Quick Results & Constant Support – Champlain College Case Study 

Client: Champlain College

Industry: Higher Education 

“I’m actually looking at a quote that I had seen from Bill [Tedesco], the [DonorSearch] founder: ‘DonorSearch was founded in 2007 with one goal: to provide more accurate, more comprehensive, more actionable data to help nonprofits of all types achieve better fundraising and outreach results.’ And I can say, without a doubt, DonorSearch totally delivers on that!” – Roland Palmer, Director of Engagement and Operations, Champlain College

At A Glance

• Challenges
  • Inaccurate insights from past partners 
  • Minimal support from past partners 
  • Overdue for a full database screening
• Results
  • Immediate identification of new prospects
  • More confident outreach backed by ongoing DonorSearch support
  • Access to cutting-edge AI tools and a game-changing CRM integration

Client Overview 

Founded in 1878, Champlain College is a small private higher education institution in Burlington, Vermont. 

The Champlain College Office of Institutional Advancement began working with DonorSearch in 2020 and immediately saw positive results for their development department. Compared to past vendors, the college saw a marked difference in the amount of support and the quality of results received from DonorSearch. 

Background 

Previous wealth screening and prospect research partners had trained Champlain College’s team on how to use their platforms, then left them high and dry with little additional long-term support. Plus, the insights they were getting weren’t accurate. Champlain College was looking for a new provider in the philanthropic space that would empower them to gain insights from their donor data and provide ongoing support to ensure development success.

Strategy

When the Champlain College team began using DonorSearch, they decided to conduct a long-overdue full database screening. In a surprisingly little amount of time, their screening was completed. Director of Engagement and Operations Roland Palmer explained, “Then, of course, the fun part began, which is actually looking at everything that DonorSearch sends back to you …an amazing amount of data points and insights that we would not normally have access to.” 

Suddenly the Champlain College team had a plethora of potential donors to work with, a group they probably wouldn’t have known existed in their data without that initial screening. From there, they were able to jump into cultivating a pipeline of prospects to confidently contact using the information received from DonorSearch’s tools. 

Champlain College also uses a one-off screening each year for alumni, and it recently began the silent phase of a large campaign, planning to use DonorSearch to help reach its goal after seeing the incredible results the platform generated in normal annual and major gift fundraising conversations. 

Benefits

• Constant support. Champlain College was impressed with the level of support they have access to from the DonorSearch team. “We were assigned a person on the team that basically trained us on the platform, made sure that we understood how the platform worked, and all of the capabilities of the platform,” Palmer said. “For some companies, that’s kind of it. You go through the initial training and then you are on your own…DonorSearch reaches out to us constantly to say, ‘How are things going? Are there any questions that you have? Do you need any help analyzing anything that we sent you?’” 

• Resources for continual learning. The college also benefited from DonorSearch’s educational resources, explaining that the webinars, blogs, podcasts, and industry guides are there to support DonorSearch clients in every industry and make sure they’re getting all that they can out of the DonorSearch platform. 

• A commitment to improvement. “There are some platforms out there that…never make any additions…it’s like the same product that they’ve used for five years,” Palmer said. “That is not the case with DonorSearch.” Palmer cited DonorSearch’s industry-leading AI product, DonorSearch Ai, as an example of the company’s commitment to innovation and improvement.  

• Bidirectional API with Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT. Champlain College also uses Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge NXT, and the DonorSearch team built an integration for them to allow the data to flow back and forth between the two platforms, making it easier for the whole Champlain team to access DonorSearch insights. 

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