How the University of Notre Dame uses hierarchies for prospecting
Highlights
- The Data Integrity team searched for ways to improve data quality as they moved over to Salesforce
- Complete Hierarchies helped clean up their data and visualize relationships amongst their accounts
- The Corporate Relations team uses Complete Hierarchies to navigate complex accounts, aiming to secure sponsorships, grants, and pledges
Overview
The University of Notre Dame was founded in 1842 and has since become one the leading teaching institutions in the United States.
The Challenge
The University of Notre Dame was kicking off a project to migrate from Advance Web to Salesforce. The first phase of the project was migrating accounts and contacts from Advance Web to Salesforce. However, the account data within Advance Web was not clean.
Migrating corporate donations (opportunities) and merging account records was going to be a tremendously complicated process for our Data Integrity team.
– Dean Ernzen, Program Director, Business Optimization
They decided to use batch cleansing from Dun & Bradstreet and Data.com to help identify potential duplicate accounts. Merging duplicate accounts was particularly challenging because many had opportunities associated with them.
Solution
The Data Integrity team decided to use Complete Hierarchies in four key areas:
- Automatically linking accounts in their legal corporate family trees using DUNS numbers
- Displaying the contacts and opportunities related to the account hierarchy in a single view
- Identifying duplicate accounts and providing on the spot merge functionality
- Running roll-up summary reports to gain a true understanding of how an account is engaging with the university and its overall value
Results
The University of Notre Dame has been using Complete Hierarchies to maintain their data cleanliness, thereby supporting the Data Integrity team.
The Corporate Relations team utilizes Complete Hierarchies to understand and build on existing relationships in Salesforce. They can easily see which companies have provided sponsorships, grants, pledges or named gifts and use that information to prospect into other levels of the family tree. They are also able to quickly understand how much companies have given in the past year, as well as their entire lifetime.
The career center at the University of Notre Dame is also using Complete Hierarchies to monitor and report on alumni relations. They are tracking companies that are coming to campus to interview and hire students, and using roll-up reporting on the number of Notre Dame alumni that are working within a particular family tree, company or industry.
The Corporate Relations team also utilizes the career center’s data to connect directly with alumni and ask for introductions to other influencers in larger organizations.
