Transcript for "Better Together: How Illinois Tech Unified Engagement and Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT to Scale Alumni Impact": Hello. Hello. Welcome, everyone. I'm so happy to be with you today. My name is Ashley Clark. I'm a marketing manager here at Blackbaud. I'm super excited to welcome you to today's session. We're calling it better together, how Illinois Tech Unified Engagement and Blackbaud, Raiser's Edge NXT to scale alumni impact. We're super grateful to have you spend part of your morning or afternoon, I guess, with us. And when we are talking about what we wanted to do for this discussion, we designed it really for advancement leaders, advancement services, and those alumni engagement teams who are looking to build meaningful self serve engagement at scale, better connect that engagement back to those measurable advancement outcomes. This webinar is also the third session in our higher ed hear from your peers series, where we've been highlighting real success stories, research, and practical findings from higher ed institutions across the country. Our goal with this series has been simple, and it's to give you an honest look about what's working, what's evolving, and how your peers are approaching some of the same challenges that you are navigating today. So I won't give too much away ahead of time. But, in this session, you'll hear from Blackbaud, Almabase, and Illinois Institute of Technology, and how they reimagine their digital engagement strategy by pairing Almabase with their Blackbaud RNXT instance to create that more connected, scalable engagement engine. They're still very much going through it, work in progress. So you'll hear kind of the start to finish and what what's happening next with them. Before we dive in to the content today, couple quick housekeeping reminders. This webinar is being recorded, and you'll receive a link to the webinar recording within twenty four hours. Next, check out the docs section over on the right hand side of your screen near the chat. There are some helpful resources in there, the other two hear from your peers webinar links, and a copy of today's slide deck. Lastly, please use that q and a panel to submit your questions throughout today's session. Our speakers will answer as many as they can at the end. And if we can't get to your question today, we will, of course, follow-up with you via email. Alright. I am going to review our agenda quickly. We're gonna do a quick poll before I let our speakers introduce themselves. They're gonna talk through the challenges that advancement offices are seeing today. Then Illinois Tech is going to jump into their journey with Omavase and Razor's Edge NXT and talk about the impact, results, lessons, what's next, and then we'll end with a q and a. So okay. Before I let our speakers introduce themselves, I'm gonna launch a quick poll here just so we can get to know you and your institution a little bit better. The polls tab should have popped up for you over on the right hand side of your screen. And the question today is, which CRM does your advancement team use primarily today? I'll give it a couple minutes, and you should be able to see some results on the screen there. Scroll down too and see some other options. So we've got mostly our NXT, couple, maybe CRM, Slate, Gen Zabar, Virtuous. Two votes for other. Great. That gives us some good context. That way our speakers know kinda what you guys are what you're working within your own shops. Great. I'm gonna stop sharing and close the poll. Then I will hand things over to our speakers. Ashley, would you like to introduce yourself first? Hi, everyone. My name is Ashley Agron, and I'm the senior director of constituent engagement at Illinois Tech. I've been with the institution for just over three years, and I have about a decade of experience in higher education alumni relations field. Awesome. Hello, everyone. My name is Aaron Riley. I'm the VP of sales at Almabase. I've been here for a little over a year, but been in the space for around six years now and excited to chat with you all. Troy. Yes. Troy Walker. Extremely honored to see that Elmo has joined the ranks today and that he's excited. Not that he's not always excited. Ashley is going to be the star of the show today, but I get to come in at the end and show you the fabulous integration between NXT and AlmaBase. That's the whole notion of the title better together. Solutions consultant, Austin, Texas, twenty five years of Blackbaud. So that's me. I'll be I'm gonna be popping in and out too because my share screen is not working. So if I leave, I'll be back. Wouldn't be a webinar without some type of share screen little technical problems. going on. Yeah. That's great. Well, cool. Let's go to the next slide here. So I really wanna start by taking a moment to reflect back on what we at AlmaBase and together with the team at Blackbaud are consistently hearing from advancement professionals like you all. So what's, I think, striking to me is how universal all of the challenges seem to be. So whether you're at a large research university, a small private school, or a community college, As I walk through these, feel free to add in your perspective in the chat. And actually, you wanna go ahead and jump in and say, hey, and where you're from and where you're located, I I would love that. And if you're an Alma based customer, raise your hand. I'd love to see that too. But what we're hearing is, first, that fundraising pressure is intensifying. So your campaign goals are getting bigger. Your giving strategies are getting more diversified. Online giving is continuing to grow. And at the same time, your