EP 55: The Power of Good Donor Data with Alumni Finder

Positioning review: No adjustments needed. All content is naturally experiential and observational, reflecting the guests' firsthand expertise in data services for nonprofits. Handbid references are descriptive and contextual.

Jeff: Welcome to Elevate Your Event, your favorite podcast for transforming fundraising events. Join us weekly for expert tips and creative ideas to make your next event a standout success. In today's episode, we delve into a crucial aspect of successful fundraising -- the significance of good data on donors. Joining us are industry leaders who have mastered the art of leveraging data for fundraising success. Our guests for this insightful discussion are CEO and founder Jeff Porter from Handbid, along with Director of Marketing and Partnerships Lori Makkai. We are also joined by Chris Boyette and Jennifer Cole, both from Alumni Finder, bringing their extensive expertise to the table. Tune in as we uncover the power of good donor data and how it can revolutionize your fundraising efforts.

Jeff: Welcome back to the Elevate Your Event podcast, where we talk about all the various ways you can make your next fundraising event better. Today in the studio, we have our friends from Alumni Finder -- Chris and Jennifer. And I'm joined by our special Handbid talent, Lori Makkai, our Director of Marketing. We're here to talk about alumni data, great data for your fundraisers. Coming from the nonprofit space and starting a nonprofit back in 2004, I understand the importance of data. So let's quickly introduce our guests here and then dive in. Chris and Jennifer, introduce yourselves. Talk a little bit about your company.

Jennifer: I'll go first. I've been with Alumni Finder for about 13 years. I had no background in the data world, but I kind of fell in love with it when I got started, and I've obviously stayed with it. Chris and I have been working together for the last several years now. He has a lot of experience with other companies similar to Alumni Finder that he can touch on. But together, Alumni Finder is basically an organization that works with nonprofits to help them clean up their database. It's as simple as helping them maintain the data that they have and helping them build out more detailed profiles for better fundraising efforts. That's kind of in a one-second nutshell what Alumni Finder is doing.

Chris: My name's Chris. I've been with Alumni Finder -- it'll be two years in May. My background is nonprofits. I've worked at a company called Blackbaud. I'm sure a lot of the people listening are familiar with them. I was there for 12 years in the analytics and data enrichment services division. Then I moved on to other opportunities, tried my own thing for a little while, then came back and hopped on board with Alumni Finder. And don't let the name fool you. You don't have to have alumni. You could have members, donors, subscribers -- you don't have to be a school, as long as you're a nonprofit. We can help you.

Jeff: So this is obviously you're helping them find alumni, and that might have been where you started. But what it sounds like is you've evolved into how to help organizations take their donor data in any form -- whether it's missing or bad or correct or incorrect -- and clean that up so that it can be useful for fundraising. Is that kind of in a nutshell what it is?

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's the key thing -- for people to be successful in their fundraising efforts, it all kind of starts with that data. That's where we come in. We really help them look at their database as a whole or look at segments of their database and really focus on the quality of their data, the accuracy of their data. Before they're going into these campaigns or doing an email campaign or a phoneathon or anything like that, they have the correct data, they're actually reaching their constituents. It's really cleaning up the information and helping them build out these more detailed profiles so that they understand their people better and they can communicate with them more efficiently.

Jeff: At maybe a base level, we're talking contact information. When you have a new charity client that comes on board, how accurate is it? Are you mostly starting with contact information -- like they don't have an accurate address, or they have an incomplete address, or an old phone number? Are you starting there, or are you finding that's mostly okay and now you're diving deeper into their activity or their history?

Chris: It's all across the board, to be honest with you. A lot of times, if you're speaking to events, they don't really think about the data initially. They're thinking about the big event that they're doing. And then when it comes around to inviting them, now you think about the data. Depending on what channel they're wanting to communicate with these people on, whether they're in the database or not, we can help them identify the right people to focus on through the channel they want to look at. It's across the board. If they have a database, we'll typically help them understand what we can update, and then they can pick and choose what they want to clean up.

Jeff: So can you connect to various CRMs and pull this data? Are they just sending you spreadsheets of data, or how does that work?

