Actions matter

Who is engaged with your institution?  We all recognize that this is crucial to identifying whom to solicit but how do you do so?  There are any number of flags within the data you keep in advancement; event attendance, giving, open rates for emails, contacts in the phone program (you do show as you on caller ID, right?) among others.

The combination of all of those can certainly help to provide you with a good idea of who is interested but there are numerous other data points that the institution tracks that should be included.  These may include season tickets, speakers, attendees at student or community events, and purchasers from a bookstore among others.  

The key here is to make a case around the rest of campus that you need access to those data points that may contain alumni and parent pool members.  This is often going to be face to face conversation to start as you build relationships with those offices running programs that include your constituents.  On small campuses this can be simple - only a handful of folks to connect with and often you already know them and they may well understand your need.  On a large campus, this may take time - years even but it is well worth it.  

At this point, I would suggest that you reach out to your database manager, explain what type of data you are seeking from the rest of campus and ask them how they would like to store it for you.  What you want to be able to do is pull a file of all engagement for each constituent and ideally that file contains the activity and date relationship - the when of that activity.  

By pulling the records with those coded activities, you can identify current engagement by individual, area of interest of potential donor and other constituents who have similar interests who give that may be able to be used as effective solicitors.