Introducing the D-SIP class of 2023!

When D-SIP kicked off 17 years ago, the plan was simple: to introduce undergraduate students to the world of development and diversify the field. Today, the award-winning program boasts nearly 400 alumni. This year, D-SIP is embarking on its second year of hybrid programming (in-person and virtual), and we have no doubt that it will be just as successful as the first.

We are proud to introduce this year’s cohort, and we are enthusiastic about the impact they will leave on our university.

Meet the Cohort

Alan Makoso

He/Him | Sophomore | OUD Development Services and Strategic Solutions

In FY22, OUD began a pilot with data vendor, “Windfall,” to purchase employment information regarding our constituents. Employment data is used to identify and prioritize top major giving prospects to ensure our fundraisers are working with the best prospects. This summer, Alan will work to improve documentation regarding the Employment Data Product and will work toward making the official documentation more user friendly and understandable. The goal is to produce “documentation” (in as many formats as possible) that would allow a non-technical individual in the development community to quickly understand the product and the processes that it entails. Alan will also work to create visual decision trees/work flow mapping through the product. Lastly, he will work to map key data elements between DART and Windfall data, ensuring a consistent crosswalk between the two data sets.

Jennifer Kim

She/Her | Sophomore | University Development Events (UDE)

This project will focus on documenting historical invitation and guest list criterias, size, attendance yield, and where possible engagement scores. Once historical information is documented, the next part of the project will include analyzing trends found in our invitation lists. These trends could be influenced by geographical location, average age of invitees, or a myriad of other factors to be summarized. Next, Jennifer will create a tool to be used when determining future invitation list criteria that predicts the success of the invitation list attendance yield and attendee engagement. By collecting this data, we will have a tool and the analysis of our work that will inform future decisions. Finally, since our team will be planning a variety of events this summer, Jennifer’s time with UDE should also include exposure to development events and the work it takes to produce a successful event. During Jennifer’s time at our department our team will be working on the planning of a variety of events- all in a different stage of planning.

Joshua Crook

He/Him | Freshman | Dobson, Michigan Theater Foundation

Josh will assist in the revitalization of the Michigan Theater in its efforts to return to pre-pandemic levels of attendance and engagement. The Michigan and State Theaters have always relied heavily on contributions and donations from the community. However, while we attempt to revamp our audience base and return to normal levels of attendance as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, our community’s contributions have allowed the Michigan and State Theaters to survive this difficult time. Donor outreach and development continue to be integral to the success of our theaters. With that, the cultivation of new members, donors, and sponsors are also integrally important to the success of our theaters. Josh will work to conduct wealth screenings and research profiles on prospective and current donors and implement surveys on member engagement to determine the interests of the target population.

Jerome Nichols

He/Him | Junior | Institute for Social Research (ISR)

Jerome will play a fundamental and exciting role in helping us develop these pillars: telling our story, building a new coalition of donors, and creating meaningful engagement. It is vitally important to continue to identify new and diverse donors in order to cultivate their relationships with the institute. Jerome will have opportunities to research our key faculty stakeholders in five major themes across ISR. Jerome will be able to draft donor-facing theme narratives that will be used in major donor conversations and across annual giving communications. He will also help research, identify, and strategically connect ISR with those constituents that have been lacking engagement over the years.

Khadidiatou Toure

She/Her | Sophomore | Dobson, Growing Hope

The scope of this project includes developing a base understanding of the principles of community-centric fundraising, preparing materials to share these values with key stakeholders, reviewing and sharing our organizational fundraising values with the community, and executing a method of fundraising that incorporates these values and expands community engagement in Growing Hope’s fundraising strategies. Khadidiatou will work to enhance the community’s understanding of community-centric fundraising by outlining foundational concepts. She will research and implement ways to increase the number of first-time donors by 20 and increase the number of auction items by five.

Cassidy Brimer

They/Them | Sophomore | OUD Marketing & Communications

Effective communications are critical to successful development programs and e-newsletters provide an excellent way to stay in touch with our donors, alumni, and friends, keeping them aware of the impact their generous giving has on our students, faculty, and research. Cassidy will do a deep dive into what makes an effective development e-newsletter, so we can use data- and evidence-driven, results-oriented strategies to reach our audience, increase engagement, and spread our message in the most beneficial way possible. This project would look into the best format for an e-newsletter, interpreting metrics, meaningful testing, frequency, and working with other communications channels (social, print, etc.), among other topics.

