The Challenge
The school began their silent phase of a $25 million capital campaign in November of 2014. The goal was to raise the bulk of this money before moving into the public phase.
It became clear to the development team that there was a gap in insights about donor potential among their alumni base. They had a strong network of alumni that intentionally chose to keep in touch and be active supporters, but with over 10k living alumni, they knew there was untapped donor potential outside of this mostly local alumni group. The challenge was identifying those individuals who had the capacity to give large amounts and understand more about them to be able to effectively reconnect and cultivate each as a major gift prospects.
The Solution
When Ken Kimble, the Director of the Capital Campaign and Foundations at CBHS came onboard, he suggested that they run a donor screening on their alumni network, and soon after involved WealthEngine for help with this data enrichment project.
They performed WE Screen by securely uploading their alumni file and received the appended results directly in their WealthEngine Platform. The team used the Propensity to Give (P2G) and the gift capacity range scores to segment their alumni base for major donor cultivation. They then used WE Search to gain deeper insight on their top prospects.
Results
Once the screening was run and they began segmenting, they immediately identified an out of town alum that was worth $50 million+ who they initially knew nothing about. With the help of the WealthEngine Platform, they began to gain deeper insight into this new major gift prospect. Within the year, they successfully secured a seven-figure gift to the campaign from this individual.
Since running wealth screenings, they continued to see great success resulting in:
- Eight seven-figure cash gifts raised
- $16 million in donation commitments
- $4.5 million in planned giving commitments
These gifts helped to build a new science building, renovate their dining hall with a full meal service plan, build a
new $10 million athletic facility, and contribute $2.5 million towards an endowment fund for faculty development.
Next Steps
Ken and his team are in the WealthEngine Platform every day, and have since run three wealth screenings on their
alumni base over the years. Each time they run a screening they identify new major gift prospects that they were
previously unaware of from a capacity standpoint.
With their next upcoming screening, they are also turning to WealthEngine to help with a data supplementation and
cleaning project to track down alumni who might have moved and who they aren’t currently engaging with. CBHS
had done their due diligence and considered other vendors to help with this cleanup project, but ultimately decided
that WealthEngine was the best partner to trust with their data.
With each data project, CBHS works with WealthEngine as they continue to improve the quality and accuracy of
their alumni database. From these screenings, it has since been shown that there is a deep donor pool that Ken says
“could easily set up the school for funding over the next 50+ years.”
Ken is a loyal customer that truly sees the value in wealth intelligence and goes on to say that “the platform goes
beyond just paying for itself, compared to the potential you have in raising funds, you’re crazy not to use these data
insights.”
Firstly, the organization began with wealth screening. Screening data informed the creation of their major gift model. In fact, WealthEngine built a custom model for the group. The model enabled them to cultivate and optimize their ask immediately. How did the model enable this? The custom algorithm was able to identify all prospects who were not only capable of giving at this level but also likely to give.
