"This process was time consuming and took considerable work hours to manage. It was a ... managing the spreadsheets, the
Throw Away the Spreadsheets: A Better Way to Manage Your Volunteer Fundraisers A Class Agent Fundraising Case Study Featuring The University of the South
The University of the South, or known familiarly as “Sewanee” by its students, faculty, staff and friends, is a national liberal arts school with 1700 undergraduates and 80 School of Theology graduate students located atop the beautiful Cumberland Plateau between Nashville and Chattanooga, Tennessee. With the recent announcement of the largest capital campaign in the university’s history coupled with revamping the annual giving Sewanee Fund, the advancement team needs to be very efficient with its time and resources. This efficiency requirement holds especially true for the Sewanee Fund team who manages almost 500 volunteer fundraisers to assist in the cause of reaching out to fellow alumni via phone, mail or electronically for donations to the Sewanee Fund. In addition to giving themselves, the volunteer fundraisers are asked to reach out to at least 10 prospects (with some choosing closer to 50-60) and attend class reunions. Up until recently, the Sewanee Fund team used “an absurd amount of spreadsheets” according to Alex Hess, Assistant Director of The Sewanee Fund. "This process was time consuming and took considerable work hours to manage. It was a combination of posting a large file of prospects on google docs containing contact information, and individually sending out spreadsheets to each volunteer based on their previous preferred assignments. “Creating the multitude of spreadsheets was labor-intensive and took our attention away from other aspects of the Sewanee Fund office including online content, messaging, gift acknowledgement, event planning and participation. All of these items were critical to complete especially when we were going into a campaign,” continues Hess. In addition to managing the spreadsheets, the team also had to do a lot of outbound contact to volunteers to ensure they were fulfilling their obligations. This can be a balancing act with volunteers since they have so graciously offered the Sewanee Fund their time and donations, but there are also annual fund goals that need to be met in a timely manner. “The most challenging part was that the staff could not tell whether the volunteers were doing the intended work or not. Were they making their calls? Many would not follow-up with the staff. It wasn’t very effective in terms of knowing who was or wasn’t working”.
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In light of these challenges and the work load the team was facing with the new campaign, the decision was made to implement Class Agent to help make the volunteer program as effective as possible. As a current Reeher customer, The University of the South did not have to update its data feed to implement Class Agent, making the go-live internally very simple. Once the Class Agent module was live, the next step was to launch it to the volunteers. The University of the South created a schedule of events for the volunteers that included webinar training sessions, mass emails to all volunteers announcing the move to Class Agent, as well as taking this launch as an opportunity to right-size the number of volunteers by giving them an option to step down if they no longer wished to participate. Leveraging an introduction manual that Reeher had created as a guide, the staff created an introductory “how to” piece to add to their volunteer handbook. The team held three conference calls with screen sharing to walk through each of the steps of the program including how to log in, how to make assignments, recording results and checking progress both on their class and other classes around them. These sessions generated a lot of engagement with enthusiastic questions. The mix of age groups was well represented which helped assure the team that they would not be alienating certain groups by moving to an online tool. After consulting with other Class Agent users in the Reeher Community, The University of the South instituted a common best practice among Class Agent users by launching its first “Sewanee Blitz”. The Sewanee Blitz is a two-week period designated for volunteers to login, contact their assignments, record the results, and report any updated contact information. The Blitz is a great way to create excitement and a sense of urgency for the volunteers to get their solicitations completed. The first “Sewanee Blitz was held during the school’s homecoming in November 2016 and a second is scheduled for March 2017 with a final push at the end of the fiscal year in June 2017.
The Sewanee Fund team garnered excitement among their volunteers resulting in 75 volunteers logging into Class Agent upon the tool’s launch. Although they did not quite meet their goal of 100 3|Page A Class Agent Fundraising Case Study Featuring The University of the South
logins, the team is very encouraged by that activity. The team plans to continue to encourage more volunteers to login as they have seen with these early results the amount of time they have saved in managing these volunteers as well as benefited from current, detailed program information at their fingertips which makes managing the volunteers a lot easier. Class Agent is also conducive to more of a multi-channel approach in reaching prospects via email, texts, phone calls, and social media, making volunteers more productive. The Sewanee Fund team also plans to take advantage of Class Agent’s ability to segment for other affinity types (i.e. athletics) beyond class year as well as the possibility to roll out the program for parent volunteers. The Sewanee Fund team also believes by using Class Agent the team can realize some longer term goals. One such goal is vision that the volunteer program will become self-sustaining with volunteers knowing to log into Class Agent, take or choose their assignments, and make the solicitations during a short blitz timeframe. The Sewanee Fund team would then be available for questions and coaching as well as monitoring the progress of the program, but overall it would be a proactive event that the volunteers would lead. This proactive approach would then lend to the other long term goal of building a culture of alumni volunteerism throughout the school. Whether it is fundraising or other volunteer activities, taking the existing alumni pride that they have for the University of the South and transfer that enthusiasm into a volunteering for their school.
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