Syracuse University:

Syracuse donor relations bet its credibility on one decision

“We're thinking a lot more like strategists than people who write impact reports. Now we can integrate ourselves where we couldn't before.”

Hear the team talk about what excites them most about their first few months using Mythos

The FOMO was real

Syracuse University's donor relations team knows how a good conference usually ends.

“I've attended so many conferences where I was excited to learn, but I'd come home disappointed because we couldn't do it. We just didn't have the bandwidth, didn't have the tools... It's good to know people in our field are doing great things. Not us, though.”

This year was different. They came home ready to do it.

For years, stewardship at Syracuse meant choosing between depth and reach. A handful of donors got a beautifully written, bespoke impact report. Everyone else got dry financials, maybe a student profile or a thank-you, and most got nothing at all.

“I remember asking, how many reports did we do this year? I think the answer was nine. They were really well done, really well written. But how could you possibly replicate that attention to detail for so many more people? It was ad hoc forever, a cycle of ad hoc we just couldn't get out of,” said Brittany Hoffman Smith, Associate Director of Stewardship and Donor Relations, Syracuse University.

Those nine reports took up roughly 80% of Brittany's time. Meanwhile, the endowment report covered close to 3,000 endowments.

“We've been doing them in print for so long that it just seemed insurmountable. We've done them digitally lots of different ways, and none of them gave us the full opportunity to tell the story. It's just dry financials that don't land the way we want them to,” said Jess Finley, Executive Director of Donor Relations, Syracuse University.

‍

The problem was never effort

Syracuse's donor relations team knew what best in class looked like. They had spent years priming donors for it. What they didn't have was the infrastructure to deliver it across a university with more than 130 gift officers.

“We've been too small of a team for too big of a school. We're a central unit that's supposed to do everything and be the experts on everything. It's really hard to spend your entire career telling people we don't have the bandwidth. I've written a thousand proposals that went nowhere.”

When donor relations couldn't keep up, the work went elsewhere, and something got lost along the way.

“So we just kind of had this…well, donor relations can't do it, they don't have the bandwidth, they're understaffed, so we're going to hire somebody. And then they're hiring somebody to send something out that's not donor centered. It might be pretty, but it didn't come from us. It wasn't our voice.”

Hear the team talk about how they went from capacity constraints to being part of the conversation

How they made the case (nine years to a yes!)

The team first met Mythos at a conference almost a decade ago and picked it as their clear choice early on. Convincing leadership took much longer. For a while, leadership thought Syracuse could build something homegrown.

“The drawback of a homegrown system is that you have to maintain it. You have to be the customer service representative. You have to be the technical people. You have to be everyone, all the time. I'm not any of those things. I'm a subject matter expert in donor relations.”

Brittany also kept the idea in front of colleagues. Every Mythos promotional mailer that arrived went up on a corkboard cubicle wall, one after another, until the board was full and people started to stop and ask what it was all about. Years later, when Brittany told a campus partner the team was onboarding a new platform, the partner asked, “Is it Mythos?” She already knew Mythos, and couldn't wait to work with it. Brittany still wonders whether she walked past that corkboard.

The case that finally won leadership over came down to four points:

Go digital without losing print. Syracuse still has print donors, and Mythos handles both.
Use one platform well beyond the endowment report: impact reports, landing pages, acknowledgments, and eventually proposals.
Break down silos by bringing gift officers, deans, and campus impact narrators into the same platform.
Staffing math. "The amount it would have cost us in staff to do what we're going to be able to do is not possible, nor would we have been able to train that many people."

Brittany displayed every mailer outside her cubicle as it arrived. It got the attention of team members.

No room to fail

Getting a yes was only half the fight. For years the team had told leadership this was the platform Syracuse needed, while leadership weighed building something homegrown instead. Now the decision was made, and it was theirs to prove.

“We do not have the ability to fail,” Brittany said. “I had said it 100 times. There is no room for us to come back and say we should have done something differently. It has to be right the first time.”

And more people were watching every month. “It went from being our pet project, to our department’s pet project, to the division’s project, and then it’s going to be the university project. There’s a lot of eyes on us.”

The work wouldn’t wait for them to learn the platform, either. The team had hoped to onboard quietly: learn the tool, build templates, send test emails. Instead, a stack of reports that had already been pushed back was due at the end of the month. “We needed to build reports now,” Brittany said, “before we even really fully understood how the platform worked.”

‍
‍

Hear the team talk about how all their division's teams now work inside one platform

Building the plane with a co-pilot

Early on, Brittany had asked the Mythos team what a typical onboarding looked like. The answer was “we’ll meet you where you’re at.” Now that promise was being tested. She took the problem straight to them. “I have to get this done by the end of the month. We need to speed something up, or teach me faster.” The answer that came overnight was “no problem!”

Within a couple of days, Sara Moïse, Mythos Chief Stewardship Advocate, had built a full template with Brittany's content already in place. Brittany checked it, swapped a few photos, and learned the platform while it was being built around and for her and her process.

“It was very nice to have somebody with a donor relations background working alongside me, knowing how the content needed to be written for a donor audience. I still met my deadline.”

The team had planned static sites and PDFs for year one. The thinking was that keeping it simple would allow them to ramp up faster and they could always evolve and enhance what they are doing in year two. Once they saw that dynamic sites took the same setup time, they decided to skip ahead. In their words, they under-promised and over-delivered.

“We've not been told no. We throw an idea out, and every single time it's 'absolutely, we can do that.' That's music to our ears.”

And their ideas keep getting bigger. “Ideas are like five times bigger than they’ve ever been before.” An idea that comes up in a morning meeting is often built by the end of the day. When scholarship students needed to understand why their survey responses mattered, the team built a site that told them about the donors behind their support. Landing pages that were never part of the plan, video included, now take minutes. “The more I use it, the faster I am,” Brittany said.

Hear the team talk about learning the platform while also meeting pressing deadlines

From report writers to strategists

The bigger and most important change has been in how the team works. Donor relations at Syracuse now sits in retention and donor journey conversations it was never part of before.

“We’re thinking a lot more like strategists than people who write impact reports. Now we can integrate ourselves where we couldn’t before.”One early example was a site for legacy donors whose call to action wasn’t a gift. It was “Tell us your story.” Now the team is collecting donor motivations it and the broader advancement team can use in other types of donor communications across the university.

Gift officers are starting to see the difference too. The team now sends surveys to scholarship recipients, so gift officers no longer have to email each student for updates, and the responses come back as content ready for donors. “You can free up 10% of your time,” the team told them.That capacity is also building credibility inside the institution.“It’s really hard to gain credibility when you can’t meet anybody’s demands. Being able to respond to the volume will give us the credibility we’ve needed for a really long time.”“I think finally people are going to look at us like, oh, they really do know what they’re talking about.”

‍

Hear the team talk about how they are getting time back to think like strategists

What's next

Syracuse is building its first digitally delivered endowment report now, followed by scholarship recipient updates and a spring impact report as a second touch. Gift officers and assistant deans are getting sneak peeks so they can walk donors through their reports with confidence.

One donor already told the team last year’s report was the best information he had ever received from Syracuse. Their answer was “just wait”.

Hear the team talk about sending the first test report, and the reaction from senior leadership