With student enrollment revenue on the decline, financial gifts are more impactful than ever. Colleges and universities need to get creative about their fundraising strategy.

Parents can help. In fact, parents want to help – 40% of families said they want to be even more involved with their student’s institution.

CampusESP for Parent Giving was just released from Beta. After building, testing, and improving our new product offering with 6 innovative schools, it’s time to spotlight their awesome results.

The family giving programs at these institutions range from just getting started to already well-established. But across the board, CampusESP helped our partners improve in three main areas: identifying major gift prospects, increasing donor participation, and growing their family associations.

Identify major gift prospects

CampusESP helps identify major gift prospects, collect prospect data, and make data-informed decisions. With form builders, institutions can capture parent contact information, as well as affinity and capacity data. CRM integration makes it easy to transfer parent data between systems. Many parents are eager to indicate their interest in supporting their student’s institution – for Flagler College, 14% of families in the family portal indicated an interest in philanthropy. 

“Engaging parents is critical for Flagler College’s fundraising success. Using CampusESP has expanded our potential donor pool and identified prospects that we didn’t previously know about, which will help us meet our fundraising goals.” 

– Jeffrey Davitt, Senior Director of Development at Flagler College

CampusESP ranks parent engagement based on actions taken within the platform to assign parents a unique Parent Promoter Score™. Users with a high Parent Promoter Score™ and high wealth rating are the most likely to give. On average for our Beta Group, CampusESP identified the top 6% of parents most likely to give, which allows our partners to focus their time and energy on the right individuals.

Catholic University leveraged parent engagement data captured in CampusESP to help secure a $50,000 gift from a major gift prospect! Here’s how they did it:

• Begin communicating with families of incoming first-year students over the summer

• Identify families interested in joining the Parents Council

• Cross-reference Parents Council interest with capacity data in order to secure an annual $5,000 Parents Council membership gift

• Utilize personalized digital communication and in-person programming to cultivate the donor over time

• Leverage donor data to maintain focus on those most likely to make a gift… and ultimately convert this individual into a major gift donor! 

Combining insightful data with personalized family communication is a winning strategy for major gift identification.

Increase donor participation

CampusESP’s automated newsletters and drip campaigns keep parents continually engaged with their student’s institution. To drive donor participation, advancement teams can create personalized giving campaigns based on a family’s interests, capacity, and gift history. 

Here are some successful ways that our Beta Group promoted giving campaigns in CampusESP:

1. University of Delaware promoted their Freshman HenGram initiative to first-year families to raise money for their Parents Fund. The results were remarkable – 10% of incoming first-year families (over 700 parents!) donated before Move-In.

2. Flagler College used CampusESP to push several giving campaigns to families so far. For their Roar & Raise Giving Challenge, Flagler raised more than $78,000 from over 300 parents – a 15x ROI on their CampusESP Parent Giving investment!

3. Auburn University’s Student Affairs Development team collected specific philanthropic interests from families, such as Food Insecurity, Student Counseling, and Veterans Affairs. Then, they targeted unique giving appeals that generated over 1,500 total clicks, with email click-rates as high as 13%. Auburn set their Student Affairs parent giving program in motion by cultivating over 280 parent gifts in their first year alone.

“CampusESP has created a space for Kennesaw State families to build trust with the university and easily become aware of giving opportunities, on a variety of levels,” said Sharon Brownlow, Director of Parent and Family Programs at Kennesaw State University. “I’m really excited to continue seeing how we are able to leverage the relationships built through CampusESP into dollars back to the university.”

Grow your Parents Council

CampusESP helps institutions gather valuable data and connect with families interested in their family association or council. On average, Tarleton State University, Catholic University, and University of Delaware identified that 6% of their total families are interested in joining their family associations. 

Within the first four months of launching CampusESP, Catholic University leveraged Parents Council interest data to secure 8 new Parents Council couples and over $100,000 in parent gifts – a 7x ROI on their CampusESP investment!

Kennesaw State used CampusESP to promote the value of the Parent and Family Association, sell PFA memberships directly within the platform, and manage renewals. In their first year (2020), KSU sold more than 2,100 PFA memberships, raising more than $100,000 for Parent and Family Programs.

“CampusESP helped us focus our efforts on the parents with the highest likelihood to join our Parents Council,” said Kyra Lyons, Senior Director of University Advancement at Catholic University. “We wouldn't have been so successful so quickly without the data from CampusESP.” 

Parents clearly want to help. Maximize your impact by including families in your advancement strategy and leveraging the data that matters.

Interested in leveling up your parent giving strategy?