Higher Education Fundraising with Artificial Intelligence

By: Dr. Reed Sheard, Vice President for College Advancement at Westmont College and Chief Information Officer and Adam Martel, Founder & CEO at Gravyty

Westmont College, a Christian liberal arts institution located in scenic Santa Barbara, recently confronted a major obstacle in its advancement and fundraising efforts.

The college had conducted two capital campaigns in only nine years. The first campaign had raised $80 million, which was at the time the largest in the history of the school, and the second secured over $155 million. Westmont now has committed to a $250 million campaign. On the heels of two successful drives, the college recognizes it doesn’t have enough donors in the pipeline to reach that goal.

Why Westmont College Turned to Gravyty’s AI for Fundraising

Westmont is no stranger to challenges and recent events have highlighted the pressing need for successful fundraising. The recent California wildfires and mudslides in Montecito caused four college-wide evacuations. In 2008, Westmont had 20 buildings destroyed or damaged when a fire broke out in the hills above Santa Barbara.

In spite of these challenges, the school has continued to expand its aid program to increase the diversity of the student body, bringing in high-performing students, many of whom do not hail from affluent families. This commitment to “doing the right thing” in admissions has reduced the number of alumni and parents who could become potential donors.

This “perfect storm” of challenges led to the decision to commit to a year-long experiment with Gravyty using Salesforce data and Gravyty’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) to find “gems” hidden in the information about prospective donors and drive engagement with these prospects.

The College has 54,000 contact records in our Salesforce CRM, and we hypothesize that there are prospects hidden there who would be perfect for cultivation and solicitation. The purpose of the AI project is to test the hypothesis of hidden viable prospects exist within the data set which traditional research will not uncover but AI can find.

AI Innovation for Higher Ed Fundraising Staff

Our project will augment the abilities of the fundraising staff at Westmont to reach the campaign’s goal. We believe that there are three valuable outcomes of such an effort:

• Identify and cultivate relationships with donor prospects within the 54,000 college records previously overlooked using traditional research methods;
• Energize the fundraising team by providing great donor prospects; and
• Teach a team how to perform at even higher levels of which will be required to ensure a successful campaign.

We believe that Gravyty’s First Draft AI product will fulfill these tasks admirably and we intend to test it with our project.

Gravyty’s ‘First Draft’ coupled with Salesforce, will allow Westmont fundraisers to cultivate and solicit donors who have been selected as optimal for the campaign.

We will test this approach against Westmont’s standard approach to fundraising.
In our experiment, Group A will be guided by AI tools and the Salesforce platform and group B by the standard methodology. We plan to share our results with other institutions of higher education through a series of short articles in the hope that they will also be able to improve their fundraising results. Westmont is optimistic regarding the potential of the Gravyty/Salesforce group and believes it could represent the breakthrough fundraisers in higher education have been looking for.

The Future of Higher Education Fundraising

Higher education is going to change more in the next 10 years than it has in the past 100 years. The question is how Westmont can benefit from this transformation and not be imperiled by it. If we are going to succeed in our fundraising function, we must move from invoking nostalgia among our prospects to inviting them to become thought leaders, working with us. In this way, we plan not only to succeed in the current campaign but also to ensure that Westmont thrives in the coming decades.

For more on this topic, check out this e-book on how you can continue to lead in your advancement efforts by using technology to engage prospective, current and future donors.

Download the E-Book

More exciting reads on technology and fundraising:

• Alumni Role Identity: A New Way Into the Alumni/Donor Psyche
• AI for Good: 3 Ways it’s Going to Change the Donor Engagement Game
• An Intro to AI for Good from Salesforce.org

About the Authors
Dr. Reed Sheard
Dr. Sheard is Chief Information Officer and Vice President for College Advancement at Westmont College. Since 2009 he has led fundraising efforts and campaigns which have secured over $300 million for academic programs, student scholarships and capital projects. As CIO, he plans, develops, and implements technology solutions to address the educational and institutional needs of the college. This also includes developing strategic plans for the college-wide implementation of technology for students, faculty, staff, administration and alumni. He is passionate about excellence and the role technology can play in improving the effectiveness and impact of any organization. In 2015 Dr. Sheard was recognized by IDG/Computerworld as one of the top 100 CIO’s in the United States.

Adam Martel
Adam is the CEO and cofounder at Gravyty, the first technology company specifically focused on developing artificial intelligence products for frontline fundraisers at nonprofit organizations. Before starting Gravyty, Adam worked at Babson College as a major gifts fundraiser, which is where he developed the concept for Gravyty’s revolutionary artificial intelligence software. As the recognized leader and voice of the AI revolution in fundraising, Adam has a deep and personal understanding of the challenges that nonprofit organizations face while trying to raise money to support their causes. Throughout his years as a front-line fundraiser, he has worked with thousands of donors and has helped nonprofit organizations raise millions of dollars. Adam graduated from Merrimack College with a degree in Communication and Business and proudly attended Babson College for his MBA.