Dive into Fundraising and Philanthropic Research
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Discuss the importance of fundraising for academic institutions and common challenges.
- Summarize the Fundraising apps, components, features, and tools for enhancing alumni engagement.
- Describe the philanthropic research workflow in Agentforce Education.
Advancement Opportunities and Challenges
A successful academic institution is akin to a fruit tree. As time goes by, more branches grow, fruits sprout, and before long, the tree yields a rich harvest of accomplished alumni, groundbreaking research, and a reputation that draws top talent from around the world.
If the institution is the tree, fundraising is the roots. Gifts from generous donors provide the essential nourishment and support that help the institution to grow, thrive, and reach its full potential.
Financial support from alumni can fuel the advancement of institutions in several ways.
-
Strategic planning and growth: Advancement efforts yield essential resources that support the institution’s goals.
-
Financial sustainability: Donations, grants, and endowments are often the primary source of funds for scholarships, student aid, and faculty research.
-
Enhanced student experiences: Philanthropic gifts can help institutions upgrade facilities and technologies to improve the learning experience.
-
Faculty and staff support: Funding can help to fortify relationships with industry partners, government agencies, and nonprofit organizations, creating opportunities for interdisciplinary research and development.
-
Institutional reputation and recognition: Public relations and communication strategies, including events, networking opportunities, and giving campaigns, help to raise the institution’s profile and strengthen its community.
Advancement is a prolonged process that involves researching prospects, running timely campaigns, and building donor relationships. This complex combination of communications, marketing, and financial planning is challenging to manage for any institution, let alone those that still use outdated or disconnected systems.
While you know Salesforce as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, did you know that it also serves as a valuable and trusted fundraising tool for all institutions? Explore why and how next.
Throughout the rest of this badge, you explore the purpose-built tools for managing every phase of fundraising, from philanthropic research and gift planning to gift entry and payment tracking.
Fundraising in Agentforce Education
Fundraising is a centralized set of apps, objects, and features in Agentforce Education that help you to better engage donors, raise funds, and drive revenue. Through this single platform, define your engagement strategies, research prospects, manage the intake of alumni contributions, and measure the success of your outreach.
The Alumni Relations app, which you discovered earlier, helps advancement teams store and update alumni information that’s useful for understanding donor potential and tailoring interactions. All of your donor information is stored in a single, unified database for easy accessibility and accurate metrics.
With the Donor Engagement app, segment donors based on various attributes, such as their graduation year, giving capacity, and interests, to create highly targeted and personalized marketing communications. View and manage opportunities and track the progress of potential gifts as they proceed through initial contact and proposal stages.
By synchronizing your alumni data with Agentforce Marketing, quickly set up professional, branded campaigns using AI and automation to encourage support across multiple channels, including email and SMS. Automatically generate and send email to invite graduates to join the Alumni Community, or inform them of available resources, such as career services and groups. Keep alumni in the know about your institution’s mission, goals, and upcoming events.
To learn all about setting up giving campaigns with Fundraising, visit the Donor Engagement in Fundraising Trailhead badge.
While campaign tools help you engage alumni at scale, you need deeper research to understand who’s ready for a larger commitment. That’s where philanthropic research comes in. It helps advancement teams to move beyond surface-level segmentation and build tailored strategies for high-potential donors based on deeper insights.
Philanthropic Research
Many academic institutions conduct detailed research to better understand their alumni, and ultimately determine how they’d like to be involved with philanthropy. This research is especially important for institutions that plan to secure financial gifts to grow their impact. Effective research goes beyond simply measuring wealth: it’s about building a full understanding of each donor’s intent, influence, and the optimal timing for engagement.
Agentforce Education includes a flexible framework to accelerate and organize your philanthropic research. Take a moment to explore how the Fundraising data model supports each step of your research workflow.
As frontline fundraisers engage with alumni, they can record noteworthy events in the alum’s life, such as a new job or a recent real estate investment, as party philanthropic indicators. Then, they can use the New Research Request Case window to quickly create a research request case to confirm the validity of those indicators, as shown here.
Using built-in case management tools, the research team can systematically verify the accuracy of each indicator, and use a dedicated Slack channel to collaborate during their examination. To record their findings, they create philanthropic research records and automatically generate documents, such as executive summaries. They then consolidate all of their evidence into a comprehensive record called a party philanthropic research profile.
From this research profile, advancement teams track the current stage of research, and view the alum’s philanthropic interests, giving patterns, and wealth indicators. The profile also displays badges to help decision makers identify top prospects. This unified data helps the team to determine whether the alum is a good candidate for further engagement.
For example, on Sophia’s research profile, Director Delaney quickly sees the research team’s findings, including Sophia’s total estimated wealth, past support, and estimated giving level.
Badges also indicate that Sophia’s a top 25 donor, an influencer prospect, and a high-net-worth prospect.
Philanthropic Research Agent
With Agentforce, maximize your research efforts and philanthropic engagement with the help of AI research assistants. By incorporating prebuilt Philanthropic Research topics into your agent, the agent can summarize fundraising milestones related to an account. It can also measure the prospect’s capacity for giving by analyzing household wealth, professional affiliations, and participation in fundraising events. These valuable insights improve your engagement techniques and deepen your relationships with donors.
When fundraising teams have specific questions about the prospect, they can query the Philanthropic Research Agent from the research topic or the alumni account record to quickly surface information that helps them to plan out their engagement.
For example, by asking the agent about Sophia’s philanthropic interests, Delaney learns that Sophia is passionate about education, financial literacy, and supporting women in business.
The agent also summarizes Sophia’s giving history to Astro University, highlighting a pattern of steady support with contributions totaling $15,000 to date. Based on this history and additional insights, Delaney determines she’s ready for a larger, lifetime commitment.
In this unit, you discovered how to conduct efficient and thorough research into alumni donors using Agentforce Education and Fundraising objects and features. In the next unit, you continue your fundraising exploration by learning how to plan and manage gifts from graduates.