Name: Beyond Generational Stereotypes: Using Data to Understand What Actually Motivates Your Donors Across Age Cohorts
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T18:31:43.111Z
Duration: 55 min 56 s
Description: Beyond Generational Stereotypes: Using Data to Understand What Actually Motivates Your Donors Across Age Cohorts

Transcript for "Beyond Generational Stereotypes: Using Data to Understand What Actually Motivates Your Donors Across Age Cohorts": Hello, everyone. Welcome, welcome. Lots of people still joining. Thank you so much for being with us here today. We'll go ahead and get started. My name is Ashley Clark. I'm a marketing manager here at Blackbaud, and I am so excited to welcome you to today's session. It's called Beyond Using Data to Understand What Actually Motivates Your Donors Across Aged Cohorts. We're so glad that you're spending part of your morning or afternoon with us. Today's session is built specifically for teams who want to move past those broad assumptions and instead use the data already in your CRM to truly understand what drives donor behavior across those age cohorts. So I am thrilled to be joined today by Tim Dassell. He is the Senior Director of Advancement Services at St. Mary's University of Minnesota. Tim will present his own research on giving behavior across generations and share how his team uses their own data to challenge those common myths, but also build smarter engagement strategies. And because Saint Mary's leverages both Blackbaud, Raiser's Edge, NXT, and Almabase, Tim brings a fresh firsthand perspective on how modern advancement teams can really turn that behavioral data into more effective outreach. So whether you're using these platforms, or not, or you're maybe exploring what's right for your institution, this content is applicable to everyone. So before we dive in, to letting Tim introduce himself, I wanted to remind you of a few quick housekeeping items. First of all, this webinar is going to be recorded and you will receive the link to the webinar recording within twenty four hours to your email. Be sure to check out the Docs section. It's over on that right hand side of your screen next to the chat that I already see so many of you active in, so thank you for that. But that Docs section has some helpful resources, articles Tim has written, and a copy of today's slide deck. So please feel free to download whatever you'd like from there. And then next to the docs section, there's a q and a panel. Please submit your questions throughout today's session. Tim will answer as many as he can after the presentation today, so please submit your questions for him. So before I actually hand things over to Tim to introduce himself, I'm gonna launch a poll. We would love to get to know all of you a little bit better. So let me go to my polls here. I'm gonna open it. You should see a pop up that says go to polls tab. And we're asking you to share what best describes your role within your institution. And there's options if you scroll up and down. Yep, I can see people already voting. Executive leadership, got directors and VPs of advancement, maybe you're in major gifts, annual fund alumni, advancement services, some other categories down below as well. But let's see what comes in here, Tim, and then I'll hand it over to you. Okay. Lots of advancement services, annual fund, major gifts, some marketing, some other. If you're an other, please feel free to put your role in the chat if you'd like just so we can get a sense for what you do. All right. Voting's slowing down a little bit, so I will close the poll and stop sharing. And without further ado, Tim, welcome to the stage. Thanks for being here with us today. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, everybody, for being here today. Thank you for your presence. I really appreciate it. I'm excited to be here today to share with you some of the research that I have been doing with our organization about generational trends. I've been working on this project off and on for probably about a year, and I keep coming back to it. I find it exciting, fascinating, interesting. There's so many components and layers. And maybe you all have your own experiences with generations at your own institutions. But I wanna share with you today the data that I have from ours. Before we get there, just a little bit about me. I've been in nonprofit fundraising for over ten years. I was grateful to be honored as one of the Alma Bay's twenty twenty five champions in philanthropy. I am a native Minnesotan, parent of two. We've had a interesting year in Minnesota, but we are resilient, strong. And I did also wanna mention in my my doctoral research, I do have a kinda academic career, weaving in and out of my advancement work, is in a subfield of intellectual history. So when I talk about generations and generational identity, you will see some ongoing interest in also the generational evolution of ideas. In another version of this presentation, I do talk about how ideas about community and institutions change from generation to generation and how they impact giving and philanthropy. That'll be a little bit more in the background today, but just wanted to let you know. Also, feel free to connect. I'm on LinkedIn. You can use the link here or type in my name, whatever works for you. As Ashley mentioned, I do have a few kind of recent articles that have just come out. One about moves management and is it intellectual history, and another quite different article about strategic planning and spirituality. To that end, I have a long term book project about spirituality fundraising in the twenty first century. That's a fun project. If you're interested in that topic, let me know. We can chat. Okay. Now moving on to the project itself. A little bit about what this research entails and what it