Mount Union College

Mount Union College Uses Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow to Streamline Processes and Engage Alumni Online

Mount Union College offers a liberal arts education grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The College affirms the importance of reason, open inquiry, living faith, and individual worth. Mount Union’s mission is to prepare students for meaningful work, fulfilling lives, and responsible citizenship. Mount Union was founded in 1846 by Orville Nelson Hartshorn as a place where men and women could be educated with equal opportunity, science would parallel the humanities, and there would be no distinction due to race, color, or sex.

The Challenge

• Mount Union College was spending far too much time manually entering data. It had to manually enter donations taken from its makeshift online form into its database, The Raiser’s Edge®.
• It had to manually enter all alumni biographical updates and changes. When the college sent its quarterly magazine, it would include a postcard for alumni to mail back updated information.
• The alumni office would get flooded with postcards that had changes and updates that needed to be entered — sometimes up to 100 in a day!
• Finally, all event registrations and donations had to be manually entered. For Mount Union, this became too much work.

The Solution

• The College choose Blackbaud NetCommunity Grow to diminish the pain and time caused by continuous manual data entry.
• “Grow” provides the three primary pieces of functionality the College needed, including the ability to provide a secure place for donors to contribute online, online event registrations, and the ability for alumni to change biographical information online.
• Because Grow integrates with The Raiser’s Edge, updates made online are automatically updated in The Raiser’s Edge.
• Grow enables Mount Union to provide a deeper and more engaging online experience for its alumni.

The Results

• Boost in Online Accounts: Within the first few months of the new site being live, more than 1,300 alumni created online accounts.
• Dramatic Time Savings: It used to take the college about 30 minutes to enter 50 gifts; now with Grow, the College saves approximately an hour each day because it no longer has to manually enter gifts.
• Increase in Online Registrations: Mount Union’s first event enabling online registration had a majority of event attendees register online.