EverTrue,
a Boston start-up that applies modern social media analytics to the
traditional field of higher-education fund-raising, was born out of the
frustrations of Brent Grinna, a former captain of the Brown University
football team.
A
few years back, Mr. Grinna agreed to help lead a fund-raising drive for
his fifth college reunion. To court prospective donors, Brown provided
him with spreadsheets listing his classmates’ names and contact details.
But that raw data, he says, offered little insight into the particular
interests that might encourage a graduate to donate to the school.
Worse, many of the email addresses and phone numbers were out-of-date.
“I ended up going to Facebook and LinkedIn, places where I knew my classmates really were,” Mr. Grinna said.
EverTrue, which he founded in 2010,
enables educational institutions to parse the social media activities
of their graduates. The company’s social donor management program, for
instance, can evaluate alumni interactions with a college’s Facebook
pages to help distinguish those people likely to give to a capital
campaign from those more interested in a specific athletic or academic
cause. It can also examine profiles of alumni on LinkedIn, a feature
that allows fund-raisers to identify people in industries, like finance
and technology, or specific companies or executive roles with a
historically higher propensity to give.
College
development offices have for decades adapted the consumer-profiling
techniques used by marketers at for-profit companies. Some schools
employ their own in-house researchers to follow, say, the stock market
transactions of individual donors or to look up the value of their homes
on Zillow. Others buy information from data brokers on their most
generous alumni or prospective donors.
Blackbaud,
a 30-year-old company in Charleston, S.C., markets donor management
software and services for nonprofits. It helps colleges and universities
identify, rank and target their best fund-raising prospects by
combining a school’s historical giving records with data from outside
sources, including an individual’s “overall wealth, income levels and
hidden assets,” according to the company’s website.
Blackbaud also maintains a database of more than 50 million donations;
the company uses it to analyze donors’ gifts to other institutions to
help schools understand the giving capacity of certain alumni.
But
EverTrue is among a handful of start-ups using social media to try to
predict the willingness of graduates to donate or volunteer for other
activities, like interviewing college applicants. Schools have
historically relied on donor databases and have also used alumni
attendance at reunions as proxies for willingness to donate. The
start-ups are meant to complement those strategies with data
visualization tools that allow fund-raisers to map their graduates’
locations or graph their social media interactions with a school.
At a moment when President Obama is pushing for federal consumer privacy legislation,
these nascent donor data-mining techniques demonstrate how easy it is
for companies to repurpose the details that individuals volunteer about
themselves in one context for a different use.
“I
do think there’s an ethical issue. It’s one thing to estimate someone’s
wealth, but then to gauge how willing they are to give, you have to
look deeply into a person’s life,” says Pam Dixon, executive director of
the World Privacy Forum, a consumer group in San Diego. “I’m not sure alumni would appreciate or want that — if they knew about it.”
A
few university fund-raisers say they are aware of the seeming
invasiveness of some alumni data-mining techniques, but feel that
spurning these tools will put their schools at a disadvantage.
Scott
G. Nichols, senior vice president for development and alumni relations
at Boston University, says he recently used EverTrue’s system when
traveling to alumni events in Istanbul, Monaco and Dubai, United Arab
Emirates.
“We’ve
discovered it is quite a major research tool,” Mr. Nichols says. “I was
probing to see who are these alumni in Monaco, only to find every one
of them was somebody I should stop and see.”
Graduway, another cloud-based start-up,
helps colleges and universities engage alumni by designing private
social networking sites for them. Branded with the logo and imagery of a
school, the networking sites encourage alumni to import their profiles
from LinkedIn, develop professional connections with one another, mentor
students or young graduates and invite fellow graduates to sign up.
Graduway also analyzes individuals’ activities on each site and, working
in conjunction with Blackbaud, sends members’ latest profile
information back to their schools’ existing databases.
“You
have to offer your alumni real value,” says Daniel Cohen, the chief
executive of Graduway. “They are not going to reward you with data,
engagement and donations unless you are giving them something of real
value.”
Nine
months ago, Tulane University introduced an alumni networking site
designed by Graduway. Since then, 4,000 graduates have signed up, and 77
percent agreed to become mentors, says James E. Stofan, vice president
for alumni relations.
“We’ve
been really able to engage our alumni more strategically,” Mr. Stofan
told me. “Engaged alumni,” he added, “are giving alumni.”
Investors
have often taken a pass on software companies that specialize in the
nonprofit sector because many focus on internal processes, like payment
and accounting, which do not directly increase donations. But the new
social donor intelligence start-ups are intended to help generate
revenue, a value proposition that appeals to some investors.
Graduway
has raised $2 million in financing. One of its investors is RSL Venture
Partners, whose principal investor is Ronald S. Lauder, the businessman
and cosmetics heir.
EverTrue,
which works with about 300 educational institutions, has raised $14.6
million, including $10 million from Bain Capital Ventures. Michael
Krupka, a managing director at Bain, envisions EverTrue eventually
extending its services to other nonprofits, such as hospitals and social
services, potentially generating annual revenue of several hundred
million dollars.
“We
think there’s a massive potential market,” Mr. Krupka says. “If you can
come up with a technology that is revenue-generating, then nonprofits
will spend.”
But
it is too soon to tell whether donor-intelligence algorithms will be
able to identify social networking patterns among alumni that correlate
with big donations.
“The
jackpot for me will be when we know what pages people go to, or what
they like, that actually has prompted a first-time gift or a rare gift,”
said Mr. Nichols of Boston University.
“We don’t know that yet,” he added. “But I believe we are going to find out.”
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