Episode 61: Nancy Felix on High Touch and High Tech Advancement
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How can advancement combine "high tech" and "high touch" to identify, engage, and partner with supporters? How can you create a culture of giving and what facilitates or inhibits that? We discuss these questions with Nancy Felix, Associate Dean for Advancement & Strategic Initiatives at Carnegie Mellon University's Mellon College of Science
In the complex ecosystem of higher education, "advancement" is often simplified to just fundraising. However, as the landscape shifts, the role of advancement is evolving into a critical driver of student success. In a recent conversation on the Connected College podcast, Nancy Felix, Associate Dean of Advancement at Carnegie Mellon’s Mellon College of Science, shared how the field is moving beyond the "bottom line" to create a culture of lifelong support.
The modern advancement office is no longer just a "back-room" operation. It is a strategic partner that uses sophisticated data to build genuine relationships, bridging the gap between an institution’s financial health and the quality of the student experience.
Defining Success: Beyond the Bottom Line
While dollar amounts are the most visible metric, Nancy Felix argues that true success in advancement is measured by engagement. This includes everything from alumni attending reunions to the simple act of clicking through a university newsletter.
Success is also inextricably linked to the "student experience." When students feel supported during their time on campus—through mental health resources, advising, and scholarships—they are far more likely to become supportive alumni. This creates a virtuous cycle: an institution that takes care of its students builds a loyal donor base that ensures the next generation of students feels just as supported.
The Data Revolution in Higher Education Advancement
The most significant change in the field is the ability to use data strategically. Modern advancement teams are now utilizing sophisticated CRM tools, like Salesforce, to track "engagement scores." By analyzing digital footprints—such as website visits and email interactions—universistsies can prioritize their outreach.
This "high-tech" approach allows for "high-touch" results. Instead of cold-calling every alum, fundraisers can focus on those who are already showing interest in the institution's mission. Algorithms now help advancement offices decide where to send staff and how to personalize messages, ensuring that resources are used efficiently.
The Rise of Bespoke Giving and Mega-Donors
We are seeing a shift from the traditional "pyramid" of giving to a "barbell" model. This means a high volume of smaller, highly specific gifts at one end and massive gifts from "mega-donors" or third-party nonprofits at the other.
Donors today want to see the direct impact of their contributions. They are less interested in "unrestricted" funds and more interested in supporting specific initiatives that resonate with their personal history; whether it’s a chemistry lab, a varsity volleyball team, or a first-generation scholarship fund. This move toward restricted, bespoke giving requires institutions to be more transparent and communicative about the tangible outcomes of every dollar.
Building a Culture of Philanthropy Through Faculty
One of the most underutilized assets in university advancement is the faculty. High-net-worth individuals often connect with an institution through a specific research breakthrough or a faculty member’s work.
To thrive in this new era, advancement professionals must build trust with faculty and learn to speak their technical language. When development officers and researchers work in tandem, they can unlock funding from non-alumni donors and specialized nonprofits that are more interested in solving global problems than simply supporting a specific alma mater.
Conclusion: Connecting the Generations
Advancement is ultimately about storytelling. It’s about showing a donor that their past experience is being mirrored in the lives of students today. By combining cutting-edge data analytics with authentic, human-centric stories, colleges can break down silos and create a sustainable future where institutional success and student success are one and the same.
Episode 61 Transcript
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Nancy Felix: The number one thing that I've seen change in my career is our, our ability to use data to help us to be more strategic in our work. So we can look at a donor's or a alumni record. And we can see how many times did they come back for reunion? Were they engaged in a fraternal organization? Did they write into the magazine? You know, we can look and see what metrics are there, and then we can use that data to help us to be strategic in reaching out to people.
Elliot Felix: That was the amazing Nancy Felix, the Associate Dean of Advancement at Carnegie Mellon's Mellon College of Science. And though we share a last name, we're not related. But we did also share an amazing experience working on a project at Carnegie Mellon. And we had an amazing conversation about how advancement is really about combining high tech and high touch and thinking about the next generation of donors and how you establish a culture of giving. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Here goes.
