The Key to Getting the Big Picture View of Your Prospect

Background:

The University of North Florida is a relatively young university that has experienced tremendous growth since being established just over 40 years ago. It has developed a great reputation, showing up in nearly every national college ranking, and has been named one of America’s best colleges by Forbes Magazine.

Their most recent capital campaign, the most successful in the school’s history, was The Power of Transformation campaign. It was developed to fund study-abroad trips, scholarships, fellowships, professorships, and academic enhancements. Impressively, the campaign exceeded the fundraising goal of $110 million to raise over $130 million.

Challenge:

With every major campaign, there is a challenge to identify and qualify new prospects with good donor potential. For Mary Jamieson Dee, Director of Prospect Research at the University of North Florida, it is crucial to get a general overall feel of a prospect before committing the time necessary to formally research them. But getting this initial snapshot can be time consuming if you have to search for the prospect across several different tools and through multiple datasets within those tools.

Solution:

For Mary Jamieson Dee, the key to getting the big picture view of the prospect is iWave. Using iWave’s 360Search, Mary is able to save time and make the identification process more efficient. “I love the idea of the 360Search, which enables me to see a variety of factors,” said Mary. “We can see employment information, real estate, donations, philanthropic connections, and director connections in one click of a button. Other databases will allow a user to find a myriad of information, but it would require a lot more clicks than the 360Search and even then, there’s a lot of slicing and dicing that still needs to happen.” In addition to this initial search, Mary said she is able to find information on prospects within iWave that she hasn’t been able to find with any other sources.

Mary and the rest of the development team at the University of North Florida have been using iWave for over 8 years. And while they do use other tools as well, Mary said “iWave is one of the best products we have. I’m always impressed by the robust amount of information within iWave. I can give other things up, but I can’t give up iWave. I will fight to keep it.”