doesn't. It looks at giving an event participation among all degreed undergraduate alumni. So we do have a graduate program at our university. It's just looking at degreed undergraduate alumni. We don't have a ton of data on classes before 1930. It shouldn't surprise you, but that data is pretty scarce. And in terms of event participation data, for events that are before 1990, not a lot of data about those. It's just CRM practice before 1990 wasn't so strong. I do have a reminder at the end of this slide that I think is important to tell ourselves whenever we're talking about generations. Generational identity is just one aspect of who an individual is. It's only one factor in shaping their values and behaviors. You may have someone within a generation that doesn't act like everyone else in their generation. You may be a millennial that doesn't like avocado toast. I actually don't eat that. But generations do tend to share certain experiences, and they do tend to have similar behaviors. Saint Mary's University. Tell you just a little bit about our university here. It was founded in 1912. It has a LaSallean Catholic identity, so formed in the ideals of Saint John the Baptist de LaSalle. Our main campus is in Winona, Minnesota in the bluffs of the Mississippi River in the Southeastern part of the state. Our grad campus is in Minneapolis where I'm based out of, and we do have a smaller Rochester campus in partnership with the Mayo Clinic. We became coed in 1969. I do mention that this is not a study, along gender, but that's another interesting direction to take this. And then today, we have about 900 undergraduate students and 2,500 grad students. Generations themselves, there is general consensus about what birth years constitute generations. I've put those here in this slide. Today, we're really gonna focus on this middle four group. So the silent generation, baby boomers, Gen x, millennials. You know, Gen z, they're still graduating. I don't have a lot of data about Gen z alumni just yet. So that's kind of putting aside, and we're gonna instead focus on the previous four gens. How I did this was I made an assumption. If you graduated, I'm going to assume you're about 22 years of age, which means I've then used that to determine your generational identity. You can see that graduation years are below birth dates to give a sense of actually when these generations are graduating from our university. So let's get to I'm sure what everyone came here to hear about, Carl Mannheim. Okay. Maybe not, but Carl Mannheim was a twentieth century social theorist, and he wrote a very influential essay about generations, the problem of generations in the late nineteen twenties. And Mannheim has two really important, among other, insights about generations that I wanna mention. The first insight is what makes a generation a generation? And he says early impressions coalesce into a natural view of the world. So to translate it a little more clearly, generations are defined by shared experiences in the formative years of their life. Formative is a little ambiguous. It might mean adolescence, might mean adolescence through teenage years. There's some ambiguity there. But a generation is generally shaped by a shared experience or series of experiences. So maybe for millennials such as myself, it's nine eleven, the advent of social media, smartphones. It doesn't have to be one singular event. It could be historical development that is new, that shapes you, changes you, transforms you into something that previous generations were not like. The second concept from Mannheim that's important is what he calls fresh contact. So for Mannheim, fresh contact is that generations, they don't simply inherit ideas, behaviors, values, but they face them with a new and fresh perspective. So, for example, you might say, today, the value of higher education. Younger generations encounter higher education, and they have fresh contact with that institution or idea. And they say, maybe we don't have to go to college after he graduates, or at least we're going to reconsider the that particular ideal. David Schultz is actually a local political scientist. He has been one of the major scholars talking about generations in politics and political science today. And I liked Schultz's framing of this. He says that generations, number one, experience a major event or historical change during adolescence that shapes them. So you might think of the question, where were you when? The Kennedy assassination is a really clear example of this, but there are many others. And then twenty years later, this generation replaces the older one and remakes the world in their image. So that's kind of how we think of generations from that really technical, social scientific perspective. But I think it's really helpful to have that background to understand what generations actually are, what makes you a generation. But then the question becomes why study generation? Why is this important? I'm gonna give us a couple of things to think about. Number one is what I would call the baby boomer dilemma. So baby boomers are the largest generation in this country by population. The millennials are second. Baby boomers, as we know, they're getting older, deaths are rising every year, estimated peak passing or cycling off the planet, whatever term you wanna prefer, is in 2055, projected to be. It is also my belief that current fundraising practice has very often enlarged and shaped by the giving habits of older generations. I don't have space here today to really go into this theory of mine, but I I think that when you look at how successful fundraising shops have evolved and exist today, a lot of that has to do with being geared towards the giving habits and patterns of this boomer generation. It was successful in the past, but we may need to change