Blog

Webinar Recap: All Hands on Deck – iWave + Gravyty

We kicked off our new webinar series: Fundraising Technology and Strategy to Enable the New Normal, in early June with our friends at Gravyty with a webinar about bringing together a fundraising technology ecosystem. 2020 hasn’t unfolded in a way that we could have predicted. We are all faced with a new normal, and navigating these times will be defined by deploying strategy and technology in ways that create meaningful elevation for your organization. 

In this webinar, Trent Beattie, VP Strategic Alliances at iWave, and Ashanti Jackson, Customer Success Manager at Gravyty presented on how technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) reinforce, stabilize, and grow giving programs in today’s economy. This webinar featured examples of how current nonprofit have adapted to the new normal as well as share ideas and suggestions on how to combine your technology to increase your organization’s effectiveness.

You can watch the full webinar recording here, but we also put together some Q&A’s from the presentation below: 

 

Q: How does Gravyty work with iWave? Is this technology included with an iWave license?

Trent & Ashanti: The way we’ve always described the Gravyty and iWave partnership is “Gravyty, powered by iWave.” What we mean by this is that iWave provides fundraising intelligence data for organizations and Gravyty uses artificial intelligence (AI) to turn that data into action for frontline fundraisers. The solutions are two separate platforms requiring their own subscriptions that integrate together both via technology and the way teams naturally function — although, when you have the best data in the industry fueling Gravyty’s AI, we like to describe that as transformative. 

 

Q: This looks like a big system operation change – how quickly can an organization adjust to this? Also, do you have recommended segments that we should be looking at?

Ashanti: Gravyty will look at pre-existing segments within a donor database and then use these to support logic for our AI algorithms to follow. For example, we might look at donors who give some years (SYBUNTS) or those who gave last year but not this year (LYBUNT) and help our users reach these folks with personalized outreach, at scale — so they can grow that relationship into one that produces Major Gifts. Depending on the overall strategy of the advancement shop, Gravyty can surface different donor and prospect segments that address those outcomes. For current Gravyty customers, this process typically takes just a few hours.

 

Q: Can you give some examples of how I can engage other team members or departments to use iWave? 

Trent: With the current shift toward mobile and remote work environments, iWave has been working to meet the needs of nonprofit organizations to ensure they’re using iWave to its fullest potential to help them operate at maximum efficiency. We actually shared a blog post earlier this year about how you can engage the rest of your team to use iWave in unique ways to help your organization, and all departments, to operate in a succinct manner.  

 

Q: If I’m introducing another team member onto iWave – how do I make sure they’re trained and up to speed?

Trent: iWave has a fantastic Client Support team that is ready to introduce and train new team members at any time. Even if you have or you are an in-house expert, don’t hesitate to connect with the iWave team to help bring new users up to speed. You might even want to join in and hear about the latest features that you haven’t had a chance to learn yourself.

 

Q: How does Gravyty change messaging based on segmentation? 

Ashanti: Donors who give some years (SYBUNTS) or who gave last year (LYBUNTS) but not this year are great segments to identify for Major Gifts, while new donors and young alumni may be great for Annual Giving. Each of these will have a slight angle of messaging depending on the time of year or particular events. By representing these in the Gravyty database, the AI is able to recognize these segments and recommend appropriate self-written First Drafts to the frontline fundraisers conducting that outreach.

Additionally, Gravyty’s AI can adapt messaging based on what’s happening in the world today. We saw this a lot throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Our customers enabled the Gravyty Crisis Module to account for their strategy during the crisis — for example, perhaps they weren’t making an ask, but doing a wellness check on donors based on the relationship the organization has with particular donors.

 

Q: If only the research staff at your institution has access to iWave and other research tools how can your Development Officer use AI and Machine Learning to help with your portfolio?

Ashanti: One of the most common workflows we see between iWave and Gravyty is that a member of the research or advancement services staff will rate prospects and begin filling discovery pools with those potential donors. Gravyty’s AI then taps into those pools to distribute to frontline fundraisers, as appropriate.

 

Check out the upcoming webinars and save your spot by registering today!

Stay Up-to-date on Fundraising News and Resources

Want a Free Demonstration of iWave’s Fundraising Intelligence Platform?

Request a Demo