Advancement Tableau User Group 15 Sep 2026

0:00 Ron Eisenstein: Thank you for joining us, uh, for this presentation. Really, really excited to see the folks at Iowa State University Foundation share their expertise and wisdom. Uh, as I was expressing before this presentation, they have, um, a, uh, a, a very strong reputation, uh, for being on the cutting edge. I saw them maybe five, six years ago, and they were just, like, always ahead of, um, where people want to go, so that is really exciting.

0:33 Um, and, uh, uh, we're gonna start with Tushar. And just so you know, um, questions are certainly encouraged, but, uh, we will hold off on answering them to the very end. But just feel free to put them in there.

0:48 Um, thank you, uh, again, uh, for joining us. And with that, I will pass it on to the team.

0:56 Stacey Barnes: All right. Thanks, Ron. And thanks, Jessie, for the invite. We're excited to be here with this group today.

1:03 Um, and so I'm actually gonna start us off and introduce the session. Uh, my name's Stacey Barnes, and I lead our analytics team here at the Iowa State Foundation.

1:14 Um, Catie and Tushar are gonna give you the technical details and talk about the product that we're really excited about today, which is, um, walking you through this fundraising mapping solution. But first, I just wanted to talk, um, broadly for just a few minutes.

1:32 And, and so in my role, really what I'm trying to do is set the Tableau analytics vision for the organization more broadly than just, like, the individual products.

1:45 And a little bit of our background is, so we invested in Tableau Cloud about two and a half to three years ago now, and at the time, we decided, um, because we were moving away from Cognos, and the user feedback that we got was, "W- I'm always in the CRM, you know, always in Salesforce, um, pretty much daily, and I don't want to have to keep navigating to another platform." And so that was the time where we decided we're really gonna lean into this Salesforce-Tableau integration that's offered.

2:19 And so right now we have about 250 users in our platform, and they are all consuming the Tableau dashboards, Tableau products that we're making through Salesforce. So as of… I mean, we're kind of growing out of that model now, and we'll eventually start directing people to Tableau Cloud for specific use cases. But right now, the big overarching concepts that we're doing, everybody is consuming those through Salesforce.

2:49 Um, and so I think, you know, I'm gonna walk you through what that looks like as an end user. And part of my motivation for doing this is we really wanna connect with all of you.

2:59 Um, if there's things that we are missing that you, you…

3:03 that you're like, "Oh, this dashboard was a slam dunk analysis that we did," um, we would love to connect with you on LinkedIn or, um, through email, whatever channel works best, to just be able to share more ideas.

3:18 Okay, so what we're gonna do, we're gonna kick off a video that's about three or four minutes long, and the intention of that is to walk you through, like, what is the users', the end users', like, current state right now when they log into Salesforce. What can they see? What can they navigate? And then, like I say, I'll pass that on then to Catie to talk a little bit about the theory and the building, um, that we use to set up this product for the mapping tool, and then Tushar will walk through, like, the functionality of the actual mapping tool.

3:50 So the thing you'll notice as the video starts is that it is gonna show you right away a Tableau-embedded dashboard that we have on our homepage.

4:02 Now, this is showing all of those high-level KPIs that we have, right, for fundraising and donor counts.

4:09 And then immediately then I've navigated to the development team tab.

4:14 What you see on this development team tab, this is our primary hub for anyone whose responsibilities are direct fundraising.

4:23 So they are navigating here through various different tabs that are to break down their portfolio. So we have lots of different filters on here. Um, they can navigate to people who have funding opportunities or proposals entered, and then people who don't, just view various different scoring that we have available, like with our, working with our prospect management team.

4:47 Next here as I scroll down is, uh, the mapping tool. So this is the, the second piece of the mapping tool that Tushar will talk about, where you can look across the entirety of the US and drill down to a particular state or a particular city, or in this example here, just look at where your managed people are across the US.

5:11 As we scroll down again, this is where their development officer metrics are. So they can search by department or by individual to look at the counts that they have on qualifications, solicitations, contact reports, any of that that we're tracking. And all of that has multiple different tabs that they can drill into and then, say, like, click on an individual contact report and have that all directly in Salesforce.

5:38 Next here, we navigate into our SAT dashboard. This is intended for our executive level folks to be able to get a quick view of what are those most important KPIs across the organization.

5:52 And then we have not any tabs here, but we have a lot of built-in tooltips so they can hover and see, well, this is production as it stands today, and, like, what it stood at year to date for, like, the last four or five fiscal years.

6:07 Underneath that then, when the executive team or someone at the AVP level requests additional data, this is where we're embedding it, is just underneath on that same tab.

6:19 We're doing some work with events, and this is probably an area where if anyone has feedback on good ways that they have tracked the ROI of events or particular visuals that people liked, we would love to hear feedback on that.

6:34 And then I'm not gonna g- this video doesn't go through all the tabs, but you can see there we're just, like, building out this model where we have several different tabs and several different dashboards kind of building on each other underneath to try to create these, these hubs of information.

6:51 And then what's gonna happen next here, so I'm gonna type in Tushar's name in the search bar, and it is navigating to his personal donor page that we have in our Salesforce CRM.