teams are being asked to increase donor participation. So let's do more across more channels with limited resources. Right? That's kind of becoming the reality of a lot of these conversations. So second is the engagement expectations have fundamentally changed. So your alumni and donors expect modern digital first experiences that really feel personal, relevant, and easy. And so your teams are working hard to evolve engagement models to meet those shifting demographics and the rising expectations. But the key here is without adding complexity or creating more work behind the scenes. It's good to see everyone saying, hey. Hello, Naomi. Hey, Susan. Hey, Glenn. And the last one here, let's get to the third one. Third one, decision making is harder than it should be. So your fundraising engagement and event data often are living in different systems. And so that really makes it difficult to see the full picture, which we're excited to talk about today, which makes it hard to act with confidence on what's really working and, hey, where do we need to focus next? So we know that these challenges are all deeply connected, and solving them takes more than just a standalone tool. There's not a lot of just, you know, plug in tools that's going to fix that. So that is exactly, why we've partnered with the great team at Blackbaud, to bring together, best in class fundraising and a modern digital engagement solution. So this will help you break down silos, engage your constituents more meaningfully, and support those ambitious fundraising goals that you have. So let me take a little time here to tell you more about Almabase, and then I'm going to pass the mic to the star of the show, Ashley, and we're gonna learn more about what she's doing at Illinois Tech. So for those of you who have not heard of Almavase, we started around a decade ago, which is crazy to think about, but with a very simple and powerful mission. It was to help educational institutions build stronger relationships with their communities, and my favorite one, to make education more affordable. So this mission is deeply personal to us. So our founders saw firsthand how many students were struggling to get access to the opportunities that we think they deserve simply because the right support systems were in place. Today, Almabase is an engagement and fundraising platform designed specifically for advancement teams like yours. So we bring together really three core products or three core areas to create one platform. So one of those is online engagement, one of those is events management, and then digital giving. So each of those is valuable on its own, but the real magic begins to happen when they are all together and then especially when they are all synced into Blackbaud. So because lasting philanthropy doesn't begin with a donation form, it begins with true connection, participation, and an actual sense of belonging. A few years ago, we entered into a strategic partnership with the team at Blackbaud and and decided to build out one of the deepest integrations in the market for Razor's Edge NXT, which it looks like a lot of you all are on. We also have things that go into Blackbaud CRM, which I know that a handful of you are on as well. So what this allows is for data to flow seamlessly between the systems. So for advancement teams, that translates into less manual work, cleaner data, better visibility into how engagement actually turns into giving. We'll cover that here on the next slides. So you can really think of Almabase as the kind of engagement layer and then as Blackbaud as your single source of truth. So Blackbaud remains a system of record. That's where all of your constituent information, GIF data will ultimately be living. And Almabase is going to sit on top of that foundation. So powering the front end experience that your community actually will interact with. So for digital engagement, for events, homecomings, tailgates, anything along those lines, Communications, we send emails, videos, and text through the platform, and then giving for simple giving forms all the way to a complicated multiday giving giving day. And then the true kind of power behind the platform here, as I touched on earlier, is the deep bidirectional sync. We call this TruSync. So TruSync keeps data flowing between the two systems in real time. So when someone updates their profile, in Almabase or registers for an event, engages with their community in some way, or makes a gift, that information automatically or automagically, however you wanna say this, syncs back to Razor's Edge in XT. It's clean, mapped, enriched, and with no manual intervention, which is awesome, saving a ton of time. It also works both ways. So data from Razor's Edge, constituent records, segments, permissions, queries, all of that can flow into AlmaBase to power personalized outreach. And we're hoping that Troy will be able to show that piece here a little bit later. But this really all just means that your team's gonna spend less time moving around in spreadsheets and trying to make things work, hoping that they're accurate, and more time focusing on those relationships that really matter. Most importantly, you're going to get a complete view of each constituent's engagement journey directly inside of Blackbaud. So all of that information continuing to sit where it matters so that conversations and fundraising efforts can be informed, timely, and obviously relevant. Okay. I think I've talked enough. Let's get it over to Ashley. And, Ashley, I'm excited to hear about your team's work at Illinois Tech. Thanks, Erin. Sorry, just waiting for the slide to change. Don't mean There it goes. I