in order to be successful in the future for other generations. Beyond the baby booter dilemma, values and behaviors change. There are different approaches to philanthropy, to communication, to higher education. There are changing definitions of community and institution. These are really crucial ideas when we talk about why people give and how they give, and they do change over time. So keep in mind that while generations are not uniform, that you often share unique perspectives and behaviors from the previous generations. Okay. That's an overview of generations in this kind of abstract. Right? What are they? Why are they important? But I wanna get into the data that I've collected, and you can do this too. It's pretty simple, all things considered. And we're gonna look at trends across graduating classes at this institution. So this represents the percentage of each graduating class that has given at least one gift. So this is participation rates. Reading from left to right, it starts with graduating classes in the nineteen tens, and it ends at the very end with graduating class of 2024. So you can see that the generational identities are listed on the bottom. On the way bottom are the graduating class years, but they're really hard to see. You don't have to worry about it. What is important to note is that this data does form a kind of triangle, and you can see that it peaks about mid mid to late seventies. Okay? So we're we're talking about classes of 74, 75, 76, 77 that are our strongest participating classes. There are certain dips that come down when you look at kind of the nadir of the late twentieth into the twenty first century, some of the late Gen X classes. And then there's a slight uptick or evening out among our millennial giving. And then Gen z comes along. They haven't been around enough. It's not fair to really assume anything about them. So we're really kinda thinking about millennials as this group that perhaps has different giving behavior than the previous ones. If you want to see the statistical numbers, you could see baby boomers, again, are strongest, silent Gen x, millennials, greatest generation than Gen z. Our, just I'm curious. I'm I'm curious how other universities compare, but our overall participation rate among graduating class is about 30%. But you can see how it tips pretty heavily towards the boomer and silent generations. Okay. Now that tells you participation, but it doesn't tell us what funds people are giving to. So what I did, and you can do this too, is I exported a list of all of our funds, and I categorized them into these, kind of general fund categories here. And what I wanted to figure out was if we had to pinpoint the donor's motivations or passions, what kind of general category would I use? And so I created these categories, put in exports. If you're in Raiders to Edge, you can reimport that information as fund attributes, and then you can kind of make an analysis. Instead of having, you know, 300, 400, 500 funds, you can just have these general categories. Makes it a little easier to analyze. Right? And when you look at designations, you can see some interesting patterns such as our solid generation I've highlighted here, strong arts and humanity supporters, actually, the most likely to be facilities and capital supporters, strongest of our Lausanne givers. Boomers, meanwhile, really strong interest in the annual fund. Athletics, scholarships. Gen x, modest supporters of annual fund, and then a little hard to find a good pattern. GenX will is the one generation that there are more variants, more peaks and valleys to their behavior than the other ones, and that is itself a fascinating topic. But Gen X is a little unpredictable. Millennials, meanwhile, I'll highlight two things. Number one, not particularly interested overall on the annual fund, our lowest participation rate. But athletics and class gifts, much more interest than previous generations. I will come back to that at the end, but it's important to think about why class gifts and athletics, to some extent, are compelling for the millennial groups. Okay. That was giving. Now looking at event attendance, kind of the same idea. Right? Have you attended at least one university sponsored event? Left to right, graduating classes. You can see we do have a similar pattern emerging. It's kind of this triangle shape. It starts to dip during the middle of our Gen X. And then with the late Gen X and into millennials, there's actually a a pretty noticeable rise in participation. When you look at the numbers, you can see it. Baby boomers naturally are number one. They're number one in seemingly every category, but millennials are almost tied for event attendance. So there is a a disconnect in some respects between the trend of millennial giving and millennial event attendance. Gen x, actually, pretty strong event attendance too, and then the other generation's less. So we don't have as much data for earlier events. So the silent generation's a little harder to say. But Gen z, 15%. It's not bad, especially for good people that have just graduated in the last couple of years. So as I broke down funds into categories, did the same thing for all of our events. And as you can see, there are some interesting trends. A silent generation and the baby boomer class, very interested in attending reunion weekend events. Gen x, these are not huge percentages, I know, but they were the most likely to attend networking and professional development events or events on our Twin Cities campus. Millennials, meanwhile, athletics and service were pretty strong comparison to other generations. Again, some of these are not large percentages, but what they do have, they tell a story about these generations. So you've seen the data. The data tells stories. I'm gonna look now into really thinking about