7:03 And you can see it opens his page, and then we navigate across to the prospect mapping tool. So this is what Tushar and Catie will talk more about.

7:13 If Tushar had multiple addresses, this would be showing multiple stars right now on this page so that we could select, you know, which place am I gonna visit Tushar in. In this case, I'm visiting him in Ankeny.

7:26 Selecting a few other filters which, uh, Catie'll have more details on how we're sort of navigating these. And then you can see there at the bottom I'm asking it to show me the surrounding people to Tushar, and so it's just gonna then have this capability there to zoom in, um, and eventually just, like, select that group of people, uh, using either a cursor or a box, whatever the preferred method is to grab those people that are around Tushar, who is sort of my anchor visit.

8:02 Um, so with that, I think, like I say, reach out if there's anything you think that, uh, we've missed in there that was really successful for you. Um, and then particularly with things like events, that would be very helpful.

8:15 Um, and Catie, I'll pass it on to you.

8:19 Catie Wram: Thanks, Stacey. Okay. So like Stacey kind of mentioned, our big problem here that we were trying to solve was that development officers need a fast visual way to identify high-potential households in geographies where they're traveling.

8:35 So sort of the first part of this was trying to understand, um, you know, what a develop- questions a development officer might ask when they're planning their trips. They wanna know who is near the households that they manage.

8:48 Of those nearby, who should I visit? Um, you know, households that have the greatest giving potential or have high engagement with the university.

8:56 Um, are they located in a, a relatively convenient, uh, travel route to where I'm going? And are there any special indicators about them that make this the time that I should now interact with them? Um, thinking about their capacity to give, engagement, affiliations, um, stuff like that.

9:16 So, um, what makes a household a top prospect? These were sort of the four indicators that we looked at that we then sort of put into this mapping product. Um, so the first was propensity to give. Um, what's a household's propensity-to-give score? Is there an ideal score for a household to have that makes them a good, um, target for soliciting?

9:37 Um, has a household, uh, reached philanthropic milestones that indicate that they're ready to give a major plus gift? And these I'll talk a bit more about. We, um, looked at our historical data to kind of indicate what these might be.

9:51 Um, and then third is engagement. How engaged are w- they with Iowa State? Are they receiving our mass text messaging? Are they volunteering? Um, receiving emails and phone calls from the phone center? And then finally, you know, most critically, what's their wealth? Do they actually have the capacity to give a major plus gift?

10:11 Okay. So we'll look kind of at this first one, propensity to give, first.

10:15 Uh, so a little bit of background on our propensity-to-give scoring. We get these scores for each of our constituents through Windfall. They're our vendor. Um, and they have developed three different models for us, one for major gifts, planned gifts, and annual gifts. Um, each provides, uh, each constituent with a score in each of these models from zero to 100, and then we get this information refes- refreshed weekly.

10:40 And, um, these models are based on, um, historical giving and other donor information that we provide to Windfall, and then information they collect. Um, so for our major gift model, really the objective for that model is identifying constituents with the ability to become a new major donor, um, in a one-year period.

11:00 Uh, for the planned gift model, we care about if they can give a $100,000-plus gift as a planned gift. And then finally, the annual giving is three consecutive years of giving, but this wasn't really the focus of our, our mapping tool, but just another model that we, we use from Windfall.

11:19 Okay. So what does a propensity-to-give scoring look like in our constituent base? So each of these graphs I've binned the PTG score, um, by 10 here, and then the number of our, um, households that fall into those bins is on the, the y-axis here. So you can see both for the major and the planned gifts, the majority of our constituents are falling before, uh, below a score of 10.

11:43 Um, but when we think about the top 10% of our households, um, we can create thresholds in each of these different scoring systems. So for major gifts, the top, top 10% of our households have a score above 11, and for planned gifts, um, they have a score above eight. So these are sort of, um, important, uh, metrics we w- will utilize next to sort of create our top, um, prospect group.

12:11 The other, uh, group we cared about were, uh, households that have a score of 50 more in e- in either of these categories, um, because they represent such a small, um, part of our database, and also they, we have a lot of confidence in their, uh, likelihood of giving a major or a planned gift.

12:34 Okay, so the next thing we're gonna look at is the readiness for major plus gifts. So have households met certain philanthropic milestones?

12:43 So sort of the first milestone we looked at was how many philanthropic gifts has a household given before their first major gift?

12:52 So here in this graph, I've plotted, um, each, uh, fiscal year that a donor could have, like, gave their first major gift, and then the average number of gifts that donor would have given prior to that gift.

13:05 Um, so when we look at the sort of our 10-year average, you can see we have a, a spike here in 2018, which is a campaign year for us. But over the past 10 years and, um, we really saw consistency here of about 30 gifts is what was the average that a household gave before they gave their first major gift.

13:24 And so when we think about, um, that threshold, we can then translate that into a sort of a binary yes/no, does a household meet this, this criteria? So here we use a lot of fixed equations, um, to build, to build out this dash- these dashboards in. Um, here I've just indicated has a, has a household had more than 30 philanthropic gifts? And if they do, they get a one, um, or else they'll get a zero.

13:51 And you're getting a little sneak peek here of we also included wealth in this, this, um, equation.

