Aspire Award Winners 2023

Aspire Awards recognize and acknowledge the contributions to and achievements of advancement services professionals, and teams who are trailblazing in search of solutions that will resolve some of the most complex challenges facing the advancement services industry.

Winners were announced and recognized at the 2023 Summit Conference in Chicago, IL, on September 28, 2023.

Categories & Award Winners

TECHNOLOGY & INNOVATION

Program or project must demonstrate an innovative solution utilizing today's technology to answer the profession's most complex problems.

Sapphire Awards:

University of California-Davis – Aggie Accord: Building a Gift Agreement App at UC Davis
Submitted by Kelly Best

At UC Davis we receive thousands of donations from complex donors -- and that number is growing each year. Last year we wrote, edited, vetted, organized signatures for more than 800 gift agreements. Creating that many bespoke gift agreements is quite a feat for a team of five. But the work of communicating and updating stakeholders about the status of each of these agreements was an equal effort. So, we decided to create an app for that. Aggie Accord is a Microsoft Power App that provides a seamless window for our development colleagues to submit, search for, and instantly see the status of any gift agreement. They can check the status instantly from any device. It is powered by Microsoft Flow logic that both automates status updates by pulling non-sensitive data from an Excel spreadsheet into the Power App interface.

North Carolina State University – Selecting NC State's Next CRM
Submitted by Jeff Baynham

NC State University embarked on selecting its next-generation CRM in April 2022, completing the final selection in December 2022. The current system had been in place for 28 years, so we knew this would be a big change. In this process, educating our community about what a CRM project entails, setting expectations on what to expect with a new CRM at launch, and in the future, was critical. It was essential that the advancement community had an opportunity to participate in the selection process. Hosting many engagement opportunities, our community felt engaged throughout the process and genuinely supported the selection.

Southern Methodist University – Development and Application of Constituent Affinity Score
Submitted by Charles Gunderson

Southern Methodist University (SMU) is benefiting from ability to capture increasing amounts of data regarding constituents. One project to realize the value of this data has involved construction of a framework for building multiple constituent scores based on affinity and engagement. These scores can be used to analyze and predictively model constituent behavior to support fundraising, and to drive reporting that maps to emerging CASE reporting metrics (Communication, Experiential, Volunteer, and Philanthropic). SMU has defined a practical framework for score building and used it to construct a constituent score that has had a major, transformational impact. Additional scores are planned.

Diamond Award:

University of California-Berkeley – UC Berkeley Data Exchange Project
Submitted by Robyn Doughty

The Data Exchange Project (DEP) sought to streamline both how data is ingested into UC Berkeley’s central fundraising database Advance, and the data itself. The DEP accomplished its core objectives through two key efforts: 1) collaboratively redefining core data sets: email, telephone, address, entity, and entity match function and 2) implementing technical solutions (Express and Keystone) that eliminated the need for custom integrations by creating a single point of integration for data that houses all business rules and creating an interface for the data team to interact with, monitor and view the history of data.

ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Program or project conceived of and implemented for a specific need, problem or challenge, and/or initiated to help meet institutional fundraising or campaign goals.

Sapphire Awards:

University of Virginia – UVA Advancement: Creating a high-performing hybrid/remote work culture
Submitted by Laura Phillips

When we shifted to remote work in 2020, we faced the same challenges as our peers: staff had uneven skills with new tools; managers had little experience managing remote staff; and individuals had varying appetites to work in a remote and more self-directed fashion. Short-term objectives were met, but over time we experienced performance issues resulting from disconnectedness. Hybrid and remote work cultures require constant support and management to work against organizational drift. They key to our success is to try new things and commit to a performance culture, creating the environment for collaboration to take place, and continuous improvement.

University of California-Davis – System of Record Upgrade at UC Davis: Our Go-Live Playbook Approach      
Submitted by Kelly Best

Last November, Advancement Services needed to upgrade its system of record, Advance. Although there had been months of planning and preparing for the upgrade, the truly critical period would take place over a single weekend: the go-live. For many, the concept of go-live conjures an idea of pushing a button or flipping a switch. But upgrading a complex relational database of over one million records is anything but that. There were many synchronized moves that needed to happen simultaneously, and the outcome of many served as crucial stop/go points; if any failed, the changes would have to be rolled back and the go-live scheduled for the following weekend. Thankfully, we did not have to do that and we believe it was because of the playbooks that we created to synchronize all of the moves that weekend.

California Institute of Technology – Caltech Executive Summary Dashboards Project
Submitted by Mark Longo

The Caltech Executive Summary Dashboards Project has empowered our Advancement Services team with the ability to provide important fundraising metrics and KPIs to our University Leadership and Board of Trustees on-demand and at the click of a button.

PROSPECT DEVELOPMENT

Program or project conceived of and implemented for a specific need, problem or challenge.

