George Washington University

The GW team identified 778 new major gift prospects and created $6MM in proposals for three hard-to-fund projects.

The Division of Alumni and Development at George Washington University faced a challenge of advancing many teams, like the Relations Alumni. They needed to build pipelines for three fundraising projects, for which they didn’t have a built-in list of prospects. The staff started from scratch to find donors for completing renovations of Thurston Hall, the dormitory. They also needed to fund a new building for Hillel, the world’s largest Jewish campus organization, and secure major gifts to support the growing Colonial athletic program.

The team had started activating the Funnel Giving to enable prospects to find the right initiatives and proactively start discovering potential opportunities. Although the university had already received some information from donors who had given funds related to it, it had not consistently shared or captured the involvement of sports and clubs on campus.

EverTrue’s Managing Director of GW’s Dean, Anne, utilizes her team and relationship management expertise to identify high-value prospects with the right mix of interests, engagement, and gifts to become major gift candidates for each project.

Thurston Hall is a historic campus building that holds a lot of memories for alumni, and a makeover was necessary. Named after Mabel Nelson Thurston, the first female undergraduate student at GW, the building was built in 1929 and serves as the home for 40 percent of first-year GW students.

Anne stated, “In EverTrue, I incorporated the ‘Resides in an Affluent Community’ search filter to identify potential contributors with financial capability.” “For any individual who had referenced ‘Thurston,’ we utilized EverTrue’s keyword search to extract contact reports,” she explained. “I also examined a roster of past Thurston inhabitants and implemented the search filter in EverTrue to locate potential donors with capacity.”

Anne ran similar searches to find prospects who were interested in supporting a new on-campus building for Hillel, looking for people who had mentioned Hillel in contact reports and had lived in high-income neighborhoods or donated to GW and had lived in neighborhoods with high real estate values. Each query takes seconds to run in EverTrue, allowing researchers to save these ongoing searches for any time someone matches the criteria, creating an automated stream of new prospects.

Anne exclaimed, “If it weren’t for EverTrue, this achievement would not have been attainable.” “When it comes to examining contact reports, constructing lists, and downloading all the data to analyze while creating a beautiful gift hierarchy, it simplifies the process significantly.”

In order to generate additional prospects, the team also utilized EverTrue’s Facebook integration to locate individuals who commented on posts pertaining to Thurston or Hillel, or showed interest in multiple posts, leveraging the power of social media engagement. She and her team made use of this feature.

“EverTrue shows you who’s a warmer lead than you think. Our CRM doesn’t show that. EverTrue shows us who’s warm, engaged, and likely to give.”

Anne Dean

The team is looking for an easy way to engage students in capacity gift-giving activities and social events.

Anne stated that the team in our CRM did not list any athletic donors or athletes who were found in any other way. Anne also mentioned that there was no apparent connection between the person’s Facebook activity and athletics. In order to identify potential top-10 donors, Anne sent gift officers and research team members to conduct a few searches, resulting in the identification of more than 100 prospects with a focus on athletics.

Anne and the research team used EverTrue to identify 778 prospects for these projects and passed those leads to GW’s frontline fundraisers.

The team involved over 340 individuals, which resulted in 90 new opportunities allocated to gift officer portfolios.

In the upcoming months, the group anticipates finalizing $6 million in proposals and possesses an extra $300,000 in new donations that GW has acquired in less than eight months.

Anne said, “Let’s go, go, go to the gift officer and make a referral. It helps us stay connected and engaged to see how we can uncover new prospects when we are right there with them.” “Sending prospects to fundraisers is great for getting the sizzle with the steak, because EverTrue is excellent.”

Prospect Researchers across the country love EverTrue