Aine Beale

She/Her | Sophomore | Dobson, Washtenaw Community College Foundation

In the community college world, there is relatively little information sharing between institutions. As the WCC Foundation looks to expand our fundraising efforts, we want to learn best practices from the field and identify strategies to implement at WCC. Aine is charged with benchmarking efforts at other community colleges in three areas: building leadership annual giving funds, planned giving, and alumni associations. Based on this documentation, Aine will recommend key strategies that could be implemented at WCC, and develop plans for some of those activities, depending on capacity and time. This benchmarking period will be an ideal on-ramp for Aine to learn on the job about various fundraising methods and programs as she develops the necessary understanding for the next phase of the project.

Amber Henson

She/Her | Freshman | College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) Advancement

LSA Advancement looks to evolve its stewardship program toward these more inclusive practices that prioritize how and where donors give. We call this methodology behavior-based donor stewardship, and this concept is the core of Amber’s project. While there are many different behaviors we could build a stewardship effort around, there are two main audiences that Amber will focus on in tandem. The first priority is crafting a stewardship program that recognizes and celebrates the faculty and staff of LSA who give back to the college. The second priority will focus on donors who give to support scholarships housed within specific departments (e.g., donors who create scholarships for students majoring in Judaic Studies). Oftentimes, these donors direct their scholarship support to a department that holds personal significance to them. They may be alumni of that particular department, or simply have a passion for a specific area of study. Because of the decentralized structure and varied resources at the departmental level, donors with the same interests (scholarship support) are seeing vastly different donor experiences across the college.

Katie Moore

She/Her | Sophomore | Corporate Foundation Relations/Michigan Medicine Foundation Relations

There are several administrative departments across U‑M that send out announcements, calendars, and requests for proposals (RFPs) to faculty to encourage them to write grants to foundations and associations to receive private funding. We can improve how we circulate these RFPs through coordination and by using methods that allow us to analyze open and submission rates. Ultimately, the goal of this project is to increase the effectiveness of communications and to grow the number of faculty applications to private foundations. We are looking to better understand how Michigan faculty perform with select disease-related associations and emerging science funders. This project will complement the main communications project, as many of these opportunities are communicated via a report distributed to Michigan Medicine faculty. Katie will take a look at U‑M’s proposal data, analyze trends with a select list of funders, and compare that list with association websites, peer websites, and nonprofit tax returns and/or grant data to determine how a group of peer institutions are performing with these same funders.

Grace Yoon

She/Her | Freshman | OUD Development Services and Strategic Solutions (DS3)

Grace will work in conjunction with the Integrated Data Services and DS3 D-SIP interns to help operationalize and expand on the DART Employment Data Product. She has some experience working with data so she can be involved in conversations related to more technically focused pieces of the employment data process. Grace will be comfortable performing research, analyzing relationships within large datasets, and generating recommendations based on her research. She is also a curious self-starter who demonstrates high attention to detail and the ability to perform both qualitative and quantitative research and analysis, then translate it into consumable information for a variety of audiences.

Adi Bapat

He/Him | Sophomore | Ross School of Business

The Alumni Engagement Team (AE) within the Office of Advancement, Ross School of Business will have Adi focus on Young Alumni Engagement. This is a significant opportunity at Michigan Ross to engage and support the Office of Advancement and further our work toward building a pipeline of alumni volunteers and donors through robust, young alumni programming focused on: young alumni awareness of AlumniAdvantage and benefits to support young alumni throughout their lifetime, young alumni engagement initiatives, and young alumni giving. This provides Adi the opportunity to support the Office of Advancement as we foster young alumni affinity toward the school, establishing a baseline of young alumni programming and acquiring best practice examples from peer institutions. Adi will be immersed in the Young Alumni Engagement project with three phases centered on graduates of the last decade (GOLD).

