The University of British Columbia (UBC) counts many illustrious names among its alumni, including two former Canadian prime ministers, two Nobel laureates and eight Olympic medal winners. But staff members with UBC’s Development and Alumni Engagement department (UBCDAE) must look beyond those marquee names to uncover prospective donors who can help support the institution’s wide-ranging academic programs. Money raised by UBCDAE funds such important areas as student assistance, research, awards, fellowships, endowed chairs and professorships, as well as building and capital projects.
According to Tracey Carmichael, UBCDAE’s Director of Research and Data Analytics, the process of finding and developing the relationship with a major gift donor—classified as someone who donates $25,000 or more—requires great care, not to mention patience. “It’s a very intense relationship development process,” she says. “And it can take anywhere from ten months to ten years to come to fruition. We want to find people who want to be found.”
With limited resources and only a small staff relative to the number of its alumni, UBCDAE focuses a significant portion of its efforts on identifying prime candidates for its major gift program. But if fundraisers simply contacted those who had donated in the past, they’d miss out on promising prospects, all because they had limited data. Indeed, one analysis indicated 27 percent of non-donor alumni had both the wealth and willingness to qualify as major donors. Finding potential donors with the capacity and willingness to make major gifts required more information than the public records and other data available through UBC’s existing sources.
But how could Carmichael find those willing and able—but as yet undeveloped—major gift donors? UBCDAE’s first step was to turn to WealthScapes from Environics Analytics (EA), a comprehensive financial database that includes information not just on Canadians’ income and home value but investments, liquid assets and net worth. UBC analyst Claudia Rangel then developed an innovative model using wealth indicators to rank postal codes according to residents’ ability to give to charity. In addition to WealthScapes, analysts used EA’s AgeByIncome and LiquidAssets databases to further refine the scores to favour desirable older candidates and those with the ability to give at the major gift level. “We created our own giving capacity rating system based on wealth statistics at the small neighbourhood level,” explains Carmichael.
By augmenting UBCDAE staffers’ knowledge of their donor database with EA’s wealth data, analysts created a giving range for prospects. They were then able to score donor prospects at the neighbourhood level, providing advancement officers with deeper insights into which of their alumni could be considered prime candidates. “Because privacy laws are very strict about individual data, lots of people felt we couldn’t do anything to determine wealth and capacity to give beyond looking at Census data,” recalls Carmichael. “We had to prove we could have success using statistics to score prospects.”
Armed with data-driven profiles and visualizations of the segments identified by the model, UBCDAE can now help its fundraising staff recognize the potential major gift donors faster and more reliably. “Some of our findings just blew away the fundraisers,” says Carmichael. “We showed that we could accurately identify the major giving potential of nine out of ten individuals who had already given us a major gift based solely on where they live and data recorded within our CRM system.” Not only is UBCDAE now able to find major gift donors, its pre-screening of potential candidates also improves the advancement staff’s return on time and effort.
Rupen Seoni is vice-president and practice leader, overseeing the packaged goods, automotive, public sector, not-for-profit, government and health sectors, at Environics Analytics.