13:59 So the next milestone we looked at was, um, you know, in the previous one, we didn't really care what the size of the gift was, so we were just looking at quantity. Here we cared about the dollar amount. So how… What was the production for donors prior to giving their first major gift? So this would be the total, um, from before they gave that gift.

14:20 So it's the same sort of graph here, but instead of on the y accent- y-axis, we have production.

14:26 So again, we're, w- in the past 10 years, we've stayed fairly consistent, um, with an average being of $42,610 and 85 cents.

14:37 Um, and so we use that sort of as our threshold for the second milestone. And again, we, um, used a similar, um, equation to, fixed equation, oops, to the last one, just looking at production total rather than number of gifts.

14:56 So once we had these first two groups, we can start to combined our information we have about households with their PTG score and whether or not they've made these different milestones. So here we had this group where we cared about had they had any sort of philanthropic giving, and are they in this 10%, top 10% of households? And from there, we broke down by have they met this first milestone, the second one?

15:23 Are they meeting the first milestone and they have a, a fairly high PTG score, um, the second milestone and a high PTG score, and then finally, both these milestones and a high PTG score. So we think the, this last group in particular are really primed to be, um, ready to give a major gift.

15:43 So how this kind of looks in Tableau, here I've put each of the, the, um, level of detail expressions for each of these different groups that we made. And again, it's just a, a yes/no, one or zero. Did this household meet these different requirements?

16:01 Okay. So the third, um, indicator we looked at was engagement. So how engaged is the household with Iowa State? So we sort of created a grid system where we looked at, um, a households receiving a mass emails, they're receiving a mass texting, answering phone calls from the phone center, and volunteering. And so we've kind of grouped people by, by those different variables and whether, how they're engaging with those.

16:28 So our non-reachable households are ones where we don't have any contact information for them. We don't have a phone or an email.

16:35 Um, the unsubscribed group is they've opted out of all of our mass, um, communication. So we have, um, contact info, but they are opting out of that, um, mass communication.

16:48 The next is reachable by one channel, so they aren't opted out of at least one of our modes of communication.

16:56 Um, the next are the non-responsive group. So they're receiving our phone calls and our emails, but they haven't engaged with them. So they're not answering the phone, or they're not opening the email.

17:06 Um, and then finally, we have our engaged by one or multiple. And so the, uh, with the one, they're doing one of these things. Um, and then w- multiple, they have a combination of at least two, um, of these engagement styles that they're, they're doing.

17:23 So we really care about this, these latter part of this grid because these are the folks that have a sh- you know, potentially have a stronger affinity to the university. They care about receiving messaging from the university and, and are engaging with us.

17:38 Um, so it was pretty gnarly looking if statement to try to group out all of these people, but I think this is an, a nice thing to show that, uh, how we actually did this. Um, and so first up here we have sort of our unsubscribed group. Um, we wanted to put that first because if someone is engaging in an e- uh, opening an email but it's only to unsubscribed, we don't really want that to, that to count as, uh, engaging, um, because really they don't want that communication from us.

18:09 Um, but here I've kind of just gone in order of highest level engagement to the, the least.

18:17 Okay. So then the final aspect we looked at, of course, is wealth. So when we kind of put this together, we thought about two, um, different groups of marketplaces. So our first was sort of our high level of our pyramid in the marketplace is our principal and leadership group, and these folks have a wealth rating of a million plus. And so in this group, because it's a much smaller group of constituents, we didn't really care where they fa- fell on this, um, and philanthropic PTG, um, engagement threshold because, um, there– it's a limited group of people, and if they're showing one of these indicators, that, that's a good sign.

18:56 Um, and we f– we're again, we're focusing on this, um, smaller portion of folks that are more engaged. So when we combine these three things together, we get our, our top prospect for this marketplace.

19:08 When thinking more about the major gift level marketplace, this is a much larger group of constituents, so we really wanted to limit, um, the group by folks that are meeting these milestones and have really high PTG scores.

19:25 Um, and so this is what made a top prospect for the major gift marketplace.

19:31 And so now I'll turn it over to Tushar.

19:34 Tushar Sharma: All right. Thank you. Thank you, Catie. Um, so the very first use case scenario, um, that we do get after noting down all the different points that Catie just m- uh, mentioned is like for a development officer, a very big question is what prospects are within a certain mile radius of my prospect that I could meet with?

19:54 So they are interested in meeting a person, and they want to see they've got either half a day open on their, uh, you know, schedule, or they want to meet some potential people around that particular individual they're interested in. So this is where, uh, we were able to, uh, create a mapping product for this.

20:12 So as Stacey mentioned in her point that this is the, um, screenshot here right now. This is the, um, profile, uh, for Salesforce for this individual, which is myself. And while you do hover towards the prospecting map tab on the right here, uh, this is where you will be able to see, uh, the whole map of US with this gold star, which is myself, which is the current person that you're on, on whose profile you're on.

20:40 So on the right-hand side, you will see all the filters, um, and the number of households in view, which in this case it's just myself who is selected here.

20:48 And, um, then I will explain this a little bit, but we have the normal filters like state, city where you want to focus on. You've got the propensity to give scores, both major and planned. And we have a slider in place so that you can increase or decrease it based on the am- amount of people that you want to see, uh, while you are running this tool.

