CASE STUDY: How Georgia Tech Digitalized Donor Engagement to Secure $1B+ and Achieve Record Fundraising Years
iFOLIO System Powered $175 million in Gifts and a $2 Billion Capital Campaign
Replacing manual, inconsistent communications with a branded, personalized digital storytelling engine purpose-built for major gift fundraising
Direct ROI = $175 Million raise via iFOLIO
(including 7 and 8 figure major gifts)
Enterprise Scale
26 Unit System
Unifying Development, Marketing, PR, Communications, and Operations
$2 Billion Capital Campaign
330K+ Donor Touchpoints
Deeper Insights
Patented engagement analytics tracking 20 distinct data points
in real-time.
Massive Reach
Scaled operations to coordinate 330,000+
personalized donor touchpoints
The Challenge
Georgia Tech Development is responsible for all major gifts, corporate giving, foundation relations, and alumni engagement across a community of 188,000+ alumni and 56,000 enrolled students. Despite a world-class institution, the communications infrastructure was stuck in a print-first era.
Georgia Tech Development realized they needed to modernize digital infrastructure to scale and connect and engage strategic donors, better, faster, and more effectively.
Key challenges:
Sending bulky physical brochures, folders, and booklets resulted in:
• Engagement Dead-Ends: Static text failed to compete for donor attention, averaging just 8 seconds of engagement.
• High Waste from heavy dependence on printed booklets and mailings — with over 50% never reaching the intended recipient
• No ability to deliver personalized digital storytelling at scale
• Zero visibility into donor engagement after a proposal was sent
• Disparate Systems: Multiple teams operated in silos without a centralized infrastructure to build, review, and track highly personalized donor communications.
The Solution: A Unified, 26-Unit Digital Storytelling Engine
Georgia Tech modernized its digital infrastructure by integrating the iFOLIO Cloud across 26 institutional units in a single connected system with dedicated brands, users, and media. This scaled fundraising operations across teams into a single, cohesive ecosystem.
Using iFOLIO’s template system and personalization automation, teams quickly and seamlessly built, reviewed, and shared critical collateral transformed in trackable digital assets, scaling to 330,000 donor touch points. This replaced manual, inconsistent communications with a branded, automated digital storytelling engine — purpose-built for major gift fundraising.
Record Breaking Results
Despite launching during the 2020 pandemic, Georgia Tech turned its first year with iFOLIO into its best development years to date, securing $175 Million through engagement and asks driven via the platform.
Major Gift Highlights:
- Individual major gifts of $10M, $7.5M, and $5M.
- Four distinct seven-figure gifts.
- Targeted campaigns fully funding Track and Field Facilities and
- Targeted campaigns fully reaching Corporate Development goals.
- A matching gift campaign for GT Swim & Dive completely filled in just 5 weeks.
Donor commendation on iFOLIO included:
- "Nice use of innovation and technology" - $7.5 Million Donor
- "We should be doing more of this" - $8.5 Million Donor
Analytics
After a campaign or a portfolio presentation, Georgia Tech used iFOLIO’s patented heat map analytics to know donor's reactions.
They can see opens, clicks on links, and which donors most engaged inside the portfolios, including what block of content got the most interest.
Now, development officers could engage and converse with donors who they knew were active with their targeted marketing campaigns.
This process saves time and boosts team morale.
