Case Study: Oregon State University Foundation achieves scalable, data-driven fundraising with Ellucian CRM Advance

How CRM Advance’s open architecture helped Oregon State University transform and grow their advancement efforts

Oregon State University Foundation (OSUF) faced a dead-end, home-grown advancement system that lacked built-in analytics, flexible data fields, secure user experience, and easy integrations—limiting how they captured and acted on constituent data. To meet goals around integration, analytics, and improved development-officer workflows, OSUF adopted Ellucian’s CRM Advance (with Microsoft Dynamics integration) as a modern, cloud-ready replacement.

Ellucian delivered an open-architecture CRM Advance platform that connected best-in-class tools (including Tableau), enabled flexible data models, and provided advanced analytics and AI-driven recommendations. The solution supported day-one processing of a $50 million gift, shipped 40 reports at go-live, helped OSUF scale fundraising (over $1 billion raised halfway through the current campaign and a $217 million record year in 2021), and empowered staff to personalize and automate outreach—reducing TCO and reliance on costly custom app development.

Oregon State University Foundation

Mark Koenig

Assistant Vice President for Advancement