21:08 We also have this concept called affinity, which is a parameter, and it is running, um, via the calculation that I've shown on the left. Uh, so basically, we listed out every single segment, every single credit reporting unit that we have in terms of where people like to give. But also, um, we wanted to make sure that if I did graduate from, for example, College of Business, but I only give to College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, that I would still come up in College of Business affinity just because I graduated from that college, not necessarily that I do give to it.

21:42 But if a development officer from College of Business was interested in a donor visit, they could potentially look at somebody who has either, um, gone to College of Business for college or given to College of Business, um, in this matter. And then we also– this is very tweakable, um, in the sense that if we want to, um, divide certain segments, for example, veterinary medicine here, this was all one, um, segment that we had initially.

22:08 But we got some feedback that let's split the veterinary clients, um, out of veterinary medicine. So it was quite an, quite a bit of an easy change to make. So it is very tweakable, uh, based on the user feedback that we receive.

22:21 Um, and then the next is when we do check on that filter that tells us that I want to see the current person or I want to see the surrounding people around that current person. So we do have a parameter in place wherein we look at your individual Salesforce profile, and that, that current person is tagged into their individual profile link. So what that means is that you could be on my profile, and you would see my addresses that I do have, and the moment you switch to S- Stacey's profile, for example, then you will be able to see her profile and her, um, gold star essentially, which is where she has, um, her current address or multiple addresses in case that's the case.

23:04 So I'm also using a second, um, table calculation here to use that parameter of displaying the current person, but also switching it to when the user picks up the surrounding people, uh, to make sure that not only do we see the surrounding people, but we do also see the current person in that view.

23:24 And then one of the very common requests that we get is, "I am going to a location. I'm going to a certain individual. I want to see anybody within a mile distance, ten miles distance." So in this case, we are using out-of-the-box Tableau functionality wherein you can click and drag and select your intended radius that you want to look at. So this is the radial tool wherein I've clicked and dragged based on the person that I'm interested in.

23:49 And you can see it's about half a mile outside of that individual that you'll be able to see all the potential people that might exist. So this is also a way for us to select this. Um, and then also we do have this tool tip here where it gives you sort of like a bird's-eye view of, you know, something about the household, who all exist in the household, total production, and who is managing them in case they are managed.

24:15 Then once you do make the selection using this tool here, then on the next page you do get what is called this list view, wherein if you do hover on here, which is their Salesforce profile, uh, you will be able to see a lot more information about that household. O- obviously, who's managing them Their household, how it looks like, qualification status, different PTG scores, giving details.

24:39 And also, let's say, um, that you do see somebody else in this list and you're interested in their profile, then we do also have this hyperlink here that will directly take you to that new person's Salesforce profile if you were interested in somebody else.

24:54 And once you do– um, once you're confident with your list view, then you can download the list view, and this will give you an Excel file, because who doesn't like an Excel file export? So this is where, um, we give that freedom out to the development officers, uh, to make the decisions based on their criteria, based on their comfortability, and, um, they're able to, um, highlight them, sort them, and use them as they please.

25:19 Uh, but then at the very least, obviously, we are not making these decisions for them, but we are helping them make some more data-driven enabled decisions. And all of these things that I showed here, including a selection on this page, they're all driven by dashboard actions that we have in place.

25:37 The second use case scenario is that you do actually are going to an ISU event where you are going to meet your managed donors. So one thing for sure, we know that you are a DO and you are interested in looking at your managed people. But guess what? You have more time, and you want to maximize that travel and that money that was spent to send you there.

25:57 Um, and so you also want to look for potential prospects around that event location.

26:03 So in this case, um, I'm gonna break this statement out into essentially what it means to us, the Tableau developers, that a DO is looking forward to, they're interested in seeing my managed people, seeing my interested people. These are the people that they do not manage, but they might be looking in terms of like, um, maybe I'm gonna manage them in the future or, um, I have met them, but I don't know if they are the right prospects yet, but still I'm interested in this person.

26:31 Uh, the next is, I want to see the unmanaged prospects in an area, um, and then see unmanaged households with major gift scores or planned gift PTG scores of fifty-plus. I've written here fifty-plus. It can be tweaked to anything within a range of zero to hundred. Uh, so if you are in a location where you are not seeing quite a few people that… then you might wanna reduce that slider of those PTG scores, but, um, and vice versa on the opposite side.

26:56 Um, so one thing to do, do note here is that for looking at your managed people, um, we do have, I will show, show this to you in the next slides, but essentially a section where you pick a manager name and then you do pick if you're the primary manager on them, uh, secondary, interested, unmanaged or managed by someone else.

27:17 Um, and then we also have special populations here where there are certain teams like governors, um, like ISU retired faculty and staff. There are some teams that are only focused on these specific individuals. So we did have to create, um, special populations for them so that you can pick and choose based on what sort of people do you want to see on the, um, prospecting map.

27:40 So this is how the first screen of the tool looks like. We have the normal filters like s– uh, state, city, affinity, that are similar to the previous tool I showed. But then this is where that management magic happens. So this is where you do pick that manager, and then you do select all the different, um, opportunities that you have to in terms of the manager type.

