Advancement and Alumni Relations
Get the prospect list to the officer before the trip
The ranked prospect list, the campaign dashboard, and the monthly reconciliation with Finance run on a schedule from the advancement system you already have. Advancement Services builds the segment once; the officer has it Monday morning.
Running Argos at private institutions, public universities, and community colleges
The situation
Dollars are up and donors are down, and both are true at once
Total giving has held. CASE's Voluntary Support of Education survey shows alumni donor counts falling for a fourth consecutive year while dollars rose, which is a pipeline problem disguised as a good year. Working the pipeline means working a list, and every list is a request.
01
The ranked list is a ticket, and the officer is already on the road
Alumni in one region, from one program, who gave under a threshold and attended something since 2023. The gift officer can describe that segment in a sentence. Getting it out of the system is a ticket to Advancement Services, and Advancement Services has eleven ahead of it.
02
The follow-up question is another ticket
The list comes back and the officer wants it cut a different way: by decade, by fund, by who has never been asked. That is a second request, and by the time it lands the trip is over.
03
Reconciliation with Finance repeats every month
The gift is posted in the advancement module. The fund is in the general ledger. Making them agree is a recurring manual argument between two offices that both think they are right.
04
Stewardship reports get built by hand
Endowed fund reports go to donors annually, in volume, showing fund performance and student impact. Almost every institution assembles them one at a time, in the same weeks the year-end appeal is going out.
The list on a schedule
Built once, delivered every Monday, without anyone asking
Your advancement team defines what a prospect looks like: giving history, event attendance, volunteer roles, class year, capacity where you hold it. Your reporting team builds that as one governed object and schedules it. The officer gets the ranked list on the road, and the regional director gets theirs.
Where advancement runs in your ERP's advancement module, giving and engagement are already in one place and the list comes straight from it. Where advancement runs a separate CRM, Argos connects to that system and reports on it directly, with the same scheduling and delivery.
- Prospect lists ranked on giving and engagement together, on definitions your advancement team sets
- Delivered to gift officers and regional directors on a schedule, built once by your team
- Views built for officers, directors, and prospect research, each permissioned to the people in that role
- No ERP or CRM seat required for report access, with unlimited users under the institutional license
- Reconciliation between the advancement module and the general ledger produced on a schedule, where both live in your ERP
“The Argos platform has allowed us to pull, synthesize and analyze data in ways only dreamed of in previous years.”
Bob Wolfenden · AVP for Alumni Relations and Annual Giving · Lehigh University
Argos X
Build the segment while the officer is still thinking about it
The list arrives and the officer wants it cut by decade, then by fund, then by who has never been asked. Today each cut is a request. In Argos X, the officer opens the list in a browser and reshapes it with Pivot Mode and Explore Data, without writing a query and without filing anything.
For the question that is not a cut of the existing list, Argos Data Agent answers in plain language against the same governed data and shows the SQL, so prospect research can verify the segment before anyone acts on it. Dashboard Designer publishes the pipeline view the vice president checks on a phone.
- Pivot Mode and Explore Data for cutting and exporting a list without a new request
- Argos Data Agent for the plain-language question, with the SQL visible
- Dashboard Designer builds and publishes pipeline and campaign dashboards from the browser, readable on a phone
- Answers grounded in governed objects and existing permissions, not an uploaded spreadsheet
- Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost
- Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers
“Argos helps me keep the pulse of my many volunteer groups. It allows me to search on just about any question I have as I deal with over 1,000 volunteers.”
Jessi Schimmel · Associate Director, Alumni Association · Lehigh University
Stewardship at volume
The receipts, the acknowledgements, and the fund reports, without the merge
Advancement sends a steady stream of documents, and nearly all of them are personalized: a receipt, an acknowledgement, a pledge reminder, and once a year an endowed fund report showing a donor what their fund did and who it helped.
Where your ERP already runs a job for the document, FormFusion takes that output and turns it into the finished piece, with your branding and the fields the baseline template cannot carry. Where the ERP has no job for it, Argos produces the document from the record and delivers it on a schedule. Either way the merge stops being somebody's December.
- FormFusion, on the jobs your ERP already runs: gift receipts, acknowledgement letters, pledge reminders
- Argos, for the documents your ERP has no job for: endowed fund and scholarship stewardship reports, personalized per donor and produced at volume
- Delivery by password-protected encrypted email, your portal, your imaging system, or to print for the donors who still want paper
- Neither requires the other, and both run alongside your advancement system
“We have been able to reduce the amount of paper previously used by our department now that Argos reports are emailed to our respective areas.”
Karen A. Sims · Director of Information Processing · Lehigh University
Pipeline and campaign
Report on the campaign without rebuilding the deck
Boards ask for campaign progress on their own schedule, and the answer usually arrives as a document somebody assembled over two days from the advancement system and a spreadsheet of adjustments.
Built as a governed object on your own definitions, campaign progress becomes a live dashboard and a scheduled packet instead of a recurring project, and the number the vice president quotes is the number the board sees.
- Campaign progress by initiative, fund, and officer, current as of this morning instead of as of last week
- Banded PDF with your branding for board and committee packets, delivered on a cycle
- Cost to raise a dollar, calculated consistently rather than argued about
- Donor retention, upgrade, and lapse tracking against your own definitions
- Definitions saved once and run the same way for CASE and survey reporting
The list reaches the officer before the trip
Segments and reconciliations run as scheduled objects against the advancement system you already have. See it in a demo.
In their words
Advancement shops, on what stopped being a request
Each one moved a list, a reconciliation, or a document off the request queue and onto a schedule.
