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As a professional in Advancement Services, you understand the importance of building and maintaining a fund raising system that will ultimately lead to sustained prosperity for your institution. Of course, the best systems are only as good as the people and data that drive them.
Our mission at BCI is to provide information products that you can count on to make sure your targets are met across a broad spectrum of fund raising activities.
Rapidly Changing Times
Regardless of how you’ve managed to maintain contact with your alumni and other constituents over the years, there are always some that seem to just drift away. It should come as no surprise, since society today has never been more transient. According to recent studies from the USPS, it is estimated that more than 44 million Americans change their addresses each year – that’s 17% of the population and the trend appears to be growing. It’s interesting to note that during the prime moving season -- over the summer months, nearly 30% of these changes occur.
Resource Efficiency
The challenge to keep contact rates from falling is endless and needs to be budgeted for like any other critical part of institutional planning. But oddly enough, funding to carry out the business of fund raising only begins with a dollars and cents approach. Deciding where to allocate resources opens up a whole new set of challenges. Some institutions have raised awareness to the importance of refining their data-driven solutions by funding new specialized positions, such as Data Integrity Manager, as key components to their team. Additionally, there are many new effective solutions from database service providers that have spawned a multitude of systems and methods for capturing essential data, analyzing it, importing it, managing it, and inevitably -- showing institutions how to profit from it.
Planning The Appeal
In the end, we are all creatures of habit. Our response patterns are somewhat predictable in the field of philanthropy as well. And with the right message at the right time, alums and donors alike will do their part to support causes they believe in. Although the window of opportunity may not be open for long, continuing advances in database technology have given fundraisers much to feel confident about.
What You Need To Get Started
The core of any contact update or enhancement overlay project begins with having sufficient baseline information to search under. At minimum, BCI requires an individual's full, last known name and at least one other piece of unique identifying information. Providing us with the Social Security Number (SSN) will always yield the most accurate, current address and result in matches over 95% of the time. However, our proprietary systems can still return remarkable results without this. In such cases, we rely upon the most recent address and/or date of birth (if available). To a lesser extent, address searches by name and phone number can also be performed with good results.
BCI provides the most comprehensive solution at the lowest cost:
- Verification that all existing names / addresses on your database are accurate -- when you’re just not sure.
- Highly advanced search algorithms that you can rely upon to locate new addresses, phone numbers and email addresses on lost alumni and other constituents.
- Average turnaround time is 3 to 7 days
- Pay only for updated records that are matched to deliverable address points.
- No fees involved for customizing import files to suit your system requirements.
BCI has helped hundreds of the nations leading public and private institutions bring new life to their alumni databases. We have specialized in this business for over 14 years and look forward to showing you a better way of making your data work for you.
Please click below to receive a cost estimate of the project you have in mind.
Project Request Form
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