‘Disruption in the Space’ Today’s high-tech opportunities for increasing fundraising Back in the early 1990s, I attended my first Educate Plus-like fundraising conference in the U.S. The exercise in one session had everyone in the room holding a banana to their ear and pretending they were calling graduates to ask them for a gift. That’s how new telephone fundraising was in the U.S. – we had to imagine what it was like. There were few phonathon rooms to visit as they didn’t exist. And that was disruption in the space. Educational fundraising in the U.S. had been primarily mail driven until then. Whatever you may think of telephone fundraising, it became a cornerstone of U.S. fundraising with graduates, raised an enormous amount of money and identified a good number of future major donors. Today, fundraising disruption is back in the U.S., although it never really went away. The internet, with its web pages, online giving, email appeals, video and more, has been disrupting our phone-and-mail fundraising for years. When institutions like Stanford University declared an end to their telephone fundraising (in 2017), it felt like the fundraising ground was really shifting beneath us. Now that social media has become a primary form of communication for so many, all that online connectivity – along with all that digital data that came with it – certainly feels like One Big Disruption. With the understanding that we’ll likely need to keep embracing “disruption” in our fundraising methods, I do want to point out some of the more prominent changes in our profession today. They won’t be the last, but they’re certainly big and you’re going to be at a disadvantage if you don’t think about them. All that Digital Data Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying in front of governments around the world http://www.latimes.com/ business/technology/la-fi-tn-facebook-data-20180604-story.html about Facebook’s user data privacy. Meanwhile, Europe’s general data protection regulation (GDPR) reflects the concern about all the digital data that’s being collected about you, me, and everyone else. All of our heightened data privacy awareness (and the new restrictions that will come with it) doesn’t mean it’s entirely going to go away. A number of behavioral research articles in the past few years http://www.pnas.org/content/110/15/5802 have noted that your online “likes,” “check-ins,” posts and page visits can accurately tell about your personal attributes and traits more than even your friends and relatives know. And your institution is in the profile of many of your graduates, which makes Facebook particularly useful for locating some of your most loyal followers – and for understanding some of their demonstrated interests. It’s possible today to place Facebook posts or ads that will appear to your graduates segmented by Facebook-identified interests such as environmentalism, agriculture, architecture, gardening, fashion design, entrepreneurship, health care, yoga, sustainability, American college football, and dozens of others. https://blog.myleadsystempro.com/facebook-ads- tutorial While this may not be the most delicate moment to launch a first Facebook appeal, the possibilities of broadening your case for support message well beyond your non-donor appeal letter shouldn’t be ignored, either. (And if you’re already crowdfunding, it’s potentially a way of locating the right target audience for your next project.) Artificial Intelligence (AI) Much more than the Tom Cruise movie, artificial intelligence is being discussed in fundraising circles about its potential for increasing our effectiveness. 5 6