what are the stories that this data is telling about these generations. And from those stories, from those this analysis, what do you think we can do with that? What's the strategic insight planning that we can do based on these generational identities and this generational data? So silent generation, the old guard, classes 1950 to '67. I have called them values driven stewards, institutional mission alignment driving loyalty. So this is what I would say of the four generations analysis today. This is the most kind of traditional. And by traditional, I mean the group that most strongly identifies the value of the institution itself as a strong anchor point for their philanthropy. So this is a group that probably responds very well to appeals from the president. They wanna meet the president. They wanna understand what the institution is doing. They might want financial numbers about how the institution is doing. They're very much tied to the university as an institution, what it does, how it functions, strong identification also with, therefore, its mission. How are you living out your mission as this institution? You know, giving rates are very strong, but event attendance is lower. There's a sense that they don't need to show up to give. They give because the institution aligns with their values. Right? Now what can you do with this? Okay. I'm gonna offer some strategic pathways for all of these classes. These are just ideas. There are lots more. I'm hoping that they themselves can spark interest and ideas for your own institutions. Because when you think about generations, it's not simply the behaviors, but it's also the values. It's also the way that they define their relationship to communities and institutions that I think are important. And that might vary from place to place. If you're at a university, it may look very differently than if you're at a a library or a social service organization. So silent generation. Couple of suggestions. Number one, this appeal to presidential authority. Right? You might use more president time communications, position GIFs as strengthening institutional foundations rather than transformation. You might wanna leverage mission alignment over peer pressure and messaging. You might also try something like a values first relationship light model. So folks on direct mail and phone outreach, the very traditional ways. Right? Emphasizing institutional continuity, legacy, endowment opportunities. This is the generation that seems very interested in not only giving to the endowment, but the status of the endowment. Want updates on the endowment. We also consider create giving opportunities tied to institutional milestones, anniversaries. Hey. It's the hundred and tenth anniversary of our university. Let's celebrate. This is the class that may be more likely to respond. Classes. Silent generation had a lot of kind of traditional ideas and values. And then when baby boomers come along, some of those ideas will be challenged, and some things will remain the same. I've called boomers alumni network givers. Relationships fuel generosity. What's I think the key insight from my research here is that baby boomers strongly identify with their alumni network. So Silent Generation was very interested on identifying the value of the institution, the university president, its mission. Baby boomers seem much more interested in constructing an idea of the institution around the community of alumni. So this is our group that has given the highest, the second highest event attendance. National alumni events are very strong, which reinforces peer connection as a primary motivational driver. It's very strong reunion weekend attenders. Almost 20 getting close to 25% have attended a reunion weekend and interested in in reckon being recognized among their peers, acknowledged among their fellow alumni. You can see the picture that's being created here. Right? So this is a group that, obviously, we've had a lot of success raising money from partnering with, and perhaps you have too. Do we need a lot of new strategies? Can we rely on what's working? Well, you can have a more focused approach. So you might think about alumni network activation using reunion driven campaigns, leveraging successful regional alumni as volunteer fundraisers, positioning giving as what can we accomplish together as alumni. There is also present here, and this is my impression both based on the data and my interactions with this group, that there is a kind of power of nostalgia that's at work. Think about this from a historical perspective. If you're a baby boomer, you are graduating during a time in which your local community is really important on campus. There's no Amazon. There's no ordering food. Everything has to be accessed through and by means of the local community and other people. So there is a kind of traditional community that is a part of the boomer class that isn't as much in Gen X and definitely isn't as much as millennials when digital culture really transforms what that means. So nostalgia, I think, is a really powerful motivator for this group. You might then connect gift opportunities to meaningful campus experiences from that era or re use reunion weekend and national alumni events as primary cultivation vehicles or build recognition programs that celebrate peer connections and shared history. When we do alumni events, reunion events, these are the classes that also love sharing photos, bringing photo albums. They have physical photos. Right? They get to share them. It's such a joy for them. And so it really is tapping into that sense of nostalgia, I think, is really important for this group. Now Gen X Gen X is a bit different. They're a little harder to read. I think that some of the trends go in sometimes opposite directions, and I don't think it's unusual for us