Welcome to the Connected College Podcast. I'm your host, Elliot Felix. I've helped more than a hundred colleges and universities change what they offer, how they operate, and how they're organized to enable student success. And if you're a leader in higher ed, and you think that the silos and separations get in the way of student success, then this podcast and my upcoming book, The Connected College, are for you. We're here to learn and work together to bust silos, question tradition, and forge partnerships so that students feel connected to their college, their community, their coursework and their careers.
So advancement plays such a critical role in advancing student success, enabling student success, supporting the students, telling the stories and more. And I'm so excited to have Nancy Felix here from Carnegie Mellon to talk about the role that advancement plays in student success and how it's changing and how institutions can respond to those changes. So welcome, Nancy.
Nancy Felix: Thank you, Elliot.
Elliot Felix: Um, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into advancement.
Nancy Felix: Um, so I have been in advancement pretty much my whole career. I did a graduate degree at the school of architecture at Cornell and the school of city and regional planning, focusing on historic preservation planning, and I thought I would work for a city government and I thought I would make historic districts and save old buildings and I did a job shadow a city planner in Alexandria, Virginia. And after one day, I thought, I don't think I want to do that. And so after getting my degree from Cornell, I ended up working for a consulting firm in New York City that worked primarily with nonprofits. Thinking about how nonprofits grow, how they expand, how they better use resources, how attract new resources. And the bottom line is when push comes to shove, non profits get bigger and they get better when they do better at fundraising and advancement.
So, it was a great experience. I spent about 10 years in consulting, doing everything from annual giving to board trainings, to writing case statements, to doing feasibility studies, learning how to use a database, learning about plan giving. It was a real training and being a generalist. From there, I got my first kind of major gift role and that was being the director of the New York City Regional Office for Dartmouth College, which was my alma mater. So I was very happy to kind of give back and get to know the constituency better and really speak from the heart and really connect with the constituency and reconnect with my, with my college. I spent about 10 years at Dartmouth. Um, and I was lucky enough that I was also able to do some international fundraising because I ended up moving to London for a few years. So I was able to do the major gift fundraising, but also a lot of international work as well. And learning about different cultures and how different cultures think about philanthropy, which was fascinating for me and still is. Um, I then transitioned outside of higher education for a few years, but quickly got right back into it. And I've been at Carnegie Mellon now for about seven years, being the chief development officer, Associate Dean for Advancement at the Mellon College of Science. We are one of the smaller colleges of the seven colleges of Carnegie Mellon. We serve the disciplines of physics, chemistry, math, and biology.
Elliot Felix: That's great. That's quite a story. And I love how you put all those things together. I've had you know, the pleasure of working for my mater, doing lots of projects for UVA. It's such a treat to do that these like full circle moments. That must be great. Well, you were rattling off all those different functions of advancement, major gifts, plan giving, using a database. Give us the lay of the land about advancement. What are the different functional areas, key activities?
Nancy Felix: So advancement is a very wide spectrum of activities. And I would say it's separated in two different areas. One is front facing and one is behind the scenes. Your frontline fundraisers are people who are going to actually be asking for money. So those are going to be your major gift officers, your principal gift officers, your annual giving fund, your telefund people, as well as your gift planners. Anybody who's talking to people face to face. But those people are only successful if they have an apparatus behind them that really supports them and that's really solid people who are working with data, research, as well as doing finance, thinking about how gift agreements are written and recorded, thinking about how plan giving programs and how funds can support the mission of the university through plan giving, um, and of course, like the events staff, my God, like we would not be able to be successful with the work we do if we didn't really do events and do them well. Alumni engagement is a key factor to any university success. So that's another kind of key piece to the advancement puzzle.
Elliot Felix: That's a great overview of all the different things that happen in advancement. Um, how do you define success in advancement? Obviously there's dollars, there's a bottom line, but what are the other success metrics for advancement?
Nancy Felix: The field in general is talking a lot more about metrics and how we define metrics. Certainly, alumni engagement is one of them. And we can define engagement in a number of different ways. That can be showing up at events. It can even be clicking through and reading emails. It can be responding to an appeal. So it's both a combination of philanthropic motivation or actually making gifts to being engaged in the life of the institution. So, that metric alumni engagement is one that's kind of loosely defined, but one that we are paying a lot of attention to.
Elliot Felix: And if engagement is a key, you know, beyond dollars and cents, um, if that's a way of measuring like advancement success, how do you define and how do you measure like student success?