Smilee Chunduru

She/Her | Sophomore | Michigan Medicine Events

The Michigan Medicine Office of Development Events team proposes a project to research and implement new or improved registration processes and data tracking methods to utilize in future events. This research will be applied toward reporting and tracking registration data in conjunction with other data, such as post-event surveys to measure return on investment. Additionally, this project will seek to further develop community fundraising opportunities and increase exposure of Michigan Medicine. Smilee will be asked to help with project work, benchmarking, and setting up our team for future successes. Smilee will also act as an active member of the Events team and will be looked to in providing on-site event logistics, planning, and execution, as well as volunteering at large-scale events. Additionally, this opportunity will also provide first-hand knowledge and experience in the execution of fundraising and development events.

Sabrena Chedid

She/Her | Sophomore | Donor Digital Experience

Our current web presence was envisioned almost a decade ago and does not meet current expectations for donors, prospects, alumni, or staff. Content is spread over three sites: Philanthropy at Michigan, Leaders & Best Impact, and Michigan Online Giving. These sites are difficult to navigate and do not offer any personalization. In 2021, the number of sessions was 334,000 across these three sites. Combined with other online activity, this drove over 41,000 digital gifts totaling in excess of $15 million. The primary outcome is to have one platform that brings this content together with best-in-class technology. We want to meet donors and prospects where they are, with content that is relevant to them. We have selected a digital experience platform and an implementation partner to ensure the new web experience will be complete, fully tested and launched by fall 2023. To ensure the website’s success in the long term, this project will develop and deploy a robust communication plan for both internal and external stakeholders.

Audrey Dozeman

She/Her | Senior | UM-Dearborn (DRBN)

Audrey at UM-Dearborn will work on impact reporting and student scholarship benchmarking. Audrey will assist in ensuring our donors understand how much their gift(s) mean to UM-Dearborn students, faculty, and our campus and help shape the future landscape of philanthropy. Audrey will be responsible for evaluating and cataloging DRBN impact reporting, researching and identifying impact topics, creating templates for social media platforms, developing impact modalities that support DEI, inventorying DRBN-specific scholarships, and benchmarking and analyzing scholarship categories.

Rachel Mintz

She/Her | Sophomore | Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

The Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design seeks to develop a regional alumni program that will provide meaningful opportunities for alumni to connect with each other and with their alma mater. This project will evaluate best practices based on benchmark research, analyze data to determine viable locations for regional activities, gather and assess information from alumni about their specific engagement interests, and provide a detailed action plan for the creation of this new program. This project will create lasting value to the school by developing a model for regional alumni engagement that can be expanded over time to include more locations. Additionally, it will contribute to a stronger alumni engagement program overall and help to maintain strong connections between Stamps alumni and the school.

Adviti Mishra

She/Her | Sophomore | School of Information (UMSI)

At the School of Information, we are uniquely positioned to center the preferences and experiences of younger donors and potential donors. Our older alumni base received a very different degree from what we currently offer, and many of our younger alumni are able to secure high-paying jobs early in their careers. Adviti will look into what makes donors of different generations willing or unwilling to give, with a focus on millennials and Generation Z. A useful analysis would be intersectional in its examination of age as only one axis of identity. UMSI will use Adviti’s findings to inform engagement and communication strategy in preparation for the upcoming fundraising campaign, and to ensure donors and potential donors who have not been properly addressed previously are spoken to. Adviti will focus on all factors that impact an individual’s desire to give.

Raaj Govil

He/Him | Sophomore | Michigan Medicine (MiMed) Campaign

The MiMed Campaign team leads all campaign planning efforts, drives strategy and engagement of Med’s top donors, and oversees prospect research and pipeline development. Raaj will analyze existing prospect research and apply results to build out the campaign pyramid. Raaj will attend campaign planning and donor strategy meetings with all gift officers. And, Raaj will have opportunities to volunteer at events throughout the summer where they will interact directly with donors and volunteers.

Elena Wong-Carrillo

She/Her | Senior | OUD People & Culture/Marketing & Communications

As hiring is increasingly competitive, it is vital for OUD to communicate our culture and mission, along with our values, to potential employees. Elena will help us leverage digital tools that will enable us to better connect with prospective employees. This project will include analysis of our current careers web presence and careers social media tactics, analysis of the web and social media tactics being used by those who may be competing for top talent, and recommendations for improved tactics and process.