think we went too far. All right. Hi, everyone. So a little bit about Illinois Tech. We were founded in 1890 as the Armour Institute of Technology, and then Lewis Institute was established in 1895. In 1940, Armour and Lewis merged, creating the Illinois Institute of Technology. Illinois Tech is the only tech focused university in the city, offering degrees in engineering, science, architecture, business, design, human sciences, applied technology, and law. We're located in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. We have seven colleges and about 8,000 students with an alumni network of 90,000 plus. Our current advancement team is fully staffed at 32, or currently have 32 staff. My constituent engagement are alumni relations team. We are a team of six. Alright. I don't know if I went too far there. Give me one sec. Yep. Alright. There we go. So, Ashley, question for you. Before implementing AlmaBase, what were some of the biggest challenges that you felt like your team was facing? Yeah. So I'm sure a lot of universities deal with this too. But a lot of the data was really trapped in silos. So the advancement team or alumni office has all the alumni data in their CRM. And then when departments want to do outreach to their alumni base, they really have to go through hoops and hurdles, and we're the ones holding that data hostage. A lot of times, they didn't wanna go through that process, and so they would have Excel spreadsheets that were outdated that they were just keeping a record of contact information that probably wasn't being utilized great. And then with data updates, so if someone wanted to give us their updated contact information or reach out to another alum that they were looking for, they would have to email the alumni office, provide the information. We'd have to go into manually edit that information in NXT, which leaves room for human error. Or if you're trying to connect with an alum, it would go through a process of us first reaching out to that alum, making sure it's okay to share contact information, or just guiding them to a directory that may not have updated information. So a lot of times, it took a lot of time before you can even have the communication there. And then with our engagement, a lot of things like our forms were living on Google Forms. We've now transitioned over to Microsoft. But everything was on Google Forms. So anything that came through, we would still have to add it into NXT, and that was someone's job, just adding all this information in there. Now with the platform with AlmaBase, there's great ways that that data will just sync through automatically, and I'll tell you a little bit about it a little later. And then staff bandwidth for this really had to have just like an admin assistant that was constantly monitoring an an email inbox or updating things, and it was very just tedious typing work to get stuff done. Before 2023, so we started using OpenBase in 2023. But before that, at Illinois Tech, we did utilize an alumni directory that didn't have self reporting capabilities. And we had that system for five years, and we only had about 3,000 alumni that ever used the platform over the total of five years. We also had alumni that were leading our regional chapters or regional engagement, and that didn't allow for us to really have proper metrics on engagement and who's attending and who's participating. And it really led to a lot of volunteer burnout. They also still didn't feel super connected to the school because they were the ones leading all of those efforts. And then let's see. Yeah. I think that that pretty much is the gist of of our challenge, but I'm sure lots of other schools did have too. Awesome. We're seeing in the chat that there is some feedback coming. So, hopefully, I'm gonna try muting myself and and that fixes our problems. Let us know if it continues, though. But, actually, think that that sounds very familiar to a lot of institutions. So it's kind of a conversation that I have every day, and I'm sure people in the chat and watching this can relate to that as well. But so how did you go about addressing those challenges? Yeah. So with the with the thinking of Omabase and NXT, it really helped us get over some of those hurdles. Now we can NXT allows for, like, streamlined data updates with just, like, a a simple click of a button when you're in the AlmaBay side sending information over so people can log in to their AlmaBay profile, give us an updated email address, and it'll go right over to NXT. For let's see. For manual processes, we were able to automate a lot of those. So as people are updating information, it'll go, like I said, straight to NXT. Any alumni connection requests that were coming in, we would just direct them to the directory, and then they could search for the alum that they're looking for. And right off that person's profile, you could send a message and connect with them via their email address. That is the most up to date email address that they provided. With reclaiming some of our strategic work time, we now have the ability to shift focus to some programs that we may have let fall into the weeds for a little bit because we were so busy with the busy work. So now we have the opportunity to really focus on our annual giving stewardship and then kind of reimagine how we'll be doing our regional program. So instead of actually traveling and only engaging with certain few areas, we'll be establishing spaces on the digital community where people in those specific areas can connect on their own and more organically. Let's see. What else can I chat about here? With the spaces tool also, it's great for our departments to