28:01 And then obviously we have this, uh, populations field here and also the instructions document. This was created, um, in case you need a refresher on the, on the tool. Uh, so this is where you will be able to– essentially it's a PDF document that will tell you the different functionalities of the tool.

28:20 And coming back to what Catie just explained, the different ways of looking at different, um, segments. In this case, this is how she picked up the top prospect segment. So I used that to create a legend here, which is also visible on the map, but that explains what every single segment means. In this case, the gold star is your managed person.

28:43 If the person is managed by you or anybody, but in our system they're managed, then we have the top prospect, which is where we look at all the different philanthropic milestones, PTG scores, engagement metrics, all that stuff. And then we have a normal major and planned gift, which means that you are in the top ten percent, um, of major gift PTG, and you're in the top ten percent of planned gift PTG propensity to give scores as well.

29:08 And then we have the last two categories where we have split this, um, into household major gift PTG top ten percent denoted by that M, which is major gift, and then similarly for P for planned gift.

29:25 So right here, we– this is the second page to that tool, which is that map of the US, and you'll see quite a bit of, uh, gold stars here, which is all the managed people. The reason, um, you see quite a few households right now is because what I've selected is I've selected a manager name here, but I've also selected everything here. So not only are we seeing all the people that are managed by this individual here, but also anybody in our system who is managed by even anybody else.

29:56 So essentially, these are all the managed people we have in our database.

30:00 So as I tweak with these filters and I remove that managed by someone else here, and I've also removed interested here, this is essentially what it is, is you've got a manager name, and these are all the managed people that are managed by that individual. So essentially this is that development officer's portfolio of managed people, and we do have unmanaged people selected here.

30:24 So these will be all your TPS are your top prospect, MPs are your major and planned, and so on, um, and so forth in terms of like major, major and planned or top prospect that you're after.

30:36 Next is I showcased you in the previous tool the out-of-the-box feature by Tableau, which was the radial distance. Um, this is a very fresh update. Uh, we got it a few weeks back, but essentially you can click and drag around the area, and this will tell you the drive time distance around that individual. You can see here, uh, we are in the middle of an area where we don't find a lot of people.

30:58 However, we wanna make sure that within that 30-minute drive time distance, who all are available. So instead of using the radial tool selection, in this case, you can also go by if you've got a rental car and you're a development officer on the road, uh, this might be helpful for you.

31:14 And then similar functionality, one thing we have kept, uh, very similar in both the tools is the way how users interact in terms of even something as small as the buttons that are even there on both the tools. We are ca- we have kept it very similar, same type of, uh, functionality because to us in this team, um, it's two different tools, but for a DO, you know, it depends on we wanna make sure that the learning curve of learning a brand-new tool is right next to zero.

31:41 So we have to keep it very consistent, uh, so that we can essentially help the end user.

31:48 And then similar functionality, we have the final Excel file, um, which lists out all the different, um, you know, features about that particular household, uh, including their degree colleges, populations, if they hit any certain populations that a DO might be interested in.

32:04 So to conclude our presentation, I would say three big points here. The first one is obviously we wanna make sure that the PTG scores of the households that we want the DOs to meet are in the top 10% or above for this particular tool. Uh, then they do meet all the philanthropic milestones, uh, that are defined, um, internally using our teams. Um, and that includes different teams working together in coming up with the criteria.

32:30 And then we wanna make sure that we have the engagement in place in terms of how engaged that individual is, either through us at ISU Foundation or through, um, Iowa State University. And then we also have those wealth capacity for major gifts, um, in place to make sure that we are directing DOs to the right people.

32:48 And, um, during this entire presentation and even the video that Stacey shared, um, we highlighted the embedded tool, the Salesforce embedded tool. What that means is that to us, yes, we created this in Tableau, but then we put this into Salesforce. To the end user, our development officers, they just assume it's a part of their, you know, daily usage of Salesforce.

33:11 To them, it d- it doesn't really matter if it is built in Tableau. To, to them, what it matters is, "I need to log into Salesforce every day. Is it something or somewhere easier for me to navigate these products?" Which is what our idea behind these, creating these products were.

33:26 Um, and then the last one is prospects are easily, easily visualized, uh, can sort by affinity, can easily look for your portfolio, and identified by, uh, which type of gift they will most likely give. Is it major gift, planned gift, both? Um, and the biggest thing me developing this tool or working with my team in developing this tool is that it is very tweakable.

33:47 Um, if there is a new tweak that we need to make in a certain criteria, a new segment that needs to be added, we have that power in our hands because we built this tool right up from zero to where it is today.

34:02 So that brings us to the end of the presentation.

34:07 Ron Eisenstein: Uh, this was absolutely fantastic. Uh, thank you so much to, uh, all of you for, um, sharing your expertise. There is… It's not just a, it's not a, just a map. It is a myriad of solutions that address many, many, many, many needs. Um, and prior to this conversation, you talked about, uh, addressing, uh, fundraiser needs and questions, and that's exactly what you're doing here.

34:32 So their questions are answered all in the same place in a limited number of dashboards. So a kudos to all of you, um, for your great work and collaboration among, uh, your group. Um, there is plenty of questions out there, so let me start with a high-level one from Heather Campbell. Hey, Heather, thank you for joining us.

