ANALYTICS | CASE STUDY

Optimize Donations at Michigan State University

COMPANY OVERVIEW

Michigan State University (MSU) is a public research university in East Lansing, Michigan and is the eighth-largest university in the United States in terms of enrollment. As recently as the early 1990s, MSU was last among the Big Ten schools in endowments, with barely over $100 million in funds. This changed in the 2000s, when the University started a campaign to increase the size of the endowment.

BUSINESS NEED

MSU’s University Advancement team needed to strategically engage nearly one million alumni and friends of the university in the most strategic way possible. They needed help providing a team of 200 professionals and support staff with actionable insights, managing an Oracle transactional database with more than 1 million records (alumni, donors, friends, organizations). The staff was working with limited resources to analyze the volume of data and maximize the return on the smallest number of targets.

SOLUTION

From strategy through execution, business analytics is a process. Ironside helped MSU with the predictive modeling process by doing the following:

Define A Roadmap

Gather and understand information about consumer needs, behaviors, and preferences
Analyze a multitude of formats including postal mail, telemarketing, email marketing, texting, crowd sourcing, and social media
Focus on high net-worth individuals segmented by region, high-paying degrees, industries, and salaries
Profile potential and/or likely candidates for major gift giving

Organize Data & Information

Identify internal and external sources that can give you the information you need to make data-driver decisions
Identify which best-of-breed technologies will give you the insights you need

Implement, Measure, Refine

Layer the predictive models over the existing BI implementation to calculate affinity scores for potential donors
Calculate affinity scores for potential donors based on the vast array of variables
Implement a predictive model, taking in both structured and unstructured data. Update the model daily so users can keep pace with any changes
Create one reporting environment that manages dynamically enriched data. Support with data integrity, data governance, maintenance, and real-time intelligence through analytics
Improve organizational performance through new BI tool introductions and training

Hands-on Coaching & Mentoring

Provide MSU analytics team with hands-on experience of being actively involved in the predictive analytics and data mining activities during the development of each of the scoring models

KEYS TO SUCCESS

With Ironside’s Advanced Analytics team, MSU was able to:

Increase data visibility across the institution, allowing for quicker action on findings
Boost business analyst and director productivity turning multi-week studies into real-time report insights

Reduce internal resource cost of identifying strong donation prospects
Achieve a 55% ROI payback after 2.1 years

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