Oh the Places You'll Go: Using Data and Reporting to Inform A Holistic Travel Strategy

While a significant portion of its nearly 150,000 alumni are local, 59% of University of Denver's alumni reside beyond the Denver-metro area. This presents an interesting challenge partnering with development leadership to develop a functional and effective travel strategy when all fundraisers want to visit regional prospects and feel as though they own a particular market or region. With both generalist and unit-based fundraisers eager to travel, DU must manage frontline travel effectively to ensure fundraisers target markets with strong prospect pools, supporting both individual and university-wide goals.

After years of unfocused strategy and travel to overcrowded markets, join the University of Denver's Strategic Analytics and Prospect Development team on our journey to use data-driven insights and prospect pool analyses to make recommendations for territory realignment, earn trust and buy-in from key stakeholders, and roll out a new travel planning dashboard to ensure the right fundraisers are seeing the right prospects.

Learning Objectives:

Attendees will learn strategies to discuss and interpret prospect pool data to inform leadership decisions around regional market coverage.
Attendees will learn how to leverage interactive dashboards using custom zip-code based boundaries and other filters for travel planning and list generation.

Peter Kotowski

Director, Prospect Development

University of Denver

Pete Kotowski is the Director of Prospect Development for the University of Denver. In this role, he is responsible for implementing a prospect management system, overseeing prospect identification processes and research efforts, and division-wide pipeline management as DU enters the public phase of its capital campaign. Prior to this, Pete held a number of roles on the Prospect Management & Research team at Loyola University Chicago, where he also serves as an adjunct professor in the Department of History. Pete has served in a number of volunteer rolls with Apra International and Apra-IL, including serving as a member of the Apra International Conference Planning Committee and as the current president of Apra-IL. Pete has a BA in History and Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a PhD in American History from Loyola University Chicago, where his research focused on the relationship between Quakerism, conceptions of manhood, and unfree labor in early Pennsylvania.