EverTrue, a Boston start-up that applies modern social media analytics to the traditional field of higher-education fund-raising, was born out of the frustrations of Brent Grinna, a former captain of the Brown University football team.
A few years back, Mr. Grinna agreed to help lead a fund-raising drive for his fifth college reunion. To court prospective donors, Brown provided him with spreadsheets listing his classmates’ names and contact details. But that raw data, he says, offered little insight into the particular interests that might encourage a graduate to donate to the school. Worse, many of the email addresses and phone numbers were out-of-date.
“I ended up going to Facebook and LinkedIn, places where I knew my classmates really were,” Mr. Grinna said.
EverTrue, which he founded in 2010, enables educational institutions to parse the social media activities of their graduates. The company’s social donor management program, for instance, can evaluate alumni interactions with a college’s Facebook pages to help distinguish those people likely to give to a capital campaign from those more interested in a specific athletic or academic cause. It can also examine profiles of alumni on LinkedIn, a feature that allows fund-raisers to identify people in industries, like finance and technology, or specific companies or executive roles with a historically higher propensity to give.
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“The jackpot for me will be when we know what pages people go to, or what they like, that actually has prompted a first-time gift or a rare gift,” said Mr. Nichols of Boston University.
“We don’t know that yet,” he added. “But I believe we are going to find out.”
A version of this article appears in print on January 25, 2015, on page BU3 of the New York edition with the headline: Your College May Be Banking on Your Facebook Likes. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