34:52 Uh, let's… This one is, could you provide some timeline estimates for this project from conception to build to delivery?

35:00 Stacey Barnes: Yeah. I should probably take that one 'cause a little bit of it predates Tushar and Catie, who are both right around the one-year anniversary mark.

35:10 Uh, so when Tushar was hired in August, at that time, we were still using the Salesforce mapping product, but we decided around that time that we wanted to sunset that and move everything into Tableau to just keep that consistent experience for end users.

35:30 Um, and so I think we went live with

35:37 the individual piece first, wanna say that was around March, and then we rolled out the bigger product, so the second piece that he showed around May. So I mean, from Tushar onboarding, upskilling, he's previously worked at the foundation and came back, so I won't say it was like a full onboarding, but I think for probably about August is when we decided, and then we released it in March.

36:03 Uh, one thing that we found useful is we knew… I mean, change management, right? We know we're gonna get some resistance to people will complain every day about Salesforce maps, but the second that we tell them it's going away, it'll suddenly become like their most cherished product with these amazing features.

36:23 Um, and so what we did is purposely released that individual piece first, the part that goes on the individual's profile. And we did that because it's something that Salesforce maps can't do. Um, and so we rolled that out and said, "Hey, we have this new additional piece. You know, kind of play around with it, experiment." And then we purposely built that to look very similar to what the other product would too.

36:51 And I think it helped to, uh, lessen that, like Onboarding of the second product because they've gotten used to that first additive piece

37:02 Ron Eisenstein: All right. Excellent. Uh, let's go into, I think, what is, is essentially a prerequisite for a lot of the mapping work is geocoding. Uh, Carlos has a question about your process for geocoding, uh, addresses.

37:17 Tushar Sharma: I can take this one. So we do, um, use a vendor called, I believe, Instant Address, that essentially looks at our addresses for people that we have. Um, and then they give us the longitude and latitudes.

37:30 So one quick fact that I would like to share is when before this Instant Address update, uh, we had, you know, there were some longitude latitudes that were up to two decimal places, three decimal places, but now we have the functionality to get it almost up to four or five. And the reason I'm mentioning this precision, uh, of these, um, decimal places is because as you increase one decimal place of a longitude or a latitude, the precision increases by 10 times.

38:00 So there were a lot of addresses… I mean, I, I know when I first started, um, when we didn't have that many decimal places to our longitude or latitudes, there were a lot of times we could see multiple households assumed to be living at the same location. So this is where we needed to make sure that first our data was right, our data was clean, and in this case, it had more decimal places or that precision.

38:22 So once we got those decimal places on those longitude and latitudes, that's when I was more confident in building out this tool, 'cause that was the step one, is how, uh, precise our data is.

38:37 Ron Eisenstein: All right.

38:38 Thank you for that.

38:39 Uh, we have a great question for Mercy. Uh, can you talk through the process of deciding to show the sliders with actual scores versus bucketing them into high, medium, or low or something like that? Uh, and then the comment, we found the granular individual scores to cause more confusion for our managers than bucketing.

39:09 Stacey Barnes: I feel like… I, I could be wrong here. I feel like we bucketed initially and then got feedback from our prospect development team that sliders would be preferred to show you're not in a… Is that?

39:22 Tushar Sharma: Yes.

39:23 Yes. And I'm nodding. That was obviously the reason one. Uh, the reason second is there is, um… The, the reason we like that slider is because there were… We, we wanted to cater to audience of every single kind. There were some that wanted that medium, low, and high buckets. There were some that needed the scoring model. So we found the best way to cater to all of those audiences, and this worked out pretty, pretty good in that regards.

39:51 Stacey Barnes: Yeah, because I think initially we had a dropdown filter, didn't we? And we just had groupings, and then we sort of went back and forth on are we artificially creating groupings that shouldn't be there, and that's kind of the feedback we got from prospect development then was if we had individual slider, um, you know, we, we

40:11 Tushar Sharma: Mm-hmm.

40:11 Stacey Barnes: … the scores down to a certain amount, so even if they slide all the way down, they're not truly getting every single person. Um, but yeah, we… that was user feedback.

40:22 Ron Eisenstein: I think that's a really important part of the process, in getting your feedback. I mean, each audience wants something a little bit different. When you're talking to the VP, they want something a little different than the prospect researchers, et cetera.

40:33 Um, trying to… It's like you come up with the orig- original version, and then you continue to refine until you get it to the place where it makes sense for everyone.

40:43 Uh, we had a question. I think there was one about a feature.

40:48 Have you incorporated or plan to incorporate the new driving distance feature into the individual profile mapping tool?

40:56 A, uh…

40:57 Maybe I'm not sure which version. Um, I… Maybe in the last. Um, but yeah, that, that's where, uh, uh, Mercy is going. And Colin.

41:08 Stacey Barnes: Yeah, and I think they maybe typed that just before Tushar then mentioned it, 'cause the, the timing on that was perfect. We released it, and people asked about the drive time feature, and then Tableau came along with the o- out of the box update that did it for us. So I think Tushar got superhero work on that one.

