or Word doc
Vendor form
Salesforce
SDO goes into database on their own

14. Optimizing Gift Officer Time and Brain Space
Former Visit Report Form required the input of the following:
Donor name, giving history, progress level, next steps
Donor dog name, donor grandchildren name, donor grandchildren dog name
Home suitable for event, possible trustee candidate, good speaker for event, questions for research
Color shirt donor wearing during visit, color chair sat in during visit, color drink drank during visit
Donor strategy, cultivation notes, next steps
Current Visit Report Form requires input of the following:
Visit summary
Visit notes
Next steps

15. Optimizing Development Assistant Time and Brain Space
Former Visit Report Form required the following steps:
Hassle Gift Officer to complete forms
Send Gift Officer blank templates to facilitate receiving of forms
Threaten Gift Officer with number of outstanding reports
Receive document from Gift Officer, proofread, enter giving history, recent gifts, gifts given during visit, suitable for events, etc.
Send via to CAO, DLG, Research colleagues, and various other stakeholders
Breathe sigh of relief. Start process again with next completed report.
Current Visit Report Form requires the following steps:
Proofread
Distribute to list auto-populated in final Word document

16. Visit Report Workflow Overview- After
Visit takes place
Gift officer takes notes on paper or in draft
Notes are transformed into narrative
Narrative is ed to assistant
Assistant formats document and inserts narrative
Officer edits and approves document
Assistant enters visit into Colleague and distributes document
Research saves final document into prospect file
fills out visit report form
Visits were easily tracked because information on whether or not a report was completed was actually IN the data warehouse – reflect follow-up at FY end which lead gift officers to either complete reports or, in some cases agreed upon by DLG and Research, enter a note into database about visit instead. 341 visits out of 350 were reported upon
Numbers include a gift officer who left partway through FY14 and was not able to retroactively complete reports. Without his numbers, we would have 291 completed reports out of 295 visits total, with a 98.6% file rate 3. 4.

17. Results Gift Officers care about getting their reports in
Increased institutional appreciation for getting information out of brains and into database
Data is more trustworthy
SDOs are more prepared for visits
Speedier portfolio reviews
Ability to build more automated reports for external (board) and internal (CAO) audiences
Reportable form increases accountability
Drastically improved file rate

18. Ongoing Work
Continue to use framework developed for the Contact Report web app to build additional internal and external applications
Create wider-ranging visit report forms for larger advancement community
Add more Prospect Management resources to My Prospects to push data from database into the hands of fundraisers

19. Questions? Gretchen Dwyer: gdwyer@amherst.edu
Elisabeth Parker:
Joshua Wallace: