When the University of North Carolina Wilmington first launched CampusESP for Family Communication, it gave the Student Affairs and Transition Programs a dedicated way to connect with families. Christine Bigwood, Director of Advancement Services for Information Systems & Reporting, and Dawn Russell, Development Officer for Parent Giving, saw an opportunity for Advancement to build on that connection.
At the time, Russell shared Advancement-related messages through the family portal, but UNCW wasn’t capturing much about how those families engaged with giving opportunities — their interests, giving affinity, likelihood to give, and more. That curiosity led UNCW to launch CampusESP for Parent Giving in 2025, providing the Advancement team more insights into families and a stronger foundation for its giving strategy.
Bigwood and Russell also worked with CampusESP on enhancing the Raiser’s Edge API integration. Now, the team can see giving history alongside family engagement and identify which gifts followed interactions with emails, the CampusESP portal, or the website.
As the first customer to launch the new Raiser’s Edge API integration, Bigwood and Russell helped shape functionality that’s now available to all Parent Giving customers.
We’re proud to celebrate the University of North Carolina Wilmington as the latest recipient of the CampusESP MVP Award!
From weekly files to a nightly sync
Before, keeping Raiser’s Edge and CampusESP aligned meant regularly exporting, cleaning, and importing files between the two systems. Now, gift amount, date, designation or fund, and constituent information sync into CampusESP automatically, giving the team a current view of advancement data without the recurring file exchange.
“Now, we can look at our Raiser’s Edge data alongside how families are engaging with the university without manually moving files back and forth,” Bigwood said. “It gives us another piece of information to use when we’re thinking about who to reach, when to reach them, and where our team should spend their time.”
And for Bigwood, it also meant one less weekly task to keep up with. What used to be a manual chore is now a quick click. “It’s given me a huge time increase back,” she said.
Solving a messy identity-data problem
Automation only works if the records underneath it are trustworthy, and email addresses aren’t always reliable identifiers. Constituent IDs now give UNCW a more stable way to match Raiser’s Edge records: a parent can update their email without creating a duplicate record, and two family members can share an email address without their giving histories getting tangled.
“We came into this integration work with some very specific things we needed to solve, particularly around how we match and move constituent data,” Russell explained. “The CampusESP team was willing to work through those details with us, and it’s great to see some of those solutions become part of what the platform can offer more broadly.”
The constituent ID functionality was developed around UNCW’s specific needs and is now part of the broader Raiser’s Edge integration offerings — turning a data-management headache into a more reliable way for other institutions to work with their advancement data.
“Working with the CampusESP team was a combined effort,” Bigwood said. “When we brought forward ideas, they collaborated with us to make those changes so the integration would be seamless.”
A more focused approach to parent giving
With data flowing automatically and reliably into CampusESP, UNCW can also target donors with far more precision.
For major gift prospects, the team can start with families it has already identified as having high giving potential, then layer in CampusESP engagement to understand who is engaging and what content or resources resonate. It’s the difference between knowing who could give and seeing who is showing up.
Additionally, UNCW uses Wealth Ratings to create internal audience segments within CampusESP, placing parents into different Communities so the team can tailor the experience based on what it knows about each constituent.
The team can also combine:
LYBUNTs — families who gave last year but haven’t given this year
SYBUNTs — families who have given previously but haven’t given this year
Giving history — including a specific designation or fund
Timing — such as a last gift within a certain timeframe
CampusESP activity — layered with giving history or other targeting criteria
Gift-level data also feeds a customizable Parent Giving ROI dashboard, showing donor counts, dollars raised, and year-over-year trends. It connects gifts to families’ CampusESP engagement, giving UNCW insight into the role of email, portal, and website interactions — something their previous tools couldn’t provide. And these capabilities aren’t limited to institutions using Raiser’s Edge.
CampusESP for Parent Giving helps advancement teams layer family engagement data with their existing giving information to build more targeted audiences, understand engagement, and measure results.
A win for everyone
UNCW’s work on the Raiser’s Edge integration went beyond solving a challenge for its own team. By working closely with the CampusESP team on dashboard reporting, giving attribution, constituent ID matching, and more, Bigwood and Russell helped shape functionality that’s now available to other Parent Giving customers, too.
Their work has also strengthened the partnership between Advancement and Student Affairs. With more visibility into the family data they share and the communications going out through CampusESP, both departments have a better understanding of how they’re reaching families and where they can work better together. “CampusESP has definitely improved and really unified our cross-campus relationships,” Russell said.
We’re thrilled to celebrate Christine Bigwood, Dawn Russell, and the UNCW advancement team for finding new ways to make their data more actionable — and for helping other customers do the same.