For the not-for-profit wings of educational institutions—the dedicated teams responsible for supporting alumni and driving essential fundraising—the challenge is often a battle for time. With few staff members to manage a growing remit, every hour spent on administration is an hour taken away from core activities like donor engagement and alumni support.
This pressure often forces teams into a difficult compromise: the “Micromanagement” Trap. While departments need the freedom to run their own marketing campaigns (like Mailchimp newsletters) and events (on platforms like Eventbrite), the central Data team must ensure every interaction is logged in the core database, often a Blackbaud CRM solution like Raiser’s Edge NXT.
Historically, this has resulted in two debilitating outcomes:
Data Gaps: Departments use unintegrated tools, leading to an outdated and incomplete record in the central Blackbaud database.
Manual Drudgery: Staff members, already stretched thin, spend hundreds of hours manually importing or inputting event registrations, email opens, and updates into the CRM.
UWC Atlantic Faced This Exact Bottleneck.
As a school supporting its global alumni network and running critical fundraising initiatives, UWC Atlantic needed to empower its departments to operate independently—using best-of-breed tools like Mailchimp and Eventbrite—without breaking their “Single Source of Truth” in their Blackbaud database. They needed efficiency, reliability, and control.
The Shift to Decentralised Efficiency
Working with SmartTHING, UWC Atlantic implemented a smart, “decentralised” architecture. Their solution was to deploy SmartSYNC, our core software, as the middleware that handles all the day-to-day data admin behind the scenes, allowing the Blackbaud database to update itself automatically and flawlessly.
The beauty of this system is that departments gain the autonomy to manage their own campaigns and events, while the central Philanthropy team enjoys total data accuracy without having to micromanage.The SmartSYNC Engine: Governing the Data Flow
The key to this success was not just connecting Mailchimp and Eventbrite to their Blackbaud CRM, but controlling how the connection works. Using SmartSYNC, the team established automatic governance rules across their entire tech stack.
The Integrated Tech Stack:
Eventbrite & Zoom: Registrations, attendance, and refunds are pushed to the Blackbaud CRM in real-time.
Mailchimp: SmartSYNC manages the syncing of 12,000+ records across multiple departmental accounts, ensuring subscribes/unsubscribes are honoured globally.
iSAMS & LinkedIn: Automating complex student imports and enriching hundreds of alumni profiles.
Other Tools: SmartSYNC can integrate several other tools used by the not-for-profit to ensure all data flows back to the central Blackbaud database.
Governance Rules for Accuracy:
Intelligent Matching: Incoming data is checked against existing constituents to prevent duplicates before it ever hits the Blackbaud database.
Zero-Touch Admin: Departments never need to log into the Blackbaud CRM to handle updates. The sync happens reliably in the background, 24/7.
Granular Control: Specific data maps to specific fields, meaning the Philanthropy team gets exactly the data points they need for accurate reporting and fundraising strategy.
The Impact: Focus on Mission, Not Manual Data Entry
The results were transformative for the small, resource-constrained team at UWC Atlantic.
We estimate the automations save the team 300 hours of staff time annually (including 120+ hours on events alone!). But the true win for the not-for-profit is reliability. The data is accurate and consistent, allowing the few staff members to trust their systems and shift their focus entirely to high-value activities: engaging alumni, strengthening relationships, and securing the funding that supports the school’s mission.
As Pippi Reader, Head of Operations – Philanthropy, Engagement & Partnerships, UWC Atlantic put it:
“The Alumni team has achieved the holy grail of CRM management: total data accuracy with zero micromanagement. The data remains consistent and reliable, allowing teams to focus on their work instead of manual updates.”
Stop importing spreadsheets. Start engaging alumni.
Does your fundraising or alumni team struggle with data gaps between Mailchimp, Eventbrite, and your Blackbaud CRM?
See how SmartSYNC can automate your governance and free up your limited staff resources.