Chris: Pretty much they would take an export of their data and then submit it to us through our secure FTP folder. We pick it up and run it through our analysis and then provide them with a report. If they have 10,000 records, we're going to go through each one of them and say, out of all these 10,000, here's X number that we confirm have good addresses. Here's how many we can update. Same for cell phone, landline, emails, date of birth, deceased. It gives them a complete picture of the accuracy of their data. If they're planning to email or call all these people, and they see there are a lot of missing numbers, we can help update those or make sure that those addresses are going to the right places so the people they want to invite actually know about the event.

Jeff: And will you help them get the data back into their CRM, or do you hand them back a spreadsheet of the cleaned-up data?

Chris: We're agnostic. The databases that we work with are across the board. Some people, it's all different types. We don't have a direct integration, but it's built in the format so that they can import it back into their system. Everything's keyed off the codes that each individual they submitted to us -- it's matched accordingly, and then they upload it to their database. We obviously can help them answer questions and support them as they're doing that.

Jeff: And do you help them kind of establish a good data management maintenance plan, a process for them so that they know how to keep it accurate? Or do you do a continuous kind of service for them?

Jennifer: Yeah, that's a great question. We kind of look at it as an ongoing relationship. We contract per project, but ultimately we're trying to set them up to be successful down the road. It's not just one project where you clean up your mailing addresses or your cell phones or your emails. It's ongoing. Step one is cleaning up that contact data -- let's make sure you have all that in a good place so you can communicate with your constituents. Step two is building out more detailed profiles, whether it's wealth information or employment or different demographic data -- presence of children, household income, gender, religion -- just really helping you understand them so you can tailor your messaging to different audiences. Step three is more of that maintenance type service. We've got everything in a good place, we've helped you fill in gaps and learn more about these individuals. Now, how do you maintain that? It's ongoing -- your basic NCOA, PCOA, that really helps you maintain mailing addresses through the post office, anybody that moves and fills out that NCOA form. Very basic but a really good way to maintain your mailing addresses. We have an online platform that our clients use on a one-off basis. If they do a mailing and they get back 20 pieces of mail, they can go in there and look up these individuals. It has cell phones, emails, property deeds -- tons of information they can use to look up as needed. Clients are typically looking at doing a larger screening on an annual basis and then utilizing those maintenance-type services to get them to that next larger screening.

Jeff: That makes sense. As I'm thinking about it and putting my nonprofit manager hat on and then my Handbid event hat on, I see a need for a lot of charities to have a good architecture in place. Like, this is the source of truth of my data, and I have all of these other inputs coming in. How do I make sure that I'm not ruining my own data? Because to your point, I go and spend really good money with you guys to clean it all up, and then I run an event -- and we see this all the time. People don't connect the value of data collection at an event with what's going on.

Lori: Or how do your donors want to be communicated with? We'll go into an event or an organization that we're working with, and a majority of their people have work emails, work phone numbers, landlines, things like that. You're also trying to work with mobile bidding or some sort of software, and you don't have good data just for that specific event.

Jeff: Yeah, and we talk to them about this -- that's what the purpose of check-in is. The purpose of check-in isn't just to give you a table number and a paddle number. The purpose of check-in is that the person who cares about my event is standing in front of me. Do I have the correct data for that person? That's the point of check-in. I need to be thorough, not just get them through.

Jennifer: I wanted to add on because a lot of times, especially with events, people are capturing just email addresses sometimes. Something that Chris and I help clients with -- they come to us with that list of email addresses and we can do a reverse email append. Then we're providing them with a name and a mailing address for those individuals.

Jeff: A lot of times the way to make check-in even better is not to have them be interviewed by you. Let them register themselves because then they're going to give the charity the information they want the charity to have. People have to balance out the desire for the seamless check-in with the need to capture the opportunity to get real good information for the database.

Chris: We definitely do consult on that. Whatever the nonprofit decides to do as far as the check-in process and collecting information, it's extremely important to document it and have a process and some procedures for how you're running the events and getting the information. Whatever is decided, document it.

Jeff: I agree with you. We have the ability to automatically synchronize this data directly into your CRM with certain CRMs like a Blackbaud or a Salesforce or a Bloomerang or a Kindful. Every charity has to make that decision separately about how to reconcile event data against their donor database.