be able to quickly connect with their alumni or with their students that are on that space as well. I had mentioned before a lot of times when departments wanted to reach out to their alumni, it was a long process to get a list, to get the communication piece. Now they could go on their space, Athletic can say, hey, there's a game coming up, we want to see lots of alumni out. Post it, and everyone gets a notification that things are happening on campus. If a student is looking for an alum to review their resume, they could filter in the directory of exactly the type of person they're looking for. They could see who wants to be a mentor. They could send connection requests. And it's all very self-service. Let's see. There were some other things. Sorry. I'm just trying to look at my notes real quick. Oh, with our engagement, with the the forms. I know I had to mention before, like, Google forms, you kinda just get the data that that's submitted. But on the engagement and data metrics side of the admin dashboard, we can actually see, like, who's clicking the link, who started a form. And, you know, if they didn't really finish it, we can always give them, like, a friendly nudge, like, hey. We've seen that you were interested in possibly volunteering. Can I ask you answer any questions for you? What can I do to get you to complete the form so that we can have you be a little more engaged? For our data driven decision making, I mean, the admin dashboard provides great reports and activity tracking. It has an engagement activity report, a donor pipeline report, and then you could customize the reports further as to your needs so you can really decide what works best for your constituents. Another thing that is super helpful is with all the data updates, we now can see what's the best way to reach out to our constituents. Some of the younger alumni, they're not gonna be checking direct mail, something that comes in the mail. They'd probably prefer an email. So we get to see their preferences of how they wanna be communicated with. We can reach out to them in the ways they want to be, and we can actually save on the outdated outreach things like direct mail. Yeah. I think I talked a lot about always trying to overcome these challenges with both systems. All great stuff. Yeah. No. That's awesome. Thank you, Ashley. Let's see here. Yep. There we go. I clicked on it. Oh, this is just something I really wanted to share with the group. I talked about how things kind of sync seamlessly within the two platforms. So this is just a screenshot of the data inbox on the AlmaBay side. What I really love about this is that you can see the new information that's coming in on AlmaBay. So as people are giving us new email addresses, physical addresses, new names, things like that, you can compare it to what is currently on NXT and then decide whether you want to approve the change, send it through, ignore it if you already have the content information. But it also has the great little toggle icon button that will actually open their profile in NXT if you need to look further into the constituents' records. So it's really great that you don't have to go to log in to all these different systems and platforms when it's just a click of a button that will open the other one. Right now, we currently use or have the syncing set for us what's working best at Illinois Tech is any information that is on NXT automatically syncs to Alma Base, and then for vice versa, OMA base to NXT. We currently have the data as set to be reviewed before approving, which is a step to do. A person has to manually do it, but it's not the whole going into someone's record, typing this information out. It's literally just pressing that green button right in the middle and saying you want to approve the change. So I really just wanted everyone to see how seamless and connected these two systems are. Actually, I love the data inbox. And I might just be, like, a a tech nerd, but I actually like clicking the green button and. just knowing that just knowing that that is making an update is fun. And it it goes through instantaneously. Like, once. you click that button, if you then click on the NXT redirect, you will see it's automatically in their. record. I love that. Alright. So I think that all of this is definitely really helpful context. Could you share how you're actually using Alma based on the more of the on the engagement side? So, like, to engage your specifically, let's talk about the alumni community. Yeah, absolutely. So we consider what we call Alma based Illinois Tech Connect for our internal purposes. And for us, it is like our centralized student alumni communication hub. That's where the directory live, all the self-service tools. Our mentorship program lives there. We have community group discussion boards within the spaces. We've transitioned all of our forms over to Alma based instead of Google Forms or Microsoft Forms. And in just about two and a half years, have over 4,500 people registered and actively using the platform. So earlier I had mentioned we had a different platform that over five years we barely had 3,000. Now at two and a half years, we have over 4,500 people using this platform on it daily, looking for alumni, saying they want to volunteer, connecting with others. And we've actually were able to triple our alumni participation in our mentoring program. So we use the mentoring module that's within Alma Base, and we designed it as kind of a build your own network platform. So Previously, like Career Services would work with us, we would get a list of alumni who wanted to be mentors, get a list of students looking for a mentor, and