Where the Alumni Are: Mapping the Donor Base at ODU
Old Dominion University’s development office maps roughly 200,000 alumni so its fundraisers can plan events, travel, and outreach around where their people actually live.
You can’t see that on an Excel file.
Jonas Porter · Director of Information, Old Dominion UniversityFor about a decade, Jonas Porter, the Director of Information at Old Dominion University’s development office, has used Maptive to turn a spreadsheet of roughly 200,000 alumni into something a fundraiser can act on. He maps where alumni and donors live so the office can plan events, travel, and outreach around where its people already cluster, and at ODU those maps now shape how fundraising gets done.
Key outcomes
- About a decade of mapping ODU’s roughly 200,000 alumni and donor records for the development office.
- Events placed where alumni already cluster, so a strong turnout is easier to draw.
- Outreach aimed at defined neighborhoods rather than broad regions, which trims wasted mail and email.
- Read-only maps shared with gift officers on the road, no login required, with security around sensitive data.
- Affordable and simple enough to renew for a decade, with no implementation project or procurement battle.
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A Development Office Built on Alumni Data
Old Dominion University, based in Norfolk, Virginia, raises money through a development office whose core asset is what it knows about its alumni. Jonas Porter directs information for that office, managing the alumni and donor database and the systems behind foundation accounting. With roughly 200,000 alumni on file, most of them in Virginia, the practical work often comes down to location.
Porter and a small group of colleagues build the maps, and the fundraisers use them. Rather than give every officer a login, the team builds a map and shares a read-only version that the fundraisers can open themselves.
With roughly 200,000 alumni on file, ODU’s development office runs on knowing where its people are.
Finding Where Alumni Cluster
The most common request is also the simplest, a question of where the people are. The alumni office wants to see clusters, gift officers want to know which cities hold enough alumni to justify a visit, and event planners want to place a gathering where the most people sit within a short drive, since a venue on the edge of the population draws a thinner crowd.
Maptive answers all of these from the same data. Porter maps the alumni in an area, the clusters become obvious, and the team centers an event or a trip on them. The visual is the point, and it is what makes the map useful to people who do not work in data all day.
On a map, the clusters that stay hidden in a spreadsheet become obvious to everyone who needs them.
Letting Requesters Define the Area
One of the benefits is settling arguments about geography. When someone asks for an event in Northern Virginia, the first question is what they mean by it, because a broad definition can pull in places no one intended. Instead of guessing, Porter shows the requester the actual clusters and lets them decide where their borders are. The person asking takes ownership of the group, and the office stops casting too wide a net.
That precision saves money. A mailing or an email to a tightly defined group costs less than a blanket campaign, and the response is usually better because the people reached are the right ones. The same idea has helped beyond fundraising. When a coach wanted to plan a trip to visit former athletes, a quick map showed where they lived, and the plan changed once the distances were in view.
Showing the real clusters lets the requester define the target area, which keeps outreach tight and the spending down.
Shared Maps for a Traveling Team
The maps reach well beyond Porter’s desk. Gift officers travel constantly, so the team shares a read-only version of a map that anyone can open without an account, which a vice president can open to plan a route or show a board. Because the data concerns alumni, the option to put security on a shared map matters as much as the map itself.
Alumni and donor records are sensitive, so a map that travels with a gift officer has to be locked down. A shared view can be password-protected and pared back to what the recipient needs, and the underlying records never leave ODU’s own systems. The maps also export at a resolution clean enough for a board presentation. The cost has stayed low enough to renew year after year without a procurement battle, and Porter calls Maptive intuitive enough to learn in an afternoon.
“Maptive helps me look good,” Porter says, which is no small thing when the audience is university leadership.
For ODU’s development office, the value shows up in events that draw better crowds, travel planned around real clusters, and decisions that change once someone can see the distances involved. None of it requires a specialist or a long rollout, which is why a small team has stayed with Maptive for a decade. All of that data existed long before the maps did, and Maptive is what lets the whole office act on it. Porter sums up the appeal in plain terms: “The biggest thing is the ease of use. It’s so intuitive that in an afternoon you can find how most of the features work and produce a map worth sharing.”
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