In December 2022, Georgia Tech launched its Transforming Tomorrow campaign, the Institute’s most ambitious fundraising effort in history. Running through 2027, the campaign seeks to raise $2 billion to increase financial support for students, advance innovation and entrepreneurship, further modernize campus, and expand opportunities for personal growth and wellbeing for students, faculty, and staff. But how does a school like Georgia Tech go about reaching for such an ambitious goal?
“It’s not on a hope and a prayer,” says Meagan Burton-Krieger, executive director for campaign operations and chief of staff for Development. “A campaign takes strategy, resources, investment, and partnerships.”
Burton-Krieger says that the Georgia Tech Foundation (GTF), and in particular the organization’s IT and Data Services team, have been the backbone of Tech’s historic campaign by providing those key elements during the past few years. Through valuable partnerships with the Office of Development, the Alumni Association, and Athletics, GTF’s IT and Data Services have streamlined information management, purchased new resources, and improved data integrity in order to help Georgia Tech reach its fundraising goals.
The key word in all of this is “partnership.” The Foundation’s CIO Dwight Dozier says that, as a service organization, GTF receives numerous requests for help with projects across campus, and it would be easy for his team to just fulfill a request and move on to the next one.
“But that usually won’t meet someone’s full need,” he says. “We want to have a better understanding of what the desired outcome is.”
So when a request comes across their desks, the IT and Data Services team is committed to having open discussions with their partners across campus to understand the goal. For Associate Vice President of Development Operations and Services, Leslie Gonnella, these talks have been valuable in shifting her department’s mindset.
“I tell my team all the time that I don’t want to be in the business of prescribing how our technical partners meet our needs,” Gonnella says. “Our role is to clearly articulate the business need and desired outcome. Then we rely on the technical experts to recommend the best solution. The result is stronger because it reflects both perspectives: their technical expertise and our understanding of the business. The best outcomes happen when we work together to solve our business needs, with each team bringing its own expertise to the table and a shared commitment to the goal.”
For Gonnella, one of the major achievements to emerge from these discussions has been the simplification of maintaining prospect solicitation and pipeline data. When she arrived at Georgia Tech three years ago, a single Development staff member was responsible for maintaining all of the pipeline and solicitation data for more than 60 gift officers overseeing hundreds of active solicitations. Development officers completed PDF forms with information such as proposed ask amounts and anticipated gift dates, which were then submitted for manual entry into the database.
That information is critical for helping development officers manage solicitation activity and enabling Gonnella and her team to track progress toward annual goals, campaign goals and forecast future results. However, because the process relied on one person entering and maintaining such a large volume of data, reporting often lagged behind activity and projections quickly became outdated.
“Given the lag time, there was no way we could count on that data to accurately predict anything,” says Gonnella. “We were constantly behind, trying to keep it updated.”
Having spent more than 25 years at other institutions where development officers managed their own solicitation information, Gonnella wanted to bring that process to Georgia Tech. But her staff had concerns. Inputting this data would require development officers to work across many different screens; Gonnella’s team worried about the time it would take for data entry and the high likelihood of errors. So GTF’s IT and Data Services team created a model that made the process much simpler by combining the multiple screens into one. Now that development officers can input their own information, data is updated faster, and Development leadership can more accurately see where they stand against their goals and make better projections.
Recently, Development’s management of prospect data was made even more efficient when IT and Data Services partnered with Development to implement Gift Campus Gift Officer, a product that builds on Tech’s existing Blackbaud system. The new interface is more modern and mobile compliant, so development officers can use it on the road, and it also includes AI components that allow the team to complete tasks, such as summarizing donor meetings or scheduling follow up, that would otherwise take a lot of time and energy.
Development officers can also now use AI as a tool for tracking relationship information in addition to their solicitation data.
“We need to make sure our front-line development officers are moving the relationships forward, and given that they have limited time, that the people they are focusing on are the right set of people,” Gonnella says. “How do you determine that? That’s where a lot of the tools and the technology that IT and Data Services are giving to us come into play; they allow us to be more efficient and effective in that space.”
But sometimes an important relationship is one that hasn’t been established yet. AI features in Gift Campus Gift Officer allow the Development team to take existing communications produced by other departments within the Institute and curate more personalized pieces based on a new prospect’s personal interests found in Blackbaud.
“We now have a tool that will curate personalized content for us to share with new people, so we’ll be able to accelerate our relationship building with them and Georgia Tech,” says Burton-Krieger.
But why is reaching new donors important less than two years out from the end of a campaign?
“It’s important to cast your net wide and invite as many people as you can to be part of this historic moment,” Burton-Krieger says. “And it allows us to start laying a foundation and developing relationships with younger donors, who will ultimately be the supporters of future campaigns.”
In addition to serving Georgia Tech’s Development team, GTF’s IT and Data Services provide resources and expertise to the Alumni Association. Currently, they are completing some analytical work, applying some of their in-house developed AI to the Blackbaud alumni development database in order to compile insights on potential donors more quickly and efficiently.
While much of the work IT and Data Services completes stems from requests across campus, sometimes their projects are self-initiated. One such project that has contributed to the campaign’s success is the creation of an online portal where donors can access their giving histories. Previously, donors to Georgia Tech had to call someone at the Institute or rely on mailed statements for that information. But now a self-service portal provides donors with real-time access to data such as gift history and endowment balances without the need to contact staff. Through the portal, they might notice they haven’t given as much as they thought, or that they haven’t donated in consecutive years. Seeing that information gives them an opportunity to act.
The portal also provides the opportunity for donors to update their profiles and, in the future, to take class reunion surveys, making it an excellent tool for alumni engagement. And it has helped Tech staff by reducing manual data entry time and improving efficiency for the Stewardship team, especially during high-volume periods like tax season and year-end giving. Last year, the project won a Blackbaud Impact Award.
Burton-Krieger says GTF has been a great partner in keeping the momentum of the campaign going and elevating the work of departments across campus by providing resources and technology. But that work means nothing if the data that is being used is not reliable, and data integrity is certainly a challenge across higher education advancement. Heather Kutzman, GTF’s manager of Strategic Operations and Learning, points to a survey of 800 institutions which found that 54% of those that experienced a decrease in alumni giving attributed it directly to poor data quality. And across industries, almost a third of constituent records can become outdated within 12 months.
“The challenge is structural,” Kutzman says. “Unlike other sectors, nearly all alumni contact data is self-reported. This makes proactive data maintenance — through both automated enrichment processes and manual verification — essential to sustaining donor relationships and philanthropic support.”
Kutzman says GTF invests in the systems and processes that keep their constituent information accurate and workflows efficient, which enables the organization to serve Georgia Tech’s mission more effectively.
“Where possible, we leverage automation to standardize our processes and ensure consistent data management, but when human intervention is necessary, our team is committed to doing that work with care and precision,” she says. “What happens behind the scenes is what makes meaningful donor relationships and sound institutional decisions possible.”
Ultimately, the behind-the-scenes efforts of GTF’s IT and Data Services empower meaningful donor relationships and informed decisions, advancing Georgia Tech’s mission and ensuring the Transforming Tomorrow campaign continues to deliver lasting impact.