Nancy Felix: So I was thinking about that question. I feel like there is kind of probably two ways of answering that one is simply: The mission of university is to educate and to produce classes of healthy, engaged adults who have found their passion in life and maybe hopefully have developed a few skills to pursue that passion. And so, to me, that's one way define it. I think the other way of student success is thinking about is the university financially sound and are you taking care of the students that are on campus. So I think that there's kind of student success thinking about the alumni body and then student success thinking about the student experience. And I kind of think they're two different things.
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Elliot Felix: Do you ever see those two sides overlapping or relating? The financial piece versus the student experience?
Nancy Felix: So certainly, an engaged and happy alumni body is going to be more supportive of the institution. And I think Carnegie Mellon has an interesting history there because there was probably about two decades where Carnegie Mellon really didn't pay attention to the student experience. I meet with alumni all the time who are like, Oh yeah, that was a really hard time in my life. It was a grind. I didn't feel supported.
Elliot Felix: How do I just get, how do I get through my classes? How do I get through? Like it was a mill.
Nancy Felix: The words they use would kind of shock me now, if any student actually said that. There were hardly any resources for advising, for mental health, for even scholarships. It just wasn't the culture of the institution then. And so those people look back and say, why would I give you any money? And so it absolutely correlates. Like there's a whole decade that we just almost totally lost because they just had a terrible student experience.
Elliot Felix: It's really interesting. The idea that if people felt supported, then they will support you.
Nancy Felix: I think absolutely.
Elliot Felix: But not the inverse. That's really interesting. I think about the alumni that I've met who want to give to scholarship. Alumni love to give to scholarship. And if they were given a scholarship, they almost always want to give it back.
Elliot Felix: Yeah, I fall squarely in that camp. Um, how, I feel like we're starting to answer this question already, which is how can advancement enable student success and scholarship and support seems like one of it. Let's expand on that a little.
Nancy Felix: Yeah. So, I mean, scholarship absolutely is probably the easiest story to tell and case to make to a potential donor about providing access to an education that a student might not normally have. Um, and if we're doing our job right, we are letting our alumni and our donors make the scholarship relevant to their own life. So if they came from Western Pennsylvania... we're in Western Pennsylvania. They want to give to students who are from Western Pennsylvania. Most donors like to give to students who kind of make them feel like they're giving to their next generation. So they want to give to kids that look and feel like themselves. First generation—I was first generation and I want to give, I'm going to set up a scholarship fund for next generation kids. I was in chemistry and I want to give to students who are studying chemistry. Things like that. That's the easiest and most straightforward way to think about student success and think about how alumni can give to that. But of course, as institutions, we're also investing so much right now in DEI programs and in health and wellness. The health and wellness space is one that is a really great opportunity for donors to give to and to invest in because those are just those are expensive programs to run. Um, we're finding that alumni sometimes don't always get why we're investing so much in health and wellness, but our parents, our parent donors, they really understand it, and they understand why it's important to have support groups.
Elliot Felix: It's almost like we just went through a pandemic that was like a global crisis.
Nancy Felix: So I would say those areas are other areas that are related to student success. That we can engage with donors about and ask for their support in.
Elliot Felix: Yeah. Well, and that support has come up a number of times in this short conversation so far. So if people feel supported, then they will support you financially. But that's also the way that you then support the next generation of students, whether it's mental health or advising or facilities or the other things you mentioned to kind of complete the circle. I feel like telling stories is also part of it. I feel like successful advancement isn't abstract. It's concrete like you get a sense of who are the people? And how will your support help them and what impact are they making in the world?
Nancy Felix: Absolutely. One thing I love about my job and one reason why I've stuck with it for so long is because the stories that people tell about their own experiences, what brought them to Carnegie Mellon or to Dartmouth or whatever university they went to, they all have their unique story. And yet those stories are happening again right now with the students who are coming in today. And so it's almost like it's this universal experience. Um, and I think that donors see that they see their own stories in the students that they're supporting today. And so I think that connection really motivates people to give.
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Elliot Felix: So if there are sort of shifts going on in what resonates with people in terms of health and wellness or in terms of support or seeing that connection, can you talk a little bit about how the advancement world is changing?
