Friars Give is Providence College’s (PC) annual giving event. It’s a day for alumni, students, parents, faculty, and staff to rally together to represent their class year, state, affiliation group, and their college. It’s as exciting a time for the school’s students, alumni, and donors as it is for Providence College’s advancement and marketing communications teams, who spend months preparing for the biggest fundraising day of the year.

The 2024 Friars Give was the most successful yet. But how did that happen? This is a story about a resourceful advancement team with a strategic vision, who selects the right partners with the right tools for the job. Together, Sleek and the PC team develop something modern and exciting—something that engages donors and connects constituents in ways that highlight the community they make up.

The Right Tools for the Job

In prior years, the PC team used iModules/Anthology to manage their online giving, campaign webpages, and marketing communications. In 2023, challenges posed by that system led them to seek another solution. With their engagement platform separated from their CRM system, they found it difficult to get real-time fundraising data to display back to donors in a compelling way that was easy to manage. Since the PC advancement team was already using Salesforce as their fundraising system of record, they engaged Sleek to bring things together and optimize their tech stack. Combining QSS™ for Salesforce, Experience Cloud, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, they’d be fully integrated and set up for success.

First, Sleek business analysts worked with the PC team to migrate their online giving to Sleek’s Salesforce-native solution. Together, they built a branded standalone site to specs. Sleek’s QSS17 online giving tool, built with custom lightning web components, enabled the PC team to provide exactly the donor experience they wanted. Searchable and write-in designations, shopping cart check-out functionality, matching gifts, joint gifts—Sleek Experience Cloud developers turned the PC team’s vision into donation pages.

Typically, launching a new site from scratch can take months. But with Experience Cloud and Sleek’s QSS17 for online giving, that time was cut in half. QSS17 is designed to streamline and enhance the online donation process with pre-built templates, automated workflows, and robust data tools that allow for easy customization. User-friendly controls are built into the lightning web components so that they can be cloned and adjusted by someone without a web developer’s skillset.

Campaign pages for Friars Give were set up via a similar process. With ideas and specs from the PC team, Sleek’s developers created components that fed donation data into live dashboards. The PC team could simply drag page components onto a canvas using an intuitive drag-and-drop builder, insert their copy and other marketing assets, and click Publish. Page elements included a countdown clock to create a sense of urgency for their time-based donation challenges, leaderboards to foster friendly competition between alumni class years, and social sharing to keep the momentum going!

Because Experience Cloud lives on top of your Salesforce CRM, there was no need for complex mapping or connectors. You can simply select the objects you want to display, set and adjust filters, and surface the data you want constituents to see. The process is flexible, too. Say you want to avoid publicly displaying information provided by external constituents without reviewing it first. No problem! We can write incoming data to a staging object and establish user-friendly processes for checking data before publishing. That way you can control what is publicly visible on your Experience Cloud pages even when time is of the essence.

Engaging Friars with Marketing Automation

What good is a new online giving experience and incredible real-time campaign dashboards without the right tools to bring traffic and excited potential donors to them? As part of their transition from iModules/Anthology, the PC team took advantage of Sleek’s QSS14 for email marketing to implement Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE). QSS14 includes training from experienced business analysts, industry best practices, opportunities for automation, smart segmentation, and integration with Salesforce CRM.

The PC team’s new marketing toolset provided an easy way to segment their audiences using always-up-to-date dynamic lists. For instance, the PC team could simply set the rules for an automated reunion year audience list and click Run. The list pulls any alumni matching the criteria. Since the list is based on a constant sync with Salesforce CRM data, the list never becomes stale. This enhanced segmentation did more than just organize data; it transformed engagement. By tailoring interactions to each donor’s unique profile, Providence College significantly boosted participation, increased overall contributions, and made every donor feel valued and integral to the cause.

To make things even easier, MCAE and Experience Cloud share the same asset bank through the Salesforce Content Management System. The PC team could seamlessly share branded assets between the marketing communications users crafting appeal emails and the Advancement team putting together Friars Give campaign pages.

A “Friars Give” Day to Remember

By leveraging QSS17, QSS14, Experience Cloud, and MCAE, Providence College achieved outstanding results. Some highlights include:

• Increased Donors: The number of donors increased by nearly 10% compared to last year, adding over 225 new donors.
• Increased Donations: Donations increased by nearly 25% compared to last year, with a total of $3,241,986 raised from 2,878 donors.
• Flexibility and Control for the PC team: This one is hard to measure, but results in time saved and the freedom to publish content in exactly the way they want.

For more details on Friars Give’s success and to view their beautiful pages built on Experience Cloud, visit the leaderboards.

More Success to Come

At Sleek, we believe personalized donor engagement leads to record-breaking results. With QSS™ for Salesforce, Providence College significantly increased donor numbers and total donations. The interconnectedness of Salesforce CRM, Experience Cloud, and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement means that internal collaboration is streamlined and efficient. We congratulate Providence College’s record-breaking success and look forward to continuing our work in transforming fundraising for educational institutions!

For more information about how we can help your institution achieve similar results, visit our website or contact us today. Let’s make your next fundraising event the most successful one yet!