to say that Gen X is one of the harder groups to really reach and connect with. I do think that they are a more pragmatic group. I've called them show me ROI. Right? They need clear value. You know, there is evidence that they're interested in networking, that, they'll participate if there is some kind of practical or pragmatic benefits. Not as strong annual fund supporters, not as driven by the sense of loyalty, right, that other generations maybe felt. But they're also a little bit of a hard generation to read because they don't feel as engaged overall. So they're a group that needs some work, and I say that from our internal perspective. I do think that they need some work. And maybe that's true for your organization as well or maybe not. But some things that you could do, ROI focused communication. So skipping all that institutional mission language doesn't seem as effective. Emphasizing measurable outcomes and tangible benefits. Position athletics and networking events as possibly business or professional development opportunities, and for us using the Twin Cities concentration for targeted professional development program. Lots of employers here in the region. Then there's something like skeptical aware messaging, leading with data and concrete results, not so much the nostalgia or emotion of previous generations. Again, offering professional networking benefits and career advancement opportunities and framing support as strategic investments rather than charitable giving. So Gen X was a hard class to read. Millennials are emerging. We're now a few years past the last graduating class, and they're, again, another turn, quite different from the previous generations. Cocreators, more so than donors, engaging first, giving collectively. So we're as I mentioned before, very strong event attendance, nearly matches the baby boomers, but lower comparative giving rates. Millennials showing up more than almost any other generation, but they're not converting traditional gifts in the same way. Engaged, but not through conventional fundraising channels, at least as much as their predecessors. Athletic event attendance have been quite high. Supports, in my view, this idea that millennials give in more competitive and participatory models. I will talk about that in just a minute. And class gifts. Again, another sense of collective giving more than individual institutional asks. The annual fund, lastly, not a a particular strong draw. The unrestricted gift to the institution ask is just not effective. It is not working with this cohort. So millennials present their own challenge. There are some ways that you can think about how do you work with this group. Millennials are the second largest generation in The United States today after the baby boomer. This is the generation that is also coming into power and prominent in politics, in business. It is the group people who will also stand to inherit at least some of that great wealth transfer that everyone's heard about, which is maybe a bit of little overblown, but it is a group that is going to soon enough be the largest generation in The United States. So they're an important group to focus on. What are some ways that we can reach this group? One is a participatory campaign design. So this would be create competitive team based and time bound challenges. You might also think about something like a give and serve model, so combining financial support with hands on volunteering or experience involvement of some sort. Positioning would be more like cocreators of institutional community rather than passive supporters, getting out of that loyalty framework to something that's much more active. Social capital integration. We talked about and saw that millennials like to spend their, quote, unquote, social capital rights. We think about this generation, the generation that went through or at least to varying stages of their life, the great recession of o eight. They may not have the same financial capital as their predecessor parents, but social capital. So how can they spend their social capital? You might emphasize peer to peer fundraising and class based collective action, connect giving opportunities to broader social impact and global issues. Right? This is this is something that people probably do know about millennials. Like, they want social causes, and they wanna see, impact in the world. But I think connecting that to more peer based collective giving might even be more effective, and then using online platforms and social media for real time campaign progress and peer engagement. So that's an outline of millennials, but now I wanna take us to an actual case study of an appeal that we did this past fall. We are recent adopters of Almabase. Almabase has a crowdfunding page on their platform that we use. It's really excellent. Recommend people use it if you haven't tried it. Look at I'm not here to sell the product. Just saying it worked for us. But we used Olive Base crowdfunding for an athletics appeal this fall, and we framed it as a participation challenge for all of our athletic teams. Now what's crucial here is that we asked all the student athletes to be solicitors and messengers. We also did ask the coaches and, of course, our advancement staff, but it was really the idea that we wanted to get our student athletes excited about philanthropy, excited about this competition. And this was a fast, digital kinda gamified appeal. If you've ever seen crowdfunding, you know what that means. There's also a matching challenge. We had a benefactor who just offered to match a certain amount of money given to each team. And, of course, this is about participation. So we're not asking people for major gifts. We're saying we want you to feel welcome, important. Participation is crucial. Competitive, communal, and collective in other