Following the close of UC Berkeley’s last capital campaign in 2013, the campus recognized that the fundraising community needed a better way to understand the interests of current and potential donors if they were going to meet the goals of their next campaign.

The University Development and Alumni Relations team was also given a new priority to identify prospects interested in multidisciplinary institutes, such as the Berkeley Food Institute and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

So in 2014, Mallory Lass and Abbey Myszka of UC Berkeley’s Prospect Development team led a working group (which included multiple advancement operations partners) to examine and overhaul their interest coding. They had no idea it would be a project they would still be shepherding nearly five years later!

After hearing their presentation at the Apra conference, I was so interested in their project that I asked Mallory and Abbey to tell us more about it in a blog post so you could hear about it, too. I’m delighted that they said yes! ~Helen

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You may have attended our 2016 APRA presentation Got Interest? Improving the Utilization of Donor Interest Codes and are thinking to yourself, “But I thought they finished that project…?!” You would be correct – and it’s also a project that found new legs.

When we first undertook a complete overhaul of our interest coding, the project entailed creating a new data table that was hierarchical in structure (this allows us to capture parent/child/grandchild level data which we can use broadly or narrowly), reviewing data integrity on the nearly 30K existing codes, and creating new processes and a new culture around the way we thought about and documented interest codes.

The focus of this project was our constituents’ outside philanthropic interests, but after talking to other EllucianAdvance users and other institutions such as University of Chicago that were also undertaking their own interest code projects, we realized the value of exploring internal philanthropic interests as well. This would lead us to code interests down to program level specificity. A whole new phase was born!

Since then we have taken ownership of prospect related interests and see this as an ongoing data stewardship and data acquisition project that may never see its “end.” That is both daunting and exhilarating.

The bulk of our efforts over the last five years have been focused on building and maintaining two distinct interest code areas: one to reflect outside philanthropic interests and one for internal interests. Sometimes those overlap, too.

For example, a donor to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art would get an outside philanthropic interest code for Art and Museums, but, depending on other circumstances, might also be coded for an internal interest in the Berkeley Art Museum.

In conjunction with our development and database management teams, we steward the creation of new codes (interesting new additions include cryptocurrency, cannabis, and astrophysics) which makes our data reactive to changing needs, to new research and, in a lot of cases, anticipatory.

For example, we created a code for an interest in cannabis in January of 2017 and in January of 2019, UCB announced a New Cannabis Research Center to explore environmental and social impacts of legalization.

This forward-looking focus helps us to pose questions, think about, and define the structure we have been working to implement over the last year. One question we worked on was “How do we best incorporate outside data sources into our prospect-interests ecosystem?” We discovered that this involves determining the integrity of the outside data source, assessing the value-add to our internal database, and deciding whether the data should be mapped to outside or internal philanthropic interests.

External data: The Federal Election Commission

We started with Federal Election Commission (FEC) data because it was easy for our analytics team to capture and studies show that people who contribute to political campaigns are more likely to also contribute to charitable causes.

FEC data includes individual giving to political action committees, and the subject matter of those PACs is what was mapped to our interest code area. Based on political giving data identified and matched by the Prospect Development analytics team, we have been able to add over 166K interest codes on 72,920 entity records.

Internal data: past giving 

Our crowdfunding team is another great source of data we can use to map a data set to our internal philanthropic interests. For example, donors who gave to a Cal Band initiative to purchase new lockers would be coded for an interest in Cal Band. We are also assessing how we can leverage eGiving and donor survey comments.

What the future holds

After attending a CARA presentation where James Sinclair from the University of Southern California explained mapping foundation funding priorities directly to campus programmatic needs, we have begun thinking about the feasibility of using foundation data for interest codes as well. The potential to leverage outside data sources for this project is almost limitless – this project might never end!

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If you would like to talk to Abbey and Mallory in more detail about this project feel free to contact them by email at amyszka {at} Berkeley dot edu  or  mlass {at} Berkeley dot edu. If you’re working on your own interest-coding project, tell us about it!