Alumni relations team adapts their technology
to fit new mission with Blackbaud by their side

Oxford Brookes University’s alumni relations team had retargeted their
focus from fundraising to engagement and, as a result, needed to digitally
transform their sprawling database. Too many of the nearly 400,000
constituent entries amassed over decades weren’t relevant to the alumni
team’s evolving purposes. Some entries didn’t even represent alumni and
were simply tied to university event attendees through the years.
“The database was set up for fundraisers, and we had changed much of
our focus from fundraising to asking alumni to help us support the student
experience and student recruitment efforts,” explained Senior Alumni
Manager Anne Cossutta.

“The system wasn’t really set up to properly track alumni participation and
engagement, which is what we were working on, and it seemed like an
ambitious task for us to tackle an overhaul of the database on our own,”
Cossutta added. “We had to consider whether we should start back over
from scratch or try to work with what’s there.”

Building Confidence to Make Change with Support from Blackbaud Customer Success

Thankfully, Cossutta and her small but talented team did not have to start
over from scratch. Their database had long been powered by Blackbaud
Raiser’s Edge NXT, the leading software for fundraising and relationship
management. They could adapt their use of Raiser’s Edge NXT to leverage
the system’s purpose-built modern capabilities. And they did not need to
make this transformative change by themselves. They could collaborate with
a Blackbaud Customer Success manager who is deeply experienced in using
this flexible software to achieve their new vision.

Meetings with their Customer Success manager helped them carve out
valuable time to set meaningful priorities and see possibilities. Data
cleanup at scale became doable, as did dreams for redesigning their CRM’s
architecture. “Within our first session with our Blackbaud Customer Success
manager, we were seeing results,” said Development Systems Officer Daniel
Coogan. “That gives you the confidence to keep building.”

Coogan had joined the staff at Oxford Brookes University shortly before
they started on the project. While he had extensive experience working
with nonprofit and commercial databases, he said the scope of what he
found when he arrived at Oxford Brookes was “quite daunting,” with records
that had been added over 30 years, some keyed to alumni who graduated
as far back as the 1940’s.

“We had a lot of things in our database that didn’t necessarily line up well
with each other, and trying to fix it quickly became all consuming,” Coogan
said. “Working with our Blackbaud Customer Success manager allowed
us to step back, break the project down into key points and decide: ‘This
is how we’re going to do it from now on.’ Honestly, this has been such a
cohesive experience.”

Transforming Alumni Engagement with Effective Data Storytelling

The overhaul included purging at least 35,000 non-essential constituent
entries within the first year, a challenging task, yet necessary to ensure
they’d have only relevant, meaningful information necessary to leverage
Raiser’s Edge NXT effectively as a system of record and engagement. By
embracing a more strategic, data-informed approach to managing alumni
relationships the team hoped to benefit the entire university community.
“Before it felt like we were working for the data, like the database owned us,
and we were including things just for the sake of posterity,” she said. “Now
we’ve shifted to ask, ‘What do we want to get from the database?’ and that
informs our decisions about what we input for building a narrative from the
data to share with our stakeholders.”

“We’ve really streamlined our processes and realized a lot of information we
were capturing wasn’t serving us or our objectives,” Cossutta added. “Now,
we have data that’s easily accessible that we actually need.”

Cossutta and Coogan have tailored the database and the team’s processes
around key pillars for engaging alumni as volunteers and active participants
in the university community. The pillars include student recruitment,
student experience, reputation and brand, and development. The revamped
setup provides a smart structure for housing data that’s easier to collect,
measure, analyse, and report. “These changes are speeding up processes
and creating a greater level of clarity on where we want to make impact,”
Coogan said.

As they continue, their team will work more strategically and redirect time
saved to connecting with alumni in personal ways. They also hope to show
colleagues outside of their team—including academic colleagues who also
engage with alumni—the benefits of tying into their system proactively so
they can share in the data storytelling and improve outcomes with less cost.

They credit their Blackbaud Customer Success manager for his steadfast
support in guiding them through the transformation. “Together,” Cossutta
said, “we looked at the bigger picture and thought beyond the limitations
to see how we could work in different ways, not just in the ways we’ve done
things in the past.”