there's a lot of manual matching, or they would have a different system that just focused on mentoring. Now all of that lives together, and the students can go to the mentoring module, filter and search for the exact type of mentor they're looking for, whether it's first gen, by ethnicity, if they're looking for a former athlete, or if it's by major. They could filter exactly who they're looking for, and it'll pop up with the available mentors that fit those filters and description. Let's see. Our digital communities or the spaces, really, we have I'll show you a picture in a bit, but we have, I believe, over 15 different spaces currently. And those are based on our colleges and different affinity groups. And then with all of the engagement tracking and insight, we really use that to evaluate our content performance and then our user experience too to see who's really being engaged with us. Did that answer the question, Erin? Okay. Alright. Next slide. Oh, so here's just a screenshot of what our spaces look like right now. We currently have established spaces for our seven colleges and then our various affinity groups. So because there's the amazing syncing between NXT and Almabase, we are able to automatically assign our users to their college based specific space. So if you are a College of Computing student or alum, we automatically will put you in the College of Computing space. We do leave our spaces open so that others can join if they're interested in just hearing about what's happening in those other spaces. Some of them are closed to specific groups. Those different affinity groups are usually created by request. Our Gunda group is a group of over the last few years, it's like a Thanksgiving dinner for international students, and they like to stay connected with the people who have attended that. So there's, I think, about 100 people in that group. So that's their way of staying informed and communicating together. Or we'll just, if another group wants to be created, we can use a list that's already created in NXT to add people to a space. So like our Greek alumni, anyone who's participated in fraternity and sorority life. We already have a list in NXT that we use to email and communicate with them, so when we create the space on AlmaBase for them, we really are just pulling them from that list and adding them to their space. And then some other things that we utilize is communications within the system. So Almabase has great custom communications, a lot of templates that are auto emails that'll go out to people, but ones that you can customize as well. I love that we have the personalized URLs. So when you're sending a communication just encouraging people to activate their profile, their register today link or get started, however you wanna call it, it will activate the profile matching the record that was imported from NXT. So it won't create a duplicate profile on the system as long as they're using this personalized link. It'll go directly and match them correctly to their NXT record, which has saved us. I love that. And, actually, I do have to plug one of my new favorite features here too is and I'm not sure if you all have gotten to play around with this yet, but and and it wouldn't be a webinar if we didn't talk about AI at least one time. So we had this is our here's AI. But email Emily is one of our new features, and you can basically, like, take a screenshot of the email like this, upload it to the tool, say what you want to send a new email about, and it will match all the branding and the design of the email, which I absolutely love, and our team has started using a ton. Oh, we have not started using that yet, but I'll add it to my next phase of what we what we. will start using with an Omobase. The newest employee, Emily. Emily is now on the team. Just to give you some quick facts impact of what we've seen on Alma Base just in the last thirty days. We usually like to look at engagement over the last fiscal years, but I think the numbers from the last thirty days speak for themselves, and you can really see what our year might look like. So we have eighteen twelve engagement activities on the platform in the last thirty days. We currently have 4,510 registered users. We've had 2,634 updated records in our alumni directory, and in just the last month, 424 new people registering for the platform. So people are logging in, people are using the platform, people are filling out our forms, and we're able to track all of that information. And it's beautiful to have it all on one platform. I don't know if I clicked too fast. Give me one sec. Nope. That was it. Yeah. Alright. That's pretty good. So Ashley, you've shared a great look at where you are with Illinois Tech today. Thank you. That was awesome. I still love and we've done a couple of presentations together, but I still love seeing your outcome numbers. And I feel like they get better every time we meet, which is incredible. But I'd love to look ahead here for a moment. So what's next for your team? Where do you see your engagement strategy kind of evolving from here? What are the exciting things that you're thinking of for when we the next time we get together and do a webinar, what will we be? Almabase has just so much to offer. And, yes, we don't take advantage of all the modules that you currently offer, so I'm I'm hoping we'll get to that eventually. But right now, we're on track to complete all of our data syncing updates from Almabase to NXT within the next month or two. It is a lot because we do have that review before approved process, but it's definitely, like, a fraction of the time it would have been had we still been collecting