Data hygiene.
Not the sexiest term, I’ll grant you, but it’s one of the most important priorities a college or university’s advancement office—and its overall administration—can pursue.
It’s also one of the first places Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s former chief education strategy officer, would look to if she were helping an advancement team improve its alumni engagement efforts.
What is data hygiene? It starts with making sure information about students, alumni, faculty, and staff is entered into university databases accurately and consistently in the first place. But accurate data sitting in siloes won’t help much. The bigger challenge is having systems that can securely share that information across divisions and departments. When different divisions and departments all have access to the same data, no one office has to work off a partial picture. And none of this works without having clear rules for who can access personally identifiable data and how they’re expected to use it.
Why does this matter in advancement? Take this example:
A gift officer discovers that an alum is the CEO of a fast-growing tech company. The advancement office is collecting information in their Raiser’s Edge database about this alum as they cultivate her for a major gift.
At the same time, the Career Center is trying to build a relationship with this alum in hopes of creating a bespoke internship program with her company. They’re building a profile for her in Handshake.
But the databases aren’t connected.
So, the gift officer and the director of Career Services each reach out to the alum independently. The alum doesn’t have much free time, so she only accepts one of the invitations. Secretly, she wonders why each office doesn’t just coordinate to meet with her together—but that’s not her concern.
This is a painfully common phenomenon. One office gets in. The other one’s left out. In the best case, this scenario leads to toes getting stepped on and egos getting bruised. In the worst case, it can completely turn the alum off to any kind of engagement with the institution.
“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing if they’re not sharing,” Cruzvergara told Ryan Catherwood on the Speaking Engagement Keynote podcast. The vital question becomes “what system or process are you putting into place to actually share information? And even if it’s not literally opening up your platform or giving the executive of the Career Center access to log into your platform, there has to be a regular stream of information that is flowing in both directions.”
With interoperable databases, each office on campus with access is working from a single source of truth about their constituents. Returning to the previous example: Let’s say the university has gotten its act together and implemented an enterprise-wide database for constituent information. The Career Center has received word this alum has received a big award and updates her record. The major gifts officer sees that activity and sees an opportunity to connect.
But before they do: the gift officer connects with the Career Center to see if they’re planning to do any outreach to the alum. Turns out, they were hoping to capitalize on this opportunity, too. So, instead of making separate attempts to speak with the alum, they make a combined ask to meet. The alum accepts the invitation, during which they discuss potential internship opportunities for students and a potential gift to the school from which the alum graduated.
With a central, integrated, and continuously updated database—and, of course, some governance developed around it—colleges and universities can connect with everyone in their orbit more efficiently and effectively. This work matters beyond advancement, too. As more institutions pilot and scale AI tools to support fundraising and engagement, a trustworthy database is the foundation that those tools depend on. An LLM trained on duplicate, outdated, or fragmented records can exacerbate the problems and bottlenecks it’s meant to solve.
With accurate data becoming the lifeblood of alumni engagement and fundraising teams in the 21st century, data hygiene has never been more important. And for many colleges and universities, it’s beyond time to wash up.
Kristin Simonetti Hanson is an award-winning editorial content strategist, writer, and editor based in Baltimore, Md.
For nearly 20 years, she’s served higher ed and nonprofit organizations with her distinctive, creative voice and sharp, strategic insight, turning complex priorities into clear, compelling narratives. In 2021—after working in-house for Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, and Elon University—she went out on her own, founding Kristin Hanson Writes, LLC.
Register for our Next Agora
Topic: Talent Development
Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity
Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.
Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion
Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
Big Themes This Week
Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.
The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.
Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.
The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.
In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.
Team Discussion Questions
Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?
Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?
Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?
Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?
How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?