Sapphire Awards:

University of British Columbia – Prospecting Dashboard Tools
Submitted by Mai Bui

The Prospecting Dashboards Tool enhances the screening of living, contactable constituents in our database, enabling fundraisers and researchers to easily shortlist prospects using a range of important identifiers and view by table and interactive map. It contains key prospecting information on each individual and is refreshed nightly to capture new information added. The filter criteria allow fundraisers to surface prospects by pipeline and opportunity information, areas of affiliation, location and other demographics and bio-data, affinity indicators such inclination score, event attendance, and involvement in varsity sports, capacity estimate, as well as analytics scores (giving velocity and RFM) and segments.

North Carolina State University – Revamping the Parent Discovery Process
Submitted by Sharon Poulson

True (non-alum) Parents can be a lucrative avenue of fundraising for higher education philanthropy programs. Due to the typically short donor cycle, it’s imperative Parents get screened and pushed out to Philanthropy Officers for qualification as quickly as possible. The NC State Prospect Development team, after completing a complex analysis of Parent fundraising potential, revamped their Parent suspect identification process using existing resources. Within two years, we quadrupled our Parent Discovery assignments and doubled Parent giving.

Temple University – Portfolios from the Perspective of Maturity     
Submitted by Sarah Cadbury

Many organizations struggle with bloated portfolios. Temple University’s problems were made worse by having inaccurate prospect status codes. The Prospect Development team at Temple decided to ditch the model of categorizing prospects by portfolio stage and instead developed a model reflecting maturity. Three simple measures uncovered new insights about prospects, portfolios, and Temple's fundraising potential.

Diamond Award:

California Institute of Technology – Prospect Pipeline Conversions
Submitted by Mark Longo

A new Caltech dashboard elevates the visibility of conversion rates and highlights team progress moving prospects forward through the stages each fiscal year. The tool was designed to accommodate multiple audiences, from top leadership interested in the high-level metrics to our team of prospect management experts, who wanted to dive into the details for insights informing strategy on how to help activate stale prospects. It is also flexible in allowing staff to explore the data either by fundraising department or by gift/rating level. Collectively, the dashboard’s information supports accountability by transparently conveying the status of the pipeline’s forward momentum.

GIFT ADMINISTRATION & DATA SERVICES

Program or project conceived of and implemented for a specific need, problem or challenge.

Sapphire Awards:

Rhode Island School of Design – Developing a Comprehensive Gift Recording Program: How Advancement Services Became a Valued Partner for the Major Gifts Team
Submitted by Serena Livingston

The Director of Gift Administration at a small private art college with a growing advancement office collaborated with institutional stakeholders to develop and standardize the process of major gift agreements. The process included developing guidelines, templates, training, and processes to track and respond to gift officer requests for donor gift agreements. We have created a system with transparency, consistency, and responsiveness, and driven by donor satisfaction. This thoughtful approach to gift documentation provides quality assurance in the process. For most gift agreements, we have a twenty-four-hour turnaround from request to internal stakeholder review.

North Carolina State University – Streamlining Gift Agreement Clause Language 
Submitted by Sarah Thomas

 In 2019, Donor Services started its four-year gift agreement automation project to streamline the crafting of approximately 500 gift agreements annually. Donor Services needed to create and input an intensive gift agreement clause library into the automated system for gift agreement submitters to select from as part of this process. This would reduce the need for customized gift agreement language and streamline the approval process. The gift agreement clause library was launched in 2022, ahead of the automated system, for development officers to use for gift agreement creation and to have a menu of items to offer the donor. This reduced the approval time needed for gift agreements and improved gift administration and donor satisfaction.

Program or project conceived of and implemented for a specific need, problem or challenge.

Sapphire Award:

Michigan Medicine Office of Development – High-Volume Impact Reporting at Michigan Medicine
Submitted by Sara Seyfarth

In 2019, the Michigan Medicine Office of Development stewardship team launched a broad impact reporting program with the goal of sharing impact with more donors more often. After the initial year of developing and implementing the program, we evaluated the effectiveness of our processes and updated how we approach receiving requests from gift officers, our project management system and staffing, and our templates. In FY23, we have increased the number of reports we are able to deliver, we have higher gift officer satisfaction with the process, and we have high engagement from our donors.

The University of Alabama – Enhanced Endowment Reports
Submitted by Jennifer Crumpton

Each year, donor relations mails endowment reports reflecting donor fund information and performance. For the past several years, the reports look the same with a simple change to the images included. Last year, we knew it was time to revamp these reports completely. Not only did we change the look and feel of the reports but included more data points necessary to endowments along with appreciation messages from deans, faculty and students. In addition, we applied a tiered reporting structure to the production of the reports, giving us the ability to include more detailed information for certain funds.

Aspire Award Winners 2022

Determination for the Sapphire Award is made based on Jury selection using criteria evaluating achievement and/or excellence to the program/project submitted as well as contributions to the profession.

Determination for the Diamond Award is made based on Jury selection using criteria evaluating the program or project submitted that exhibited the highest level of excellence.