41:29 Ron Eisenstein: It went from impossible to, like, oh, to like-

41:33 Tushar Sharma: Yes, and not even very little work. I didn't do anything about it. It just… One morning it just popped up, and I'm like, "What is this button?" And it said Isochrone tool, which I didn't know what that meant, so I Googled that, and that's how I found out.

41:47 Ron Eisenstein: Oh, that's the best. That is a, a happy, happy surprise. Uh, all right. So-

41:51 Stacey Barnes: Uh, Ron.

41:52 Ron Eisenstein: Excuse me.

41:52 Stacey Barnes: Oh, we look like we're getting a few about PTGs in the Q&A. So I started to type something, and then I was like, "Oh, this might be too long to type." But-

42:00 Ron Eisenstein: Go for it. Go for it

42:01 Stacey Barnes: … um, so with the

42:02 Tushar Sharma: Yeah

42:03 Stacey Barnes: … process, I think the short of it is so we send them our data once a week, and then they evaluate, send, uh, any score changes back that'll have happened. Um, so that, I think that's important for some, 'cause I know some people do their wealth screening in, like, a large batch every few years. That's not for us. It's a, a weekly update.

42:24 Um, so it… within the model itself, the things that tend to pop out, and I'm gonna reference for a second, um, so Windfall take their own proprietary data as well as what they receive from us. But generally speaking, each model's a little different, but, uh, org donations in the last two years tends to be one of the…

42:46 Uh, org donations in the last five years, the wealth rank within the state, event attendees, and then w- uh, donations to the org for all time.

42:58 Um, and I think after that it starts to significantly drop off.

43:03 Um, so the wealth rating itself is not included, so we purchase wealth ratings from Windfall, but that's separate from the scoring. And where it factors into their scores is that wealth rank in the state, not necessarily the do- dollar amount itself.

43:21 Um, I think we do a little bit of duplication, because really what they're balancing is, like, the date of the last gift and the number of last gifts, or number of gifts that have been given. And so some of Catie's analysis, it, it could almost duplicate that. But I think what it's doing for us is layering on some additional buckets that for our end users, it makes it easier for them to understand, because it removes that black box piece of Windfall.

43:49 And we sort of say, "Okay, so here's a benchmark that you can, like, see and wrap your arms around," and that's a threshold that's being met.

44:00 Ron Eisenstein: Excellent.

44:01 Stacey Barnes: If there, if there is any more, just send them then because we can follow up. Oh, sorry, Catie, go ahead.

44:05 Catie Wram: Oh, I was gonna say too, sort of those thresholds that we came up with are based on our historical data too. So those would be, you know, different for any organizat- like, any individual organization. Um, and yeah, like Stacey said, I think it's just that that next layer of, like, a specific activity that happened. Because you could have a donor that, you know, gave 30 really small gifts and, you know, if their, you know, PTG is low, they're probably not, you know, gonna be a major gift donor even though they've met this milestone.

44:40 Stacey Barnes: And then Colin asked, just to build on that, so can imagine, do you run into any issues at the household level versus contact level?

44:48 Um, because the PTG data is done at the individual level. And yes, so that's where in each, in each of those, uh, calls that were right in there, we household the PTG because the individuals do have different scores. And we always take the max of the PTGs of the individuals in the household.

45:11 Um, and so I'd say that's one that we occasionally get pinged about, of someone messages and says, "Why does this particular person meet this threshold?" And usually the first thing we do is check this out, since, uh, you've got to be able to look at both individuals to, um, take that score and threshold.

45:33 Ron Eisenstein: Uh, yeah, the householding is one of the… I always think of that as, like, the advanced data management approach.

45:41 Uh, it, it… When it works effectively, people are like, "Yeah, of course, you just household." But it doesn't just happen automatically, um, it's, you have to build it in, um, across the board. Um, v- kudos to you all for doing that. Uh, there is a question out there, um, this may be a, uh, what's the best way of learning around how to embed dashboards right into Salesforce.

46:07 Do you do anything sophisticated with VizQL embedding? Uh, maybe talk about your trials and tribulations, or any general advice on best approach to figuring that out.

46:21 Stacey Barnes: Yeah. I'm just actually, I'll prep a slide here.

46:25 Um, let's see if this works. If it does, shout out to Canva. Uh, Tushar, do you just wanna advance this one more slide? I think I, I added one in the deck.

46:35 Maybe. Yes.

46:36 Ron Eisenstein: Yes.

46:37 Stacey Barnes: Um, so this, uh, can be the quick tutorial. I'm gonna say that embedding the dashboards into Salesforce is the, one of the easiest things you can ever do.

46:48 Um, so this is giving you a look behind the scenes of what a Salesforce developer does.

46:53 So you can see maybe at the top, if you remember, those tabs at the top correspond to what I showed in the video of the different tabs that we have available on Salesforce. So they come in, they add the box that they need, which I'm gonna poorly represent the terminology of what Salesforce people do. But they just grab an empty box, and then in there they can select, um, the Tableau component.

47:18 And then all they need from us are the two links that you can see there on the right-hand side. So the site ID is the same on every single embedding that we do. So they just have that one sitting there ready, and then we provide them Tableau view hyperlink. So click, like, here from your Tableau Cloud, and you send somebody a link.

