Reclaiming capacity to think beyond reporting.

Brown University's stewardship team was consumed every year by just handling reporting. Writers spent endless hours physically organizing reports and responding to ad hoc requests. They built a homegrown system to digitally collate thousands of fund reports, but even that remained “onerous and inefficient.” The team needed something that would eliminate manual work entirely.

Katie LeClair, Director Of Stewardship, completely transformed how her team functions, evolving from writers buried in manual tasks to project managers using intelligent systems to scale their work and create space for strategic stewardship.

From manual organizing to systematic processes

“We have completely changed the makeup of the team and how it functions,” Katie explained. “The stewardship team used to be made up of mostly writers who took a lot of time physically organizing reports and completing ad hoc requests, and now we're a team of project managers who use a digital system to do the organizing for us.”

Mythos replaced their broken workflow—templates created in one software, moved to another for editing, never quite polished. Mythos took over the manual work going between several tools, making it efficient and dramatically reducing manual proofing.

Printing reports with Mythos instead of using an outside vendor “was a relief,” Katie noted, cutting out the middleman work of handing off data to someone unfamiliar with their process.

The elevated reports from Mythos delighted donors, with them saying they were “the best reports we have ever received.” Katie reflected that one impressed donor called specifically to request they send the printed report to her brother.

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Building capacity for strategic stewardship

The even bigger story is in was what they did with that capacity—establishing an individual stewardship program for the most engaged donors, using data to drive personalization, and engaging campus partners to create higher quality impact stories. “When fundraisers trust that there is this consistent, repeated process taking care of stewardship basics, then they can look beyond reporting and think more creatively.” she explained.

With the time savings, her team built partnerships across advancement, creating resources for marketing communications, and preparing for a major campaign with donors.

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