Putting Ideas into Action: Emory’s Donor Experience Academy
Newton's Laws
- The Donor Experience Academy (DXA) is meant to help build a pipeline for donors and internal talent.
- Donor Experience Officers are gaining skillsets to help them grow as major gift officers.
- It is important to have leadership buy-in to help a program like DXA become successful.
My last blog post touched on the need to focus on investing in our teams, in order to drive change within our organizations. This month, I wanted to share a real-world example of this, through Emory’s newly formed Donor Experience Academy (DXA).
The Academy allows us to develop strong frontline gift officers. This can lead to a domino effect, which helps to improve the overall donor experience. Since starting about six months ago, the program has already gotten some buzz—with a profile from EverTrue.
I recently sat down for a conversation with two leaders spearheading this effort, Martina Hubbarth, assistant vice president of individual giving, and Elizabeth Chapman, managing director of the Donor Experience Academy.
We talked about why the academy is so important, how we train Donor Experience Officers to be successful fundraisers, and how the program has evolved since we implemented it at Emory.