The Non-Constituent Record Management Solution for Higher Education
Colleges and universities typically solicit from a relatively small group; namely their alumni. If there’s a way to expand the number of potential donors in your universe, you should consider it. The easiest way to expand your constituent count is by including current and past parents, and I’ve previously written about the benefits in an earlier blog. However, each institution is unique, and if you’re raising money, you should always be thinking about potential groups of non-alumni that might show affinity to your university.
The second part of the numbers problem is where to put the new folks in your database. If you’re using Raiser’s Edge or RE NXT, you might have a concern about the total number of constituents. After all, a larger constituent count might mean more costs and more complexity. Luckily, Omatic has a solution: List Management. With List Management, we’ve greatly expanded the concept of a non-constituent record. You might be familiar with a non-constituent spouse, or a non-constituent event attendee. In List Management, the non-constituent record exists independently and it looks and feels like a full constituent record without contributing to your data footprint in RE.
Let’s look at a non-constituent record in List Management. Can you spot the difference between this record and a full constituent?
Not much of a difference, is there? The main rule with List Management is that you can’t have any financial transaction information on the record. You can always add a gift (either on the record or from Batch) and the record will automatically be promoted to a full constituent.
The key with List Management is that you’re always trying to move folks into making a gift. Omatic provides lots of functionality around appealing to potential donors: you can grab list members, sort them, apply query filters, and then right click and add appeals, solicitors, solicitor groups, action tracks, task sets and default sets. Essentially automating moving prospects through the pipeline, with the end goal of promoting non-constituent list members to be a donor.
There’s a lot of functionality that I won’t go into, but you might have some ideas around utilizing List Management for your institution at this point. If you consider Raiser’s Edge to be your System of Record, List Management is a fantastic way to consolidate databases incorporating individuals who may not become full constituents. Do you have that list of event attendees in another system? Bring ’em in! That list of students that never graduated? Add ’em! How about the swim team boosters? Why not? List members won’t appear in your queries or reports, so the more, the merrier.
I mentioned that I’m not going into functionality, but you really need to see List Management to understand how awesome it is! If you have around 15 minutes, here’s a link to a nice overview, but if you’d like to schedule a personalized demo, I’d be happy to show you the solution.