Outcome
Scheduling and delivery returned about 80 percent of the daily staff time the advancement team had spent producing reports, with 40 scheduled reports now emailed across campus each week.
Lehigh University
Development and Alumni Relations
“
We've been using Argos basically as our glue.
Earlham College
IT and Enterprise Reporting
A small liberal arts college running student and advancement reporting on one governed layer, built by a small team.
Related
The offices advancement works with most
Finance and the Business Office
Fund accounting, gift reconciliation, and endowment reporting.
Financial Aid
The scholarship funds you raise, and the students they reached, reported from the same record.
Private Institutions
Tuition dependence, retention, and the gift pipeline as one revenue question.
Registrar and Enrollment Services
Graduation lists, class year, and the alumni record it becomes.
How it fits
Where this sits relative to what you already run
With your advancement system
Argos does not replace Banner Advancement, Colleague Advancement, Raiser's Edge, or any other advancement system, and it is not a moves management tool. Your system stays the system of record for the constituent and the gift. Argos reports on it: the list, the dashboard, the packet, and the reconciliation, on a schedule, from the data you already keep there.
With Ellucian Insights
Insights aggregates data across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos works directly against your own environment, covering dashboards through Dashboard Designer, conversational analysis through Argos Data Agent, and scheduled delivery, on definitions your team controls. Most institutions run both.
With the way it works today
The segment is a request, the reconciliation is a monthly manual exercise, and the stewardship report is a merge. Each is manageable in isolation. Together they are most of what Advancement Services does instead of prospect strategy.
Trust and security
You take security seriously. So do we.
The Trust Center is published and the HECVAT is available on request, so a reviewer can start before anyone schedules a call.
Permissions are enforced, never overridden
A report can only be opened by someone your team has permissioned to run it. Views for officers, directors, and prospect research are built for the role and granted to it.
Authentication
LDAP group sync and SAML SSO configured once at the MAPS layer, with permission tiers set per product in the same place, by the same team.
Donor confidentiality
Views that carry capacity and wealth indicators are built for prospect research and permissioned to prospect research. For Argos Data Agent, those fields can be masked or redacted.
Data handling
Encryption in transit and AES-encrypted, password-protected document delivery for stewardship and acknowledgement correspondence.
AI governance
Argos Data Agent operates under Zero Data Retention, honors existing permissions, and runs against governed objects instead of the raw constituent database.
Documentation
Trust Center, and a HECVAT (the standard higher education security questionnaire) on request.
Frequently asked questions
Questions we get asked first
Our advancement office runs in Banner or Colleague. What does that change?
It makes this the shortest path. Giving, engagement, and constituent data are already in the advancement module, so the ranked list, the campaign dashboard, and the Finance reconciliation are built directly on it.
We run Raiser's Edge or another separate CRM. Do you connect to it?
Argos connects through ODBC, REST, and API layers, and reports on the advancement system directly. Tell us which one you run and we will say what we have connected to before and what it would take.
Are you trying to replace our fundraising system?
No. Your advancement system stays the system of record for the constituent and the gift. Argos gets the list, the dashboard, and the packet out of it on a schedule.
Can each gift officer see only their own portfolio?
Access is granted per folder and DataBlock, so a view built for one group is permissioned to that group and nobody else can open it. Your team controls that in one place, and the same model covers dashboards and Argos Data Agent. Restricting a shared object to each person's own rows is not how Argos works; the view is built for the audience that needs it.
Can we produce endowed fund stewardship reports at volume?
Yes. Argos produces them from the advancement record, personalized per donor, and delivers them on a schedule. Receipts and acknowledgements, which your ERP already runs a job for, go through FormFusion.
How is donor data protected?
Views carrying capacity and wealth indicators are permissioned to prospect research alone, document delivery is AES-encrypted and password-protected, and Argos Data Agent can mask or redact sensitive fields.
Can we reconcile the advancement system against the general ledger?
Where both live in your ERP, yes. Both are queryable on the same governed definitions, so reconciliation becomes a scheduled report instead of a monthly exercise.
What is included with Argos, and what is licensed separately?
Dashboard Designer, Explore Data, and Pivot Mode are included with Argos at no additional cost. Argos Data Agent is licensed separately, in Core and Advanced tiers.
What happens to donor data when someone uses Data Agent?
Argos Data Agent operates under Zero Data Retention, honors existing permissions, and supports masking and redaction. It runs against governed objects instead of the raw database.
Does this do wealth screening or predictive scoring?
No. It gets the engagement and giving data your screening depends on to the people who run it, on a schedule. The modeling remains yours or your vendor's.
Do users need a Banner or Colleague login?
No. Licensing is per institution with unlimited users, and report access does not require an ERP seat.
How does this coexist with Ellucian Insights?
Insights aggregates across Ellucian products on a managed data layer. Argos runs against your own environment on your team's definitions. Most institutions run both.
How long does implementation take?
It depends on how much you want live on day one, and on how much the CO-OP library covers before anyone writes a query. Professional Services scopes it with you.
What does it cost, and can we talk to an advancement team like ours?
Licensing is per institution rather than per user, and price is driven by institution size and product mix rather than headcount, with nothing billed for people who only read reports. The one exception is Argos Data Agent Advanced, which is licensed per seat; Core is unlimited. Tell us your FTE and which products you are weighing and we will give you a real figure on the first call, then put you in touch with an advancement team of roughly your size and system.
Next step
Advancement Services out of the request queue
Get a demo and see the lists officers ask for most, built once and delivered on a schedule.
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