With more and more institutions conducting complex annual fund and endowment campaigns, development offices must have reliable alumni and donor data. The influx of those seeking second or advanced degrees as well as non-alumni donors make the competition for donations even steeper. How do you most effectively and efficiently maintain and manage this crucial information, and how do you focus resources?

Annual fund
The annual fund provides the foundation of renewed support for institutions; it is also the entry-level for larger gifts for future endowment, capital, sponsorship campaigns and planned giving programs. Focusing resources on the most likely candidates requires a donor intelligence platform that can answer both basic and advanced business intelligence questions. For example, basic questions might include the following:

• Which donors gave last year to which campaigns?
• Which campaigns were most successful?
• Are we on track with the current campaign?
• What is our cost per dollar earned?

Advanced analytics allows more advanced questions to be answered, such as:

• Which donors are more likely to give?
• Which donors are best to solicit for major gifts or larger annual fund donations?
• What is our five-year forecast, based on projected donor growth and retention?
• How long should our callers spend on the phone for optimum donor acquisition and growth?

Major gifts
Since large sums of money are at stake and developing personal relationships is integral to securing these funds, it is imperative that the appropriate staff members are well informed and prepared to interact with and meet the needs of potential donors in many different situations. In addition, there is frequent turnover in development officers – the average tenure is just two years. For the sake of continuity, it is especially important to have the data in central place for incoming development officers and staff.

The SAS Intelligence Platform
Using SAS, university development offices can ensure that data from several sources can be managed, stored and updated so that appropriate staff members have the information they need at any time, in any phase of fundraising.The SAS Intelligence Platform will allow you to focus resources on developing relationships in the right places instead of sifting through mountains of data to understand basic and advanced business intelligence questions.

The solution – Bringing it all together with SAS
SAS provides an integrated, open and extensible intelligence platform that serves as the foundation for creating and delivering accurate, in-depth intelligence across the institution and to all levels of education. This framework allows you to make the most of your existing IT investment since it integrates with a wide variety of data sources, ensuring a smooth flow of information across campus, departments or organizations. The SAS Intelligence Platform provides an unmatched ability to turn administrative, teaching and research data first into information, then into insight, allowing effective decisions to be made with confidence.

The SAS Intelligence Platform includes the following flagship offerings:

• SAS Enterprise ETL Server offers a platform-independent extraction, transformation and loading solution that includes a range of access engines, a multithreaded transformation engine, integrated metadata management, data cleansing and a graphical interface.
• SAS Intelligence Storage provides a dedicated platform designed from the outset to efficiently disseminate information for business intelligence and analytic applications – whether from SAS or third parties.
• SAS Enterprise BI Server empowers users by giving them access to information in the format they need, when they need it. It provides appropriate interfaces for various user skill levels and needs, enabling users to generate their own answers while IT retains control over the quality and consistency of the data.
• SAS Analytic Technologies deliver the industry’s widest portfolio of analytics, algorithms, mathematical data manipulation and modeling capabilities. SAS takes the mystery out of these high-end statistical techniques by coupling them with a wide range of user interfaces and graphics.

By integrating analytic technologies, data warehousing and content delivery, the SAS Intelligence Platform helps fundraising executives create intelligence for maximizing donor acquisition and retention.

SAS Marketing Automation
SAS Marketing Automation helps you improve response rates and revenues from your fundraising efforts by giving you the ability to easily manage sophisticated, timely, personalized donor communication strategies. Built specifically to meet the needs of key members of the marketing process, only SAS Marketing Automation provides comprehensive data management, campaign management and advanced donor analytics in one integrated, easy-to-use solution.