Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management
Sloan engaged PDP to create a stronger culture of philanthropy at the school, and to establish a more disciplined approach to qualifying and cultivating donor prospects.
Challenges
- Staff were not being diligent or disciplined about qualifying prospects, but rather assuming that everyone in their portfolio was a prospect who simply needed to be cultivated. This led to a long process with reluctance or inability to move to an ask.
- Gift officers were shopping menus of priorities versus engaging qualified prospects in a dialogue about areas (defined by Sloan) on which they had a desire to make a definable impact through their giving.
Benefits & Results
- The Sloan team raised $99M following DFF program participation (in the prior capital campaign, it took 9 years to raise $110M).
- Equipping the frontline gift officers with a shared donor engagement process, language and communication tools, enabled efficient handoffs and a shared culture of performance-based fundraising.
- Enhanced discipline of qualification across the team coupled with more effective communication tools allowed gift officers to move prospects through a defined philanthropic process more quickly and efficiently.
- Gift offers stopped defaulting to transactional conversations that left philanthropic dollars on the table and shifted to impact-based dialogues yielding increased dollars in critical bands. Gifts of $250K-$500K and gifts of $500K-$1M increased by 46%.
Our Plus Delta program results have been remarkable. They’ve given us a disciplined fundraising approach and framework that ensures that prospects move through the pipeline more quickly and that conversations are more substantive. Having a shared language for the whole team has helped us manage and hold staff accountable. I have been in the advancement profession for 35 years and acquired new skills and language that have been invaluable.
Kristina Gulick Schaefer, Senior Associate Dean – Office of External Relations & International Programs
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management