You can never get a donor started too soon. That’s the intention of an implementation of a Blackbaud product targeted to get higher ed students giving and fundraising while still on campus.

Blackbaud unveiled its Cloud Solution for Higher Education today during its annual bbcon 2018 user conference in Orlando, Fla. It’s an adaptation of its commercial solution for private K-12 schools, said Tim Hill, president and general manager of Blackbaud’s higher education division. The Cloud Solution for Higher Education include enables universities and colleges to advance their institutions with increased revenue, deepen alumni engagement and enhance community outreach, connect departments and students, and improve the student and alumni experience through high-impact lifecycle management, according to Hill.

The Education Management portfolio includes student information, recruiting and enrollment management, school website systems and learning management, enabling institutions to build a connected campus.

The challenge for schools, said Tiffany Crumpton, director of marketing for the higher education division, is to develop programs that resonate with students, “outreach to those students to give even small amounts on a regular basis.” The plan is to use predictive modeling to get students chatting up alumni for gifts, particularly on the phone, she said.

The Cloud Solution for Higher Education combines fundraising and relationship management, analytics, financial management, grant and award management, and marketing with the new education management capabilities.

Blackbaud also announced the addition of the following solutions for higher education:

• Blackbaud Stewardship Management:  This software helps to collect quality impact statements and share them with donors. Blackbaud Stewardship Management enables education institutions to collect communication from scholarship beneficiaries and provide it to donors, providing personalization and connectivity at scale.
• Blackbaud Guided Fundraising: Made possible by Blackbaud’s acquisition of Reeher in May 2018, Blackbaud Guided Fundraising provides automation, and project management capabilities for annual giving teams to scale a multi-channel, person-to-person fundraising strategy. It enables coordinated phone, email, SMS, direct mail, and online payments. Students can engage with donors directly via personalized messaging across multi-channel communications streams while ensuring effective engagement through algorithm-driven predictive segmentation and real-time donation processing.

To learn more, visit Blackbaud’s Cloud Solution for Higher Education Institutions.