via email. What else is happening? Oh, we're gonna be setting up some more of the automated communications, so whether that's encouraging someone to activate their profile. At first, we were kinda doing it when we first launched, and then slowly, about a year later, we did another one. We wanna get more intentional about how often and when we're asking people to activate their profile. Once students graduate, they're not in our system right away, so we wanna make sure our timing is right. So after they graduate, encourage them, make sure you activated your profile if you didn't have the opportunity to do so as a student. I did see a question. Someone asked if we give current students access. Yes, we do. So if they didn't activate as a student, we encourage them to do so once they graduate. We'll be expanding our spaces, so adding more to include affinity groups and regional groups. For our regional programs, at the moment we aren't traveling to different areas, but we still want to make sure that those spaces, whether across The US or globally, people want to connect and share their experience about Illinois Tech. We'll be establishing some global regional groups on the platform and spaces. We're also exploring the possibility of adding the Alma based giving module to our contract. We will have our giving day in October and we're looking for platform. And Omabase does offer that, so we're hoping to just have everything in one place. I have seen some other institutions use a directory for class notes and job boards, so I'd really love for us to use that. We're just not there yet. For job boards, for sure, I think class notes, we can probably get that going sooner. Right now, our class notes come in through a form on AlmaBase, and then they're added to our alumni magazine. But I'd love it to be more organic and the content that the alumni wrote to be what's written and what's showcased to everybody. So if we could put it in a directory, a scrolling directory of class notes, I'd love for us to get there. And I've seen other institutions that have AlmaBase use it. So I can't wait for us to get to that point. But yeah, I think that's our next step. And then maybe the AI. Yes. Love that. Very cool. Troy, I see you have joined us again. How are we how are we feeling about seeing this thing in action? Might be frozen. Troy, you might be on mute. Oh, maybe he's frozen. You know what, guys? For, while Troy's maybe still figuring it out, I think we can, hop to some conclusions in the q and a. And then if he can, and if he can hop back on and everything is working, I'm sure he'd like to see you guys at this point. I appreciate the frozen meme GIF in the chat. So, yeah, why don't we why don't we skip this one, go to our conclusions, and then we can start reading off some of the great questions that everyone submitted. Nice. Yeah, that works, Ashley. Thanks so much. Yeah, so let's kind of step back for a minute capture capture the big picture here of what Ashley just walked us through on Illinois Tech's journey. So I think really what this is a story of is the integration the integration piece. So even just seeing the screen of the data inbox, I thought was really powerful. And just a reminder that, like, integration is so clutch in connecting all of these systems. So it's a huge strategic unlock for advancement teams. And just when something like Omobase can work with something like NXT, you just move from these fragmented interactions to truly a connected overall experience when we start talking about alumni lifecycle. And I just I love seeing it in action, and I love what your team is doing, Ashley. So thank you so much for sharing. That was fantastic. Yeah. Maybe let's go ahead and move into some q and a. Awesome. Yeah. I echo Aaron's sentiments. Thank you, Ashley, for sharing. I think it's so valuable, and a lot of you do too. I see it in the chat. When peer institutions can share about what's working, what's not, and what's coming up next. So, Ashley, we we really appreciate you sharing today. That being said, we did get quite a few questions. So we'll see how many we can get through, and I'll try to start back at the beginning. And I know there are two Ashleys. I'm Ashley c. This is Ashley a. So I'll try to keep things keep things clear. Okay. So, Ashley a, Glenn is asking, at some point, would you please describe the process you used to create the individual alumni profiles in AlmaBase? Did you upload your alums en masse, or was there an opt in process? Could you talk a little bit about that? It's a mass import from NXT in Tawama Basin. So we added we add all of our alumni and current students to the platform as the mass import. And then every I think it's every month, we have an automated workflow that if there's any new alumni or student record added to NXT, it automatically goes to AlmaBase. I wasn't at Illinois Tech when they did the setup. It happened, like, a month before I got there, so I don't know all the intricacies of it. But that's what I heard is how it's done. That that is how most of our customers do it as well. And so, Glenn, we will upload those profiles. And then, basically, it's like a, hey. Come claim your profile type of process. Very good. Thank you. Sarai is asking, does AlmaBase authenticate alums' emails that get added for potential updates on the platform? Very. There is an authentication process for email addresses. Yes. So part of the coolness that I was gonna show is as the I'm I'm sorry. I I we tested this yesterday, and everything worked perfectly. I've been demoing all morning. But, anyway, as you can tell, I can't share. But one of the things I was gonna show is that whole thing