Chris: One thing to mention -- whatever you do, don't delete the data that was in there. If you get an address, don't override the existing address. Always save it as an alternative, as a backup.

Jennifer: Save both. Keep your old addresses because any company like us that does data projects for you -- all those past addresses will help to make sure we have the right person. We also do a free database analysis for our clients. We can look at segmented files and basically provide them back with statistics on the accuracy of the data. It's a free analysis that we run all the time.

Jeff: It sounds like a best practice -- you need to have some processes written down about data management for your organization. In the nonprofit sector there's turnover all the time, and they need to have a process about how they're going to continue to collect data so their data stays good.

Lori: And there's turnover on event platforms too. We have clients who in the previous three years have been on three different mobile bidding platforms. What they don't realize is that they're walking away from all of this data from every single one of those platforms.

Jeff: They just view this mobile bidding platform as a transactional one-time event thing. They forget that this is a very critical data collection tool. We talked to one prospect whose prior platform basically handed her a whole bunch of cell phone numbers and said, 'These are the people that donated.' She's like, 'What are their names?' They said, 'We don't collect names. We don't collect emails.'

Lori: We say this all the time on the podcast -- your donors are coming to your event because they want to give. They're coming because they love you as an organization. Don't miss that opportunity to gather that good data.

Jeff: We did an event in Tampa where they told us to create fake accounts for celebrities. It was a complete disaster. They couldn't follow up with anyone. We've checked in plenty of celebrities -- they're willing to give you an email address because they want follow-up.

Jeff: Hey, let's dive into the Alumni Finder part. Do you actually help organizations find alumni?

Jennifer: The name is deceiving in two ways. We don't just help clean up alumni records -- we clean up donors, members, any type of constituent record. And we don't just go find alumni that a college or university doesn't have. We need them to give us a list of people to go off of.

Jeff: I'm on an advisory board for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They have no idea who their alumni are. But do they have data from when they were a part of FCA? Because that would be something Alumni Finder could help with.

Jennifer: We do not provide any data on individuals under the age of 18. But once they're over 18 and established, we could take the child's name, the parent's address, and find where they are now -- home address, cell phone number, email address.

Jeff: Maybe when they're 26 or 28, I hand you this list of emails and you figure out where they're at and then start applying wealth data. That could be really valuable information.

Chris: It may not be a bad thing -- instead of waiting -- to send them an email on their birthday. Just some touch point every year. Not asking for anything, just so that when they're 27 or 28 and they get a mailing with a call to action, you've been building that relationship.

Lori: Universities can be good at that. My university has sent me a birthday card every year since I graduated. They're not asking for money.

Jeff: I don't get a birthday card from the University of Virginia. I'm offended now.

Jeff: Is there any concern around data privacy that you guys have to worry about?

Jennifer: It has drastically changed over the last several years. Our organization is SOC2 compliant. We've had to go through everything from a legal and IT perspective to meet requirements of our clients. We can only have a file for 30 days and then it's permanently purged from our servers.

Jeff: A lot of charities don't understand the importance of working with partners who understand compliance elements around data. If you're thinking about who you're working with, ask those people -- are you up to speed on all of these data privacy laws? Are you a trustworthy partner?

Jeff: This has been a great conversation. Data is the blood running through the body. It is so critical that it's accurate and available. If your event planner is telling you that check-in speed is more important than data collection, find a new event planner.

Chris: If you give us incomplete records, we're not going to have a super successful overall result for you. It all starts with the data -- collecting it and then maintaining it is just going to make your overall fundraising goals more successful.

Jennifer: AlumniFinder.com is our website. We would love to run the free analysis for anyone listening. There's literally no strings attached.

Jeff: Thank you for joining us for the podcast. The check-in process is a critical data collection and data cleanup point of your event. Keep that in mind. Until then, happy fundraising.

Jeff: Thanks for tuning in to this enlightening episode of Elevate Your Event. Thank you to Chris Boyette and Jennifer Cole from Alumni Finder. Reach out to them at alumnifinder.com. If you enjoyed our show, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can find us on Apple, Google, and Spotify. Until next time, happy fundraising.