UNC-Chapel Hill picks Blackbaud for CRM

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has selected Blackbaud's enterprise CRM solution to help it manage fundraising efforts and gather data from its relationships with students, alumni and other stakeholder groups.

The university will use the software to get a clearer view of its schools and campuses, with the ultimate goal of increasing fundraising revenue and reducing costs.

With a total enrollment of almost 29,000 students in its bachelor's, master's, doctoral and postdoctoral programs, UNC relies on a significant volume of donations. Previously, it used a custom in-house system largely designed by its internal IT team and run on a mainframe, which was more expensive for the university.

“Part of the genesis was to move from a custom solution to a vendor-supported solution,” says Ken Keefer, director of higher education accounts for Blackbaud. “The goal of UNC is to communicate with their constituents and supporters in ways they want to be communicated with.”

The CRM system will allow UNC to communicate to alumni through multiple channels, including e-mail, print and SMS through one central system. It will also track participation rates and responses to marketing, providing the overall ROI on any given program. Additionally, UNC hopes the system will allow for better data sharing and reporting among parts of the organization.

“If you view a constituent over a life cycle, you want to monitor all the outreach and touches that take place,” says Keefer. “It looks at the depth of involvement, and that may not always be financial.”