Discovery Sessions
Process Overview
Stakeholders
- Central Advancement Services Staff
- Development Staff
- Corporation and Foundation donors
Corporation and Foundation fundraising activities require unique technological support from the CRM. CF fundraising can be more complex because it can incorporate multiple entities that fall under the same organization. There could be several records in the system for the corporation since a unique record has to be created for each relevant entity. There will be one parent record, but corporate foundations, subsidiaries, divisions, branches, plants and others could fall under the umbrella for the parent organization.
Having multiple entity records under a parent corporation can complicate other aspects of the fundraising process. The first is that it can be difficult to get a holistic view of a corporation’s giving to the university. There is no simple way in ANDI to synthesize the giving data.
A second issue is that alumni employment numbers are spread out over several entity records. If the company is a matching gift company, most employed alumni will be linked to the matching gift entity record (usually the corporate sponsored foundation). However, this is not guaranteed. Employment data might end up tied to any one of the entity records in the system – the local branch the alum works for or the parent record. Clean-up of this data must be done manually, so it is difficult to see an accurate picture of alumni employment by organization.
Note: An issue in ANDI that is not unique to CFE fundraising, but is relevant to this discussion, is that alumni employment is stored in two different places on an entity record. ANDI has an employment table that allows us to store the employer (linked with an ANDI ID if available), job type, job title, and job status. Employment can also be listed in the address table as a business address. Sometimes, especially with automatic batch loads from data submitted externally, employment data will be updated in one section but not the other. It is difficult to tell which section contains the accurate employment data.
Another complicating factor of CF fundraising is the establishment of prospect records. Prospects are connected to entity records. We have not had a consistent policy in the past that stipulates how corporate prospect records should be created when multiple entities are in the corporate hierarchy. Unless there is an established corporate hierarchy, it is not easy to see which entity record is the “correct” record. This can lead to the entry of contact reports on the wrong entity record, making it difficult to know who is visiting a CF prospect. There might be multiple prospect records created for a corporate entity, so it is also difficult to see how many proposals have been submitted to a corporate entity.
Central Advancement Services has worked to manually build corporate hierarchies. The hierarchy establishes a parent record and connects all associated entities (corporate sponsored foundations, divisions, subsidiaries, plants, branches, etc.). These updates are made by Prospect Research and the UTK Corporation and Foundation Engagement team. They are researched and coded manually. However, there is no indication of where the entity falls in the corporate hierarchy from a lookup, so users must go to a record and then view the corporate hierarchy.
Opportunities
Corporate Hierarchy: Allow companies to be connected in a corporate hierarchy that is automatically sorted by different types of entities so that the tree displays the entities in a logical order.
Record Search: When searching for the organization name, include the record type and its position in the hierarchy (parent vs branch). Ideally, we would have a feature that allows a user to display the corporate hierarchy as they search before selecting a record.
Single Prospect Policy: All entities part of a corporate hierarchy should fall under a single prospect record. This will allow all development officers working with the corporation to be aware of what others are doing.
CF Record-Specific Data Categories: Allow for a more extensive “relationship” section for organization records: this should be able to include faculty partners, important alumni employees, and various corporate contacts. It would also be helpful to have a section that can list the various locations of a company (headquarters, branches, etc.). A section where fundraising or research interests could be tracked would be beneficial to fundraisers.
Alert Capabilities: Organizations usually fund awards through multiple payments. It would be ideal for alerts regarding these payments to be pushed from the system (when money is expected, when documentation needs to be sent, etc.).
Improve Employment Data: Allow alumni to be connected to the relevant corporate entity (the specific location they work for)while allowing that data to “roll up” to the relevant corporate foundation and parent record. This will allow employment totals and matching gift potential to be measured more easily.