Families should be a central part of your institution’s giving strategy —  40% of families want to feel more involved and connected with their student’s institution. 

Stacey Muzzi, Assistant Vice President, Parent Giving & Student Life Philanthropy at University of Delaware and Kyra Lyons, Senior Director of University Advancement at The Catholic University of America, joined us to discuss three ways that strategic family engagement has helped their institutions reach fundraising goals: cultivating parents into donors, increasing donor participation, and identifying major gift prospects. 

Looking to dive deeper? Jump to the bottom of the page to watch our full webinar recording on this topic.

Cultivate parents into donors

Engaging families early on builds early affinity, connection, and trust with the university. Communicating with them consistently strengthens that relationship and familiarizes parents with where they can receive reliable information from your campus.

“We start sending out information to families as soon as we can,” said Lyons. “It helps answer so many questions for them and they know that there's a place that they can come and get this information and find how to contact us.”

Data collection is also an important component of understanding your families and cultivating parent donors. CampusESP’s onboarding survey helps collect information from families to identify family interests, affinity, and capacity.

“We’ve refined the onboarding questions to help identify hand raisers and evolved them to be more direct with giving,” said Muzzi. “We also have some questions around areas like volunteering, career, and mentorship.”

Increase donor participation

By the time that you’re ready to make a solicitation, parents are already primed for your ask. University of Delaware promoted their Freshman HenGram initiative to first-year families to raise money for their Parents Fund. 10% of incoming first-year families — over 700 parents — donated before move-in.

“The participation numbers were significant for us, so we were really pleased with the outcomes,” said Muzzi. “This past year, about 10% of the class gave again and we were able to also increase our average gift size.” 

Catholic University has also successfully leveraged families for their annual giving campaigns. Catholic raised over $144,000 from 636 parent donors for their Cardinal Athletics Giving Challenge, which represents over 20% of their overall dollars raised. Communicating through multiple channels such as email, advertisements, and SMS allows advancement teams to reach families effectively and maximize the impact. 

Identify major gift prospects

Parent Promoter Score™ helps identify parents with the highest engagement and affinity. Paired with capacity data, CampusESP segments the parents most likely to make a major gift so institutions know where they should focus their efforts.

“Parents that have a high Parent Promoter Score and high wealth rating are the parents we go back to all the time, whether it’s doing outreach or inviting them to events, ” said Lyons. “For us, it’s the crème de la crème of our parent pool to turn parents into major gift prospects.” 

The results speak for themselves — Catholic University leveraged strategic parent communication and data captured in CampusESP to secure a $50,000 gift from a major gift prospect.

“The parent said they were honored to help support the university. That was the exact word they used,” said Lyons. “It was really great to see that all these data points backed up the work and really showed us that these were the right people to ask and the timing was right.”

Looking to dive deeper? Watch the full webinar below.

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