University Fundraising Solutions

Empower fundraisers and increase their productivity. Fundraisers are critical to the success of every university. Whether sports or academics are the focus, to be effective, fundraisers must constantly make contacts that result in gifts that sustain the mission of the university. With a well-organized strategy for maintaining relationships and bringing new donors into the fold, PILYTIX helps fundraisers become more efficient with their day-to-day outreach and long-term planning.

Identifying which prospects should be assigned to gift officer portfolios for cultivation is a time-consuming and costly task for most institutions. They must sift through extensive contact databases comprised of alumni, parents, fans of sports teams, former donors and other affiliated parties. To make the job easier, fundraisers often use companies that provide scores that indicate interest levels. Traditional scoring products rank donor databases once or twice a year — giving a ranking will stay with that contact until or if the product rescores. These products do not take into account constantly evolving prospective capacity and interest levels. So, the best prospect yesterday may not be a strong cultivation candidate today; and today’s best prospect may less enthusiastic tomorrow.  

Dynamic Contact Scoring positions fundraising teams for success by continuously updating each contact ranking in your database. As relevant data changes — even data that is scattered across multiple systems — the scores change as interest levels ebb and flow. With Dynamic Contact Scoring, leadership can regularly monitor the database, and have gift officers follow up on financially qualified contacts when their interest in donating is piquing. Dynamic Contact Scoring also provides your research team a tool that will further assist them with an efficient means to identify prospects that have the resources and motivation to donate.

Once portfolios are assigned, it is the responsibility of the gift officer to follow up on their prospects. Because donor interest levels may wane for a variety of reasons, some of these prospects are unlikely, or not ready, to donate. Yet gift officers will waste time chasing or over-investing time in these prospects because they may “feel” right to them.

Updated on a daily basis, Portfolio Accelerator helps gift officers to prioritize their efforts by providing a success probability for each prospect in their portfolios. The probability is based on ever-changing data related to the prospect, gift type, or projected gift amount, and also includes the gift officer’s own strengths, weaknesses, and closing tendencies. The ranking is easily understood by gift officers because the Portfolio Accelerator clearly explains the rationale behind each prediction — positive attributes that may make a donor more likely donate, as well as factors that may give a donor pause when considering a gift. Armed with these insights, gift officers will make the most of their time when they are positioned to focus on the best gift prospects at the right time and are better prepared for meaningful engagement.

Gift officers in the field are the best source of meaningful data about your prospective donors. Unfortunately, gift officers tend not to enter data into the CRM uniformly. Some CRM users waste time entering more information than is really productive; others don’t enter information in a timely manner. Still others become complacent in their data entry habits, only entering the bare minimum to avoid conflict with the leadership team. All of these behaviors contribute to messy CRM data which makes it difficult for leadership to extract meaningful insights and leads to fundraising inefficiency.

The Data Quality Auditor represents the most direct path to sustainable improvements in the quality of data entered into your CRM by gift officers. The system keeps gift officers on their toes by monitoring patterns of data entry that adversely affect the overall quality of your data. When corrective measures are needed, the leadership team has direct insights into the specific behaviors that require modification.