Florida A&M University · HBCU · University Advancement
From waiting on reports to owning their data
- Solution
- AskMoose
- Systems
- Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT, Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT
- Engagement
- 4-week pilot, expanding university-wide
Background
The infrastructure was there. The access was not.
FAMU is an HBCU and a major public research university with a growing advancement operation, dedicated central staff, and a full Blackbaud environment.
Only the central University Advancement team could log into Blackbaud Raiser's Edge NXT. Every college that needed a report submitted a request and waited, sometimes days. Individual colleges had no visibility into their own fundraising, no way to identify their donors, and no path to self-sufficiency.
Kimberly Hankerson, AVP for Major and Principal Giving, had seen this solved at Florida State. When she arrived at FAMU she went looking for the same capability.
The Challenge
Four problems, one root cause.
The College of Law was chosen as the pilot deliberately, because it is one of the most complex colleges at FAMU to work with. If it worked there it would work anywhere.
No direct data access.
College staff could not log into Raiser's Edge NXT. Every request went through central advancement, creating a bottleneck on both sides.
Slow, inflexible reporting.
Weekly reports from the central team were never instantaneous and never tailored to what a college needed in the moment.
Unknown donors.
Without visibility into giving patterns, the College of Law did not know who its regular donors were or how to steward them.
Manual workarounds.
Finance staff maintained spreadsheets across 20-plus accounts by hand from monthly exports, perpetually behind.
The Engagement
Four weeks. Real data. No shortcuts.
Nothing was staged or simulated. The pilot ran on live Raiser's Edge NXT and Financial Edge NXT data from the first week.
Mapped reporting priorities with staff. Ingested live data from your systems into a dedicated environment.
Donor records, transaction distributions, and project IDs loaded and validated. Sample compliance and reconciliation reports replicated on live data.
Reports generated, dashboards built, data exported in real time. Staff began running their own queries mid-session.
Staff completed assigned queries independently. Credentials issued. Pilot concluded with no Data Moose staff in the room.
I didn't realize these people were giving us this money on a regular basis.
Outcomes
What changed by week four.
- Self-service data access for the first time, with no Raiser's Edge NXT login required
- Regular donors identified for the first time, so stewardship could start
- ABA compliance reports and gift reconciliation on demand from live Financial Edge NXT data
- Reporting burden on central advancement dropped significantly
- The pilot became the proven model for a phased university-wide rollout, with University Advancement, Engineering, and Pharmacy next
Why This Matters
The gap between the data an organization has and the data its people can reach is one of the most consistent friction points in the sector.
AskMoose closes that gap regardless of what system the data lives in. It is not a replacement for the CRM. It is the layer that makes what an organization already has reachable by the people who need it.