ways. Now that should sound a lot like what I was talking about for millennials. And if you look at the chart on the right side, this is the generational breakdown of people who gave to this for whom we have birth dates. So there's a whole bunch of people we don't have birth dates for. I'm can't make a judgment about that data. I'm gonna assume that it probably mirrors this. But for the individuals who we knew their dates of birth and we were able to match them to a generation, you can see that this appeal was highly effective among Gen z and millennials and much less boomers, although they did give, which is great. We had athletic reach out to all of our athletics alumni, which included a lot of number of baby boomers, of course. But this appeal really did speak to our youngest two generations, Gen z and millennials. Because of this fall appeal, we are now on pace to break participation rates for the fiscal year as compared to the last four years. So not only was this appeal successful for raising money, for bringing our younger generations to participate in giving in a way that feels real to them, but it was also successful in raising our participation rates overall for our fundraising fiscal year. So a very successful campaign, and we're really excited to see the results. And this is something that you could probably replicate too. Okay. So kind of at the end here, I want to step back for a second and think about you know, we've talked about the data, talked about strategy, looked at some results. There is still more that you can do. I think for some people, you might think about generations and say, we'll just segment them in a normal campaign and call it a day, so to speak. But I think this data actually might ask more of us. So instead of thinking of you've got one campaign, you segment out generations, you might think about having a separate campaign for each generational and matching it to generational community models. So this would position institutional role differently for each generation. And from the advancement services side, you might redefine your success success metrics for each generation. So it might be that your younger generations, you simply are looking for a gift. But for your more consistent donors, that would be your baby boomer generation, maybe you're looking for consistent monthly gifts. So thinking about not only how do you approach different generations, but how you define your metrics of success differently for each generation is, I think, really important because it kinda levels the playing field. I think it's unfair to ask your, millennial donors and your Gen z donors to give and interact in ways that the previous generations have. This would include then expanding financial gifts to match generational preferences and going beyond that. So in, some people might have seen this in a recent poll. I don't know who put it out. But they asked people in GenDean, GenAlpha, what do you wanna be when you grow up? And a lot of people said, I wanna be a content creator. I wanna be a YouTuber, which is fascinating in its own right. But it tells you the kinds of gifts and passions that a lot of young people have. And so if you're asking for contributions, instead of saying, please give us $10 a month, a younger generation maybe say, I think I am more valuable as someone as a content creator, and maybe you ask them for a TikTok reel about your organization. Maybe they do a YouTube video for you. Thinking about how we get out of this very traditional model that says, we send you something in the mail. You send us a check. That's great. To generations want to be generous, but they might have their own preferences, their own ways of engagement, and their own ways of conceptualizing what that means for them. So that's why this multiple campaign model, I think, is really compelling for me. It is just an idea. Haven't tried it yet. But I think it's a way that we might approach generations that really honor their unique identities, challenges, and their own preferences and passions. So with that, thank you. You've been a lovely audience sitting there. Happy to take questions. One of the things I wanted to say was I am curious also from you all. You probably have noticed something about your institutions, your donors, and their generational identities. And you may have data that's, like, really different than mine, and that's cool too. That's really interesting to me. Or it might be very similar to what I presented. So if you have your own observations about your respective institutions, that's interesting to hear too. Awesome. Thank you so much, Tim. There are a couple of questions that came in, and please feel free to share your thoughts with Tim in the chat too regarding his last question. I'll also share his email address for you on the next slide. But just so a couple of things, Tim. First of all, can you talk to us a little bit about how you approached your CRM, which is our NXT in your case? But how did you approach that when thinking about how to just begin this kind of project? And do you have any tips universities trying to pull this data in their own. instances? Yeah. I I mean, the first thing that's probably the most absolutely most essential is you need to be able to figure out, generation. So birth dates, or if you don't have that, you do have a graduating class here, that's super important. It's kind of, like, the one thing you really do need. I know that not every org collects that data. And so you if you don't have it, you might think about how are we going to collect it. Do you do it proactively? There are third parties that can supply that information. I've not looked at it. I don't know how accurate it is. But that's the first thing is do we have data about when people were born so we can match them, the generations? And then, you know, there's