is, you know, someone let's say someone signs up for an event, they go into AlmaBase. First thing that AlmaBase is looking for is to see if they're in the database because AlmaBase and Razer's Edge are so connected through the integration. It'll recognize them both as they come in. So first of all, it'll say, unmapped. Unmapped means it looks like they're not part of the database. So then you can actually click on that and say try to find the individual. Maybe they're brand new. Then you can actually click on, are they in Razer's Edge? Go through Razer's Edge. You can do a search for the name, and it's like, lo and behold, they're there. You can connect them at that point, and then they're integrated. So they're gonna get the Razer's Edge ID. They're gonna get the almond base ID, and they actually have a tile that's produced for them in Razor's Edge. So you can actually see all activities that read only, but you can see all their active on the Razor's Edge side. So the integration, as Aaron was saying, is think I it's one of the best integrations that Blackbaud has, period. It's absolutely beautiful. The the the biggest difference that you're gonna have to get used to is is you confirm everything on the AlmaBay side first. And then when you push it in the Razer's Edge, it's assumed that it's clean data as it's coming in. So it's a little bit different thinking because everything we do is RE centric. Almond base is Almond base centric because it's a different product in in that sense. Thanks, Troy. That's helpful. And, Troy, maybe we can make a little video afterwards just showing, and. send it out to this group. can. That would be that would be cool. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, I'm rehearsed, and I'm ready to go. But, yes. Sorry that. the Goldcast is being, terrible with me. worries. So most stressful morning I've had in a while. Okay. So we have kind of two people asking similar questions. Ashley, it's you did mention you do give current students access to OnBase. Right? So, yes, Naomi, that answers your question. And then Marsha asked, how do you manage the interaction with students and alumni for mentorship purposes? Is there do you do any trainings? Do you have a guide, maybe best practices, anything like that? We we follow a model that our career services department was using when they were still doing the manual matching. So when someone is registering for their platform or updating their profile, they select whether they're willing to be a mentor, and the students would select if they're looking for a mentor. And then they would go to our mentoring module, which we call build your own network. And there's a form that has to be completed that talks about what's expected of a mentor, what's expected of a mentee. You have to agree to these things. You have to fill out some data points so that you can be better mapped and filtered to the correct potential mentor. There's a bio form that you fill out. Alumni can select their strong suits of what they're willing to help students with, whether that's mock interviews, resume review, looking for an internship, networking skills. So the alumni fill out exactly what they can offer, and then the students also fill out what they're looking for. That really helps them with the pairing aspect. And then that form that they're filling out, again, it has kinda guidelines of what's expected, what you should do, best practices. We don't have an official training session, but I think that serves as the guide of what's expected in a mentorship pairing. And then it's organic for them. Once a student finds a mentor that they like, they just click a button, it sends a connection request to that alum, the alum approves it, and then they're chatting on their own. That's great. I love that. I love the organic aspect, and it seems like the intake really kinda defines that relationship and and what it could start out being. So thank you. Sarai asked who manages your spaces, Ashley? Yeah. That's why we probably don't have as many affinity group spaces because each space needs a moderator, right? And it doesn't make sense for it to be coming from Ashley Agron, who wasn't a part of College of Computing, or me logging in as the alumni office profile. They don't always wanna hear from us. They wanna hear from someone in that department, in that group, a representative of that affinity group. So we try to assign moderators for the colleges. So if there's a staff member for a specific college that's already maybe posting to social media for that department, that would make the most sense to be a person to have access on the platform, be listed as a moderator. Because then if they're posting on Instagram and Facebook, they could just copy that over and put it in AlmaBase too, to try to see to get more engagement that way too. So we try to have moderators. We do have our advancement constituent engagement team listed as most of our moderators as well, just as backup, because we do have our alumni newsletter that goes out and things like that. So little stories and tidbits that come from there, we'll also post it on behalf of the university so that everyone can see it too. But, yes, you have to have a moderator because someone's gotta be in control and making sure that conversations are happening on those spaces and that people are being responded to. Yeah. That's great. Thanks for sharing. And, Ashley, you you shared a little bit about, like, the increase in participation when you were going over those impact numbers. Do you have any idea? And it's okay if you don't know the percentage, but do you know the percentage of your alumni base who are actively using the