Nancy Felix: Yeah, I think that the number one thing that I've seen change in my career is our ability to use data to help us to be more strategic in our work. So we can look at a donor's or a alumni record. And we can see how many times did they come back for reunion? Were they engaged in a fraternal organization? Did they write into the magazine? You know, we can look and see what metrics are there, and then we can use that data to help us to be strategic in reaching out to people. So that helps in kind of the donor engagement outward facing, but it also helps us as advancement organizations prioritize where our resources should be spent. You know, if we're looking and most of our alumni are in the Bay Area, well, then I'm going to send my people to the Bay Area and get to know our female alumni in the Bay Area. Um, but having a really good handle on that data is really important. And the databases now are so much better than they used to be, so that we have the ability to not only capture a lot more data, but also be able to build algorithms that help us to be able to prioritize the activity that we do so much better. That's one of the main things.
I think the other change that I've seen in advancement is the ability for some institutions to engage people who didn't go to the university, so non alumni are becoming some of our major donors in ways that didn't happen in kind of the first half of my career. So, I think that we have high net worth individuals who connect with a faculty member over a specific type of research, and they might make a major gift to the institution, even though they were not affiliated with the institution in any way before that. But they connect with something that we're doing, or something a faculty member is doing, and they want to invest in it. So I've seen 5 or 6 major gifts come to Carnegie Mellon in the last 7 years from people who are totally unaffiliated prior to the initial conversations.
Elliot Felix: You know, it's interesting you mentioned that. I had the good fortune of working on the campaign messaging for the school of architecture at UVA. And one of the really interesting things about that process was you know, as any good consultant, you need a two by two. Um, but we talked about what's the kind of emotional hook? What's the rational hook for someone? Um, and both for people that have some affiliation or connection and someone who doesn't, so you can kind of play in all four of those boxes. And it's just interesting. Cause I totally see what you're saying about people can connect with an idea or a person, even if they didn't graduate there themselves or send a kid there or whatever it may be. I mean, I know in other spheres, fundraising has gone into because it's easier to solicit and track and manage smaller increments, there are smaller and smaller gifts, which people interestingly have higher and higher expectations for control or influence. Are you seeing that? Is that happening with universities as well?
Nancy Felix: Well, I think the message to any non profit is that you have to demonstrate the impact of the gifts to the donors regardless of the amount of the gift. It's so easy to communicate with someone by an email, there's no reason not to communicate that impact. If you are communicating the impact with your higher donors, there's no reason not to communicate with those smaller donors. Um, and so I think that that is how I think about the smaller gifts. I feel like fundraising everybody used to have a pyramid and used to have a few big gifts and then the middle and then the bottom, but that's not the case anymore. Most fundraising is kind of more of a barbell—you've got a group of smaller gifts and you don't have a lot in the middle and then you have some really big gifts at the top end. So I think that as fundraisers we have to rethink the pyramid and come up with some other shapes.
Elliot Felix: And is the barbell base broader because of technology, because you can get so many small gifts and you can thank them personally?
Nancy Felix: Maybe. I'm not so sure. I mean, the good news about working for an Institute of Higher Education is that our constituency gets bigger every year because we graduate another class. So every year we are churning out alumni who become our constituents. So our overall pie keeps getting bigger and so we have the expectation that every year the number of gifts we get should be bigger as well. I'm not so sure that that's the case with every institution because they just don't have that built in factory of churning out potential donors every year.
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Elliot Felix: What's your advice for advancement people that are trying to enable student success and respond to these changes in data and technology and expectations and so forth?
Nancy Felix: So I think that thinking strategically and creatively about engagement is really important. And then building the analytical tools to be able to capture it and to be able to understand what's working and what's not. I think that in higher education, what we're finding is that it's really hard for our fundraisers to get first meetings with people. And I don't know if this is a reflection of the pandemic, but if someone attends an event and meets a fundraiser, they're more likely to take a one on one meeting with that fundraiser than just respond to an email that requests a meeting. And so we have to invest in those events in order to engage our people enough so that they would take that first meeting with the fundraiser. So, I think that knowing that you have to invest in that suite of events to attract a broad range of your alumni is an important piece and then having the resources behind it to take that next step and move someone along the gift pipeline, so to speak.