47:40 Your Salesforce embedding uses that same link. So you just paste it in, and then as soon as those changes are saved, it's viewable to all users on S- Salesforce. So for everything we do, that is, that takes all of five minutes to request to be made live.

47:58 Ron Eisenstein: Yeah. Y- here's the thing, though. It may be easy now that you know it, but that takes hours to figure out where you go. Like, that is, you just saved hours of time. I, it's just like w- the, the, the, the massive environment and where you go and what. And you're like, "Oh, here you go. Let me just distill it into simple things."

48:15 Stacey Barnes: Yeah. And I wanna say that the, the individual profile is a little bit more nuanced. Um, took us a little bit more time to work out, but that is definitely one that once we've worked it out, it's now easier. And we're building out some, some bigger ideas for different, um, tabs that we can put on individuals' profiles. But I know we, it took me and one of our Salesforce folks, I think at the time we still did some old school Googling and found a ch- a forum quite easily that someone has kindly walked us through all the steps.

48:47 And so I wanna say even that one from the idea of being able to do it, to actually doing it, was less than a couple of hours work.

48:56 Ron Eisenstein: Excellent.

48:57 Uh, and then there's a question from Colin about standard dimensions for your dashboards embedded in Salesforce.

49:05 What, uh, dimensions do you find work best?

49:11 Stacey Barnes: They, um…

49:13 I would have to look know. We set all of our Tableau dashboards on automatic, uh, to make sure that they size correctly, and that's one that we had to learn the hard way of people sending a screenshot and saying, "This looks gross for me," and it's something looked fine on our screen.

49:33 Um, I'll see if I can find you an answer quite quickly, and if I can, I'll put it in the chat.

49:40 Ron Eisenstein: Excellent.

49:41 Uh, I think please put in the chat if I missed your question, and I'll just

49:49 give Stacey a few seconds.

49:53 Catie Wram: I-

49:53 Ron Eisenstein: Uh, automatic is a… Oh, go ahead.

49:55 Catie Wram: Oh, I was gonna say, I think one… A, a nice question that Jessie asked was about using fixed calculations instead of adding those to the data source. And, um, sort of this, these thresholds are why we chose to go with the fixed calculation right now instead of adding back to our data source, was, um, sort of our thresholds for things and what we're including as a top prospect is, um, a little bit fluid right now.

50:21 Um, and so we wanted to be able to have the flexibility to, to change that as we, um, you know, figure out what is meaningful for us and that w- without having to go back to our data team and being like, "Okay, you need to make this small tweak now." Um, but once we feel like they're in a more stable place, um, the plan will be to add that sort of as a field to our, um, to our actual data source, rather than having it be a fixed calculation that, um, anyone that wants to use that sort of terminology would have to include in what they're doing.

50:56 But, um, still sort of an ongoing development right now.

51:01 Ron Eisenstein: One of the things I noticed, uh, in development is the, is the trade-off between the ease of creating those fixed calculated fields and the potential impact on performance because they're not materialized. And, you know, speaking with a Tableau product owner, I was expressing how valuable it would be for those to be materialized, and I think they could possibly materialize a handful of them, but it starts to fall apart when you start adding filters and adding context filters.

51:26 So when you hit the, a certain number, it… Like, you have to… People, um, want the feature, and then they may not want the wait as a result of the feature.

51:35 Catie Wram: Yes.

51:35 Ron Eisenstein: So it's an ongoing trade-off.

51:36 Catie Wram: Balance, yes.

51:39 Ron Eisenstein: Excellent. Uh, all right. I think that covers all of the questions. Yeah, thank you, Jessie, for your question. Um, that is a great one. Um, and, uh, thank you again, everyone, for joining us, especially our presenters. I was really looking forward to this.

51:57 Uh, superb job, and, uh, thank you again for your time, and your kindness, and sharing what you have learned, and putting it all in, uh, a presentation that folks can absorb within a single hour. Um, I hope, uh, y'all run, and we run into you at another conference, and keep up the great work. And thanks again for, uh, your participation.

52:20 Jessie Rader: I just wanna add, I wanna give Ron a shout-out and thanks.

52:24 We have been doing this Tableau user group for just over five years now, and it was Ron's idea. And he's been the one that's keeping us all on track, and getting speakers, and figuring out new, uh, Zoom-like event tools.

52:42 Um, so I just wanted to tell Ron thank you. Ron's going to step down from our little leadership group here, and he's just been such an inspiration to us all. So big round of applause and thanks to Ron.

52:56 Ron Eisenstein: Yeah. Thank you so much, Jessie.

52:57 Jessie Rader: Thank you.

52:58 Ron Eisenstein: It's been an absolute delight, um, working with you, and Mohammed, and Tam, who's on this call too. Y'all are just some of the brightest people out, and the coolest, as I mentioned earlier. Um, so yeah, it's been a pleasure. I will be joining, uh, looking forward as an attendee, and excited for new folks to, to join the leadership board and to take it to the next level.

53:19 Um, thank you again, Jessie. And, uh, wishing everyone a great, uh, rest to your day, and thanks again to our speakers and everyone for joining us. All right, take care, everyone. Thanks.

53:28 Jessie Rader: Thanks, everybody.

53:29 Ron Eisenstein: Bye.