platform? I don't, but if give me a second. I can I can easily filter on Illinois on AlmaBase from our registered profiles, and I can filter to see who alumni are? So give me a quick second. cool. No worries. We'll Hold. see. on. As actually does that, Brian asked a question about origin of records. So records can start in AlmaBase and be pushed over. They can stay in AlmaBase. You don't have to push them into Razor's Edge at all, or they can also come through Razor's Edge. So Razor's Edge has a nice way to bring them over where where you can create a list. When you create that list, it's automatically synced back through the service bus into AlmaBase, and you can actually pull that list in. So you can pull the list in as just new constituents or you can actually pull them in as an email list. We didn't talk much about email, but there is a fantastic email tool in AlmaBase as well. Thanks, Troy. That's helpful. I'm sorry there's questions coming in now. I'm I'm trying to keep up and just pick the best ones. I know what a lot of us probably have to drop at the top of the hour. Like I said at the beginning, if anything does not get answered, we'll be sure to follow-up with you via email too. Absolutely. Are you able to pull up anything? So out of our registered users, we have 4,500. 3,600 are alumni are the ones that are using the platform. So 3,600 out of our 90,000 alumni base, I can't do math right now. You would think I'd be able to. I was a math major, but I can't do math. The potential is still great, though, for growing. Yeah. Yeah. And I I'm sure as you add your affinity groups, as you begin using the engage or the events module, like, data flowing in, the better. Okay. So that's great to know. Thank you. Brandon asked a good question. Have you seen any direct result of engagement on the AlmaBase leading to alumni giving for you guys? I would say because of, like, all of our engagement forms are on AlmaBase. That's where we get our volunteers from and get we've had a really big influx of alumni volunteers, whether they're wanting to volunteer with career services or admissions and things like that. That pool is becoming donors. So we weren't engaging with all of those people before, but providing an engagement opportunity for them that they were interested in, we are able to then transition them to be whether it's a first time donor or increasing their guests or things like that because we know that that group of people wants to be engaged. So a little bit, I would say. Great. And I I'm sure as more people start flowing into the system and engaging, you'll be able to kinda do some direct, like, ROI studies on that too. But it seems like you like we said at the beginning, like, it's cool that you're sharing because you're kind of in the middle of this journey. And, yeah, maybe we can see, Erin, if we can find someone who's who's been on longer or is able to share a little bit more about the direct relation giving and engagement. We know it exists, especially with some other customers too. So. This is fantastic too because, I mean, most of the other webinars we've done have been all about events and giving day stuff. So So I'd love to see that Ashley's talking about just that that engagement and then also the, you know, the spaces that are out there. But I was gonna show a little bit on events. The the events are fantastic in terms of the way the events work as well. Completely integrated with Razor's Edge. You build the event in AlmaBase. It builds the event on the Razor's Edge side. Automatically updates as people are registering. They go in as registered. When you mark them as attended, they're marked as attended. They have QR codes, and they have discount codes. Lots of stuff that we don't get through, you know, BBC RM or NXT in terms of event stuff. So if you need significantly more robust event capabilities, homecoming weekend, a reunion, definitely check out on the base on that. Awesome. Great to know. Thanks, Troy. That is the bulk of our questions there. There's a couple questions on pricing that came in. We'll definitely follow-up with you guys post webinar on that. Probably a good place to wrap up. I do wanna call attention to that doc section one more time. There's great resources in there for you. You can read about the Illinois Tech, like, full case study that they wrote with that Ashley and team wrote with, AlmaBase. AlmaBase also has a great case white paper. They partnered with case for a white paper on the state of giving days, which is super relevant. We've been talking about giving days a little bit here. There's some information about our Blackbaud new development agent, copy of today's slide deck, and then those other webinars I mentioned at the beginning. But, I think that's a good place to wrap. If we didn't get to your question, we'll make sure to reach out to you post webinar. Again, please, thank you, Ashley, first of all, for being here and sharing your story with us. It's one. thing to do all of this work, but then to take the time to share it with your peers, I think, is so valuable and and really special. So we really appreciate you. And then. yeah. Ashley, you were so fantastic. I I I said you're gonna be the star of the show. Someone had called me and asked how much we were paying you. You're you were so fantastic to. do this stuff. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And, again, my apologies. We'll put a a video together of the integration stuff. Actually, I have one. Thank you so much, everybody, and for all of our attendees for being with us today. Thanks for taking time out of your day, and we'll see you next time. Thanks, guys. Bye. Bye. Thank you.