a lot of, like, little bit of data cleanup that I did. One of the things is really, for me, understanding what all of our funds are for, because some of them have very, like, arcane or weird descriptions, and I have to ask staff who were here before me. Like, someone's been here for twenty years. Like, what is this random fund? Like, the Joe Johnson fund or whatever? Like, is this something can you tell me what the purpose of it is? So there is a kind of, learning about your funds and what people are giving to is really important. And then the kind of same thing for events. Like, most events in our CRM, I think, were pretty clear, but some of them, I just I I could not figure out what they were for, and you have to rely on your colleagues. Which is to say, in your CRM, going forward, it's really great to use in, like, a notes or description field describing what the fund is for and an event is for. That helps a lot for so many areas of of what we do, not just this project. It's a great start. Thanks, Tim. That reminds me. I'm gonna pop a resource link in the chat too. So this, like, higher ed hear from your peers series that we're doing here at Blackbaud is, like, a once monthly webinar series where people like Tim come in and present their research and just helpful things. Because doing the research is one thing, Tim, but for you to share it with all of us, it's so special. And, you know, thank you again. In January, Maya Rossman from Wake Tech Foundation shared how she records scholarship recipient data in RENXT. That just. made me think of what you're talking about. Like, the more information you can gather in your CRM, the better when doing data projects like this. But thank you. That was great. A couple more questions came in. Let me see here. Yeah. Some of them are really in-depth, which I am going to pass along to you, Tim, to answer via email because I think it's just it's so complicated to answer. But Robin asked, your findings reflect your organization. Correct? And, yes, that is the answer. How closely could I use your insights at my organization? I know I could do the analysis to find the gift fund event information, but I'm wondering what about or about all the insights that you found, like those slides with the, you know, millennials and boomers, and how much are they transferrable to other organizations? Yeah. That's a great question. And I don't have a perfect answer to that because, again, I'm working off of my data. One of the goals of this project is that to partner with other orgs, really ask them to share similar data and then collect a much larger set so I can get a fuller picture. You know, in terms of what's transferable and what's not, it's important to keep in mind what you have identified in the behavior and patterns of your constituents and think about what that shares with my own analysis. I do think that a lot of what I presented today is generally true across generations, but there will be differences. There will be exceptions. Some of it has to do historically with, you know, how have you engaged people and how what has been successful. You know, I think that from an internal perspective about our fundraising, the younger generation, we're just kind of getting caught up now in trying to reach them. So that may impact the data somewhat. And other organizations may have really great millennial giving, and Gen X maybe is much clearer in terms of behavior patterns than it is here. So one of things you could do is just a hypothesis. Like, say, oh, I I I think this is true about our, you know, baby boomer generation. They really like alumni events. Okay. How can you try that out to see if that's true for your cohorts? Great. Thank you, Pam. A couple more, if you're. up for it. Nelly asked: In the fall Cardinal case study, what did participation look like when it wasn't gifts? And I wonder if maybe we revisit that slide real quick just to give us some context. Yeah. Sorry. So the oh, there we go. Okay. So, yeah, this is, a participation event fundraiser, sorry, based off of gifts. So this is largely about people giving. What I think made it successful is that student athletes felt that they were part of the process so that they are they're not expected to necessarily give, but they are expected to bring in people who want to give. So they are participating but in a different way. That's great. Good insight. A couple more good ones came in. Christina asks, did geographical identity play much of a role in your research, Midwest versus Northeast, Southwest? Yeah. That's a great question. So this has to do a little bit with the history of Saint Mary's. We in, like, the fifties through the eighties, we had a really strong presence in the Chicago area for recruiting to the university. So we have a lot of alumni from, you know, the classes in the forties, fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties in not just the Chicago area, but a lot of people in concentration there. Whereas our more recent grads are largely in Minnesota and Wisconsin. So I I haven't quite figured out to what extent this impacts the data. I just know that when you think about event attendance, national alumni events, local alumni events, you're going to see a stronger turnout for national alumni events among that baby boomer generation because we just have more people who are not in the Twin Cities or Winona area. But I haven't really fully explored quite how that impacts the numbers in other ways. Maybe a part two, perhaps. Yeah. There are a lot of questions coming in that have sort of the same flavor of engagement strategies. You know? Now that you have this data, what are you guys doing with it? How are you seeking buy in from those across your organization to test and try new. things and plan with these generational categories in. mind as a factor, but not all