I think that the other changes that we're seeing is this rise of these higher education adjacent non profits that are really potential funders of our programs. So I don't really work in the athletics field, but certainly there's the rise of the booster programs that are funding a lot of athletic programs and sponsoring students. Again, not my field of expertise at all, but I'm seeing the same thing in the world of science, which is my area of these nonprofits that are being set up by high net worth individuals. They don't want to give directly to one institution. They want to give to collaborations. And so they're setting up these independent nonprofits and funding groups of researchers at multiple institutions. So they don't have to give all of their funding to one institution. It can kind of go to a group of researchers across a number of institutions.
Elliot Felix: Are those also like CBOs that are funding scholarships and other student success? Would you put those in that, like a Posse Foundation or a QuestBridge?
Nancy Felix: Yeah, exactly. That's another good example and thinking about the range of student success topics in terms of athletics or scholarships. Yes, there's a lot of these. Um, and whether that's reflective—and I would love to talk more about this—whether that's reflective of an overall distrust of higher education, I don't know. I think it would be really interesting to kind of dig in and find out if that was the case. You know, that's one thing that we're hearing is that there's a general distrust of higher education these days. So I don't know if that is a result of that, or if people are really trying to be more purposeful and directed in their philanthropy, and they feel that that's one way to do it.
Elliot Felix: So another change is that people are not giving directly to institutions, they're giving to third parties that facilitate or fund certain programs across institutions. And advancement folks now have kind of another job, which is not just building relationships with potential donors, but with these kind of third party intermediate nonprofits.
Nancy Felix: Right. And thinking about it from my seat, we actually don't even have somebody on our advancement team who specializes in that yet.
Elliot Felix: Right, it's not like major gifts or plans. It's not a department. It's not foundations or corporate relations, it's neither one of those. It's not individuals. Where does it sit? That's interesting. Um, yeah, cause it's not an organization type that you're necessarily set up to build a relationship with yet, yet they're a major new player.
Nancy Felix: Yeah.
Elliot Felix: It is interesting to think about why there are these third parties versus giving directly and maybe some of it is trust, but I feel like some of it's also just scale. Like I know the Gates Foundation a few years ago started a program called intermediaries for scale, and they were basically trying to fund people that would work across institutions. And at least in that case, it was really about scale. Like, how can we give one gift that impacts 10 or 100 institutions without having to coordinate without them having to manage relationships with 100 universities. So I think part of it was also the efficiency or the economy of scale. Um, so if people are trying to respond to these changes, they have to build relationships with these new nonprofits, with these intermediaries, they need to think strategically about how they engage people to build those relationships. They need to build analytical tools and capability. What other advice would you tell your former self about advancement in these turbulent times?
Nancy Felix: Well, I think the other thing—thinking about the two things, kind of the third party or higher education adjacent nonprofits, as well as kind of these mega donors, these donors who kind of swoop in and fund something that they think is cool—I think that the key to both of those two constituents that we have not fully cracked yet in higher education is our faculty. And I think that our faculty have far more insight and connections than we give them credit for and we need to build their trust. We have to be able to speak their language at a school like Carnegie Mellon in a very specific discipline like engineering or the sciences. You have to have people who can understand the work of the faculty and who can speak that language. It's critical to building those relationships with the faculty members who then have their own relationships in their own networks.
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Elliot Felix: That's really good advice. Who's doing this well? Carnegie Mellon and beyond, like who's thinking strategically about engagement, who's crushing it when it comes to analytics, who's engaging faculty?
Nancy Felix: I don't think I have insight into enough other universities to say that. I mean, I can say that we did a conversion to Salesforce a few years ago. And I've worked with a lot of different databases and Salesforce has tools that I've never ever seen before. So to me, I love digging into Salesforce and we've got awesome computer scientists or programmers who build tools and dashboards that give me data that I'm just sometimes blown away by. So to me, utilizing those new resources and investing in those is super important. You know, I think about my alma mater. Dartmouth creates—and most of the Ivies, Princeton does it really well too—most of the Ivies create a culture of philanthropy from the day a student gets onto campus. Maybe it's because those campuses are so freaking old. UVA is the same thing. Kids get on that campus and they can feel the history. They can feel how deeply that place has been invested in for generations and generations. And there's something about being on those campuses where that is so steeped into the culture that makes you want to give back. That makes you want to be a part of it. You don't want to just be a blip. You want to be part of that fabric. And somehow those student experiences on those super old campuses just promote that in a way that a newer university like Carnegie Mellon does not have. We don't have that.
