DRG’s exclusive and comprehensive endowment reporting course will teach you how to tell the financial story of your donors’ impact—effectively, efficiently, and with the donor in mind.
If you need help creating an endowment reporting program from the ground up or enhancing your current process to deliver an amazing donor experience, you’re not alone! We’ve been there. And after years of proven success building and improving reporting programs—and facing many challenges along the way—we’ve taken that experience and created this comprehensive reporting course to help guide you and your team through the entire process, from beginning to end.
No more sitting in front of an incomplete spreadsheet, wondering where to start, what data to include, how to gather the financial and utilization information you need, how to thread it all together, and what to do after the reports are delivered. This course will walk you through the what, when, and how of creating endowment reports that will leave your donors surprised, delighted, and proud of the impact they’ve made at your organization. Because this initiative is incredibly time and resource intensive for most organizations, we will also explore how to streamline your efforts, evaluate the outcomes, and justify the return on investment to your leadership teams.
Stop struggling with your reporting process—grab your team and follow our step-by-step guide to creating powerful endowment reports!
The best part? This program can be used to train and cross train your current and future employees in the endowment reporting process. Purchase it once, and share it across your organization!
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What You Will Get
This course comes with 7 pre-recorded and on-demand modules that will walk you through how to build or revamp your endowment reporting process from start to finish, along with a ton of other tools and perks that will help you—like templates and samples, access to a private group on LinkedIn, and a discount on ODDER (On Demand Digital Endowment Reports).
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Here's what you'll get when you purchase this course:​
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Unlimited access to our comprehensive on-demand course (7 pre-recorded modules)
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Training on your time—your access to our on-demand content never expires
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Access to an exclusive LinkedIn group to connect with Sarah, Jan, and your colleagues taking the course
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6 CFRE Credits
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Access to templates, checklists, and samples including:
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Complete Endowment Reporting Project Checklist outlining every step
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Annual Endowment Report Survey Template
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Endowment Reporting Financial Spreadsheet
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Data checklist with tips and tricks
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Sample data spreadsheet
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Sample narrative and impact templates
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Sample surveys
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Sample digital and print reports
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Sample project management timelines
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What You Will Learn
PART 1: ENDOWMENTS 101
Your quick crash course in all things endowment reporting. Whether you’re new to this work or just need a refresher, this session will prepare you for the rest of this course. We’ll cover all the basics of endowments from important terms and the components of a report to commonly asked questions like: What is an endowment spending policy? When does an endowment get fully funded? When do you start reporting? And, what are common fields to report on?
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​PART 2: TIMELINE CREATION & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
There is extensive pre-work that goes into reporting and our team is going to lay out the entire process for you—from data clean-up and email acquisition to communications, deadlines, and impact narrative request processes. This comprehensive overview (complete with sample timelines) will set you up for success as you work through the reporting process.
​PART 3: DATA GATHERING, ORGANIZATION, & BEST PRACTICES
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Ahh, the data. The most important, complex, and often frustrating components of reporting. In this module, we’ll walk you through which data points you need, how to gather them, who to partner with, and best practices for cleaning and organizing it all. We’ll also explore guidelines around adding stewardees and standardizing your review process.
PART 4: NARRATIVE & IMPACT REPORT GATHERING
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Sharing the specific impact of your donors’ generosity is a crucial component of creating a meaningful and personal endowment report. In this session, we’ll teach you how to gather utilization narratives and stories that will heighten your donors’ connection to their philanthropic investments. You’ll learn how to gather recipient information, outreach methods, technology platforms that reduce time and increase organization, and best practices for this process.
PART 5: TIERING REPORT COMPONENTS
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Endowment reporting often becomes an all-consuming task that sucks time, resources, and ROI from your team. As organizational endowments grow and the number of funds, complexity of agreements, and demand for impact reporting increase exponentially, your teams must develop creative and efficient ways to balance donor needs with team limitations. In this session we'll explore a case study on how to develop tiering mechanisms to ensure you are putting your resources where they matter.
PART 6: CREATING REPORTS THAT RESONATE
The “art” of the art and science of endowment reporting is creating a beautiful report that is designed for a positive reader/donor experience. In this session we’ll explore the benefits of using templates to create reports, how to seamlessly weave data with narratives, which charts and graphics are most important to donors, and show you samples of simple and complex reports that utilize a cohesive design.
PART 7: DELIVERY AND FOLLOW-UP BEST PRACTICES
Your work doesn’t end when once your reports are out the door! In this module we’ll discuss critical post-work that that brings all of your efforts full circle. This includes surveying techniques and follow-up, key metrics to develop, delivery and storage methods, and general best practices. We’ll explore the importance of “leading up” and “leading out” in this initiative to the rest of our organization, our bosses, and our many peers in this process. The reports are complete and now it’s our time to shine!
Your Investment
Order your copy today, and you'll get the entire course delivered directly to your inbox. You'll have a comprehensive endowment reporting training tool at your fingertips to train all current and future staff at your organization!
GET THE KEYS TO
POWERFUL ENDOWMENT REPORTING FOR JUST
$1,500
Train your entire team for less than the cost of attending a conference!
Meet Your Presenters
Sarah E. Sims, CFRE
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Once upon a time, a donor became mad and sent a letter to the university president complaining because he never heard anything about his endowed faculty funds. He even included a sample from the “other” school he supported and asked why said university couldn’t “be more like them”. Thus, Sarah was hired, given an incomplete excel spreadsheet, and told to build a reporting program from the ground up. That is how, rather ingloriously, Sarah’s long career in donor relations and extensive experience in endowment reporting began. Since then, Sarah has built new or revamped existing reporting programs at multiple institutions and developed an eye for strategy, efficiency, and execution that is designed with the donor in mind. Sarah can tell you what works, what doesn’t, and isn’t afraid of diving into even the scariest of endowment reporting challenges with you.
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Jan McGuire​
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“How fast can you get the endowment reports out?” asked the Vice President for Development, as he appeared unannounced in Jan’s office doorway. She was just a few months into her job, had never prepared a report, and knew it wasn’t yet “time” for reporting. But the sense of urgency in the VP’s voice was real, as the recession’s ripple effect wreaked havoc on the endowment. Donors’ permission was needed - and needed quickly—to apply UPMIFA to their endowments, or more than 1000 scholarships and programs could go without funding.
What ensued for Jan was a crash course in Endowments 101 and reporting. Now, she draws upon her own experiences to help others define and refine their reporting content, processes, and timelines. Jan can help you determine what you need to send and who you need to send it to, not to mention just how fast you can send it, should your leadership ever ask.
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