factors, as Tim. reminded us? It's it's a great question. And, you know, we're we have our own, like, institutional world where trying to get anything pushed along, it feels like it goes at a snail's pace sometimes across, you know, multiple department. A couple things I'll mention. Number one is really involving the university president for our, really, our legacy benefactors, especially in those older classes, because they really do respond to his outrage. So thinking about, you know, this authority figure represents the institution, it's been really successful. Like, some people will give because they have a strong relationship with our university president. He's also a priest, so it does speak to, I think, some of the, religious interest and leanings of this older group. The second thing I'll mention is that we used to have a digital engagement officer, so someone who really worked on things like crowdfunding and social media engagement and someone who did this from a fundraising standpoint. We don't have that position anymore. We're looking to hire someone back again. But I love the idea of bringing someone on board who is really focused on trying to reach younger generations through social media and other online mediums. I'm sure there are larger orgs out there who have, like, a whole bunch of people doing that, but we don't. And that's something that I think this data says we really need. That's great. And I think, like, your mention of AlmaBase too, when being able to attach your CRM, REXT with a platform like them and be able to segment, create events, those crowdfunding efforts, and then have that native integration back into RE and XT so then you. can go pull the data again and see what happened is pretty valuable. I popped this in the chat, but if anyone is interested in learning about all of these, please let me know. Our our folks can talk to you about it too. Let's see. Tim, do you see any questions you want to answer in the chat? There's some in the Q and A, some in the chat. Trying to get to everybody here knowing we have only a couple minutes left. Let's see. Okay. I I haven't had a chance to, like, pour through these. No worries. Okay. You know, Mary's your question about the kinds of language that are effective, that's a great question. I have thought a little bit about this, and you can kind of get some sense of it and what I presented so far. But I think this is a very difficult thing to figure out because you wanna avoid, like, talking to a generation with their language, you know, because that comes across as inauthentic. So you don't wanna, like, parrot Gen z talk to Gen z. But then the question is, what's the kind of language that you use? And I'm still kind of figuring that out. I think what we found with our older generations is that there's more formality and that what you appeal to really does depend upon the identities that I've laid out. So baby boomers, it really is thinking about the appeal of nostalgia and what kind of language can you develop from that while still feeling authentic to that group. But I have been thinking about this question, and I I'm still kind of working through what I would what suggestions I would make. It's a great question. Thanks, Mary. Let's see. Maybe one more. Jeff asked if there was any of the generational cohorts that seemed to cohere the least in terms of your overall generational modeling? And I was wondering about one cohort for which the data seemed most diffused and diverse. Yeah. Yeah. I think and maybe you kinda could sense from the data that Gen X has always been a really hard cohort to figure out, partly because when I look at the data, I think that, like, the early Gen X group can sometimes behave a little bit like baby boomers, and the later Gen X group almost feels more close to millennial behavior. And then there are these sort of dips in the middle that I'm trying to figure out. My original hypothesis on this was that there are some internal things happening at the university in, like, the early to mid nineties that have turned some people away. I have only heard, like, rumblings that people were on top were unhappy with the university president or the administration. So I'm sensing that internal issues did turn away some people in that cohort, which is why it feels really all over the place. But, yeah, it's a good question. Yeah. Maybe more specific to your school or, you know, your specific experience with Gen X, but I don't know. I think that that plays across universities, at least the ones that I worked at in the past. Yeah. Well, they're kinda mysterious. But, yeah, I think I might wrap it there, Tim. We got a couple of other pretty detailed questions that I will make sure to, email you so that you could answer on a personal level. I'm gonna share Tim's email address here. I'll leave it up on the screen for a minute. Tim, thank you so much for taking the time not only to do this research but to share it with us. I think it's important that we had a wide variety of folks join us today. Thank you guys for being here. We are hoping to continue these kinds of webinars. If you have anything that you would like to share, with our audiences just like Tim did today, please reach out to me. I'll pop my email address in the chat too. We wanna keep this kind of knowledge sharing going as well. And it can be about any topic, not just not just generational giving, but major gifts, giving days, you know, seasonality for higher ed, whatever is on on on the top of your mind. But thank you again for being here, you guys. Our next hear from your peers webinar, the marketing starts for tomorrow, and it is taking place March 19. It's gonna feature a customer who uses Almabase, actually. So look out in your email, and you'll be hearing about that one soon. All right. you. thank you. Yep. Thank you, guys. Bye.