Elliot Felix: Going back to the Salesforce and the amazing analytics. What's something you can share that was a piece of analysis and insight that blew you away?
Nancy Felix: We've essentially created an engagement score. We essentially give everybody a score. So we have a hundred thousand people in the database. Everybody has a score one through six or something. And based on literally the number of emails you open, the time you spend on the homepage, the times you open our emails, all of that data, as well as if you go to a happy hour, or a ball game, or whatever, all those things are captured, and if you're a 6th grader, you are highly engaged and my team is going to say, Oh, they'll probably take a meeting with me. They probably loved their Carnegie Mellon experience. So for me having that simple tool, which is not anybody actually looking in record by record by record, but just taking the data we have and assigning those engagement scores to me is a tool that I find incredibly valuable.
Elliot Felix: So you could just be a lot more focused and talk to people who want the conversation. That makes a lot of sense. I see a lot of parallels in content marketing for professional services too, because I put a lot of ideas out there and the whole point is like, see who's responding to them and then those are the people to talk to, don't waste each other's time. Focus on the people who are interested. Any other examples inspire you, people that are doing interesting stuff around advancement for student success?
Nancy Felix: I think that a lot of schools are also being really creative about developing giving opportunities around specific things on campus. And so if that's things like giving to a sports team or, you know, the more bespoke a university can make the giving experience, I think the more we'll be able to keep donors giving year after year. I worked in a place where pretty much if you wanted to be considered an annual donor, you only gave to unrestricted. And there is a movement towards giving more and more restricted gifts to things that really, really speak to you. Whether it's the student theater group, or the volleyball team, or your fraternity, whatever it is, if you can give to what you value, chances are you're going to give it again. My father always used to say, I don't want to give to the cider and donuts fund.
Elliot Felix: That's interesting. So on the one hand that's also a double edged sword, right? Because you're creating bespoke giving opportunities that are restricted, but you have less flexibility in how to allocate those funds.
Nancy Felix: It's true. But if you have a really big endowment, the endowment can fund the unrestricted needs. Some schools really have that. So that's another thing that I think people do really respond to. It is also a great way of people thinking that they're giving to financial aid or scholarships, and then they start thinking about their own fund in the future. So, I think that's another thing that's been successful for a lot of schools. Um, you know, I think that the number one unrestricted need at any school is if the major revenue coming in through philanthropy or through your annual fund every year goes to financial aid, it really helps the operating budget.
Elliot Felix: Gotcha. Well, Nancy, thank you for a fascinating conversation about advancement and student success. Anything we didn't cover that you want to add as you think about the future?
Nancy Felix: One thing that we didn't really talk about is the role of social media and the fact that there are so many avenues to connect with alumni and with potential donors and that is something that universities have to invest in and you have to drill down like even departments. You need everybody on your campus because you don't know which alum is going to say hey I want to follow the cheerleading squad or I want to follow this. And we need to be investing in that in a way, and we need to be able to figure out how to embed advancement messages into all social media, and really connect with the platforms that our younger alumni are on.
Elliot Felix: Are you on TikTok?
Nancy Felix: Part of me is for sure.
Elliot Felix: I mean. I would think reading about or posting about or following on social media would also contribute to that engagement score that we were talking about before, right?
Nancy Felix: Yeah, exactly. For sure.
Elliot Felix: It would be interesting to see like what counts more—opening an email or following the cheerleading team or hitting like on Instagram. Which counts more, a like or an open?
Nancy Felix: There's some algorithm for that. I'm sure.
Elliot Felix: Interesting. Well, thank you so much, Nancy. This is really great. I appreciate your insights. Keep doing what you're doing, you're doing great work.
Nancy Felix: I love what I do. Thank you so much.
Elliot Felix: Thanks for listening to the connected college podcast. Subscribe to my Connected College Newsletter at ElliotFelix.com for insights and excerpts from my upcoming book, tools you can download, and special offers. You can also find more information about talks I've given, articles I've written, and upcoming events there, and please support the podcast by rating and reviewing it wherever you're listening. Let's create connected colleges where students will succeed.