Florida Gators Raise $9 Million in Incremental Donations from Net New Prospects

E&I Article Featuring Affinaquest

The Gator Boosters, a fundraising arm for the Florida Athletics program, helps to identify incremental revenue. While UF athletic has many fans across the state, disparate data sources and general siloed data could sometimes hinder efforts to reach out to new giving prospects. The Gator Boosters and UF athletics worked with Affinaquest to raise millions in incremental donations from net new prospects.

Within UF athletics, different departments "owned" their own systems and worked to keep contacts updated, but these legacy data systems didn't integrate across the department. It needed a seamless way to sync individual records to get better data. Besides incomplete data, this led to redundancies in work, plus inefficiencies in how the Gator Boosters' Major Gift Officers reviewed prospects. 

Since 2017, UF's constituent database had grown to 1 million active contacts. Because of this large growth, UF saw an opportunity to find new prospects with high propensity to give. These new contacts may have only interacted with the athletic department during digital ticketing, merchandise purchases, or lead generation campaigns. After finding new potential prospects, the Gift Officers for Gator Boosters spend time qualifying them, researching and prioritizing outreach to maximize impact. This of course includes calling, emailing or visiting potential giving prospects, but the prioritization wasn't fast or efficient.

In summer 2019, UF was working with Affinaquest to help with data management. UF implemented the Affinaquest Central Intelligence solution which integrated data from ticketing, merchandise, and email data across UF's digital platforms. After this, UF could identify prospects across all engagement touchpoints. This allowed Gift Officers to target new leads faster. 

Affinaquest's predictive analytics solution analyzes patterns of fan behavior from hundreds of data points. UF was already collecting much of this data, but it was spread across too many systems to measure. Dashboards were created that allowed Gift Officers to form relationships to find major gifts and customized outreach. To prioritize best solicitation opportunities, Gator Boosters appended the constituent records of new leads, expanding each fan's comprehensive profile. UF generated fan scores for each contact with demographic information, location, wealth scores, and engagement data points from email, merchandise, and ticketing.

This work supercharged UF's prospecting. In fundraising there is no silver bullet, but a data-driven approach is a glue that holds the reach-out plan together. UF has raised nearly $9 million in incremental donations from these insights.