These services and tools help to enable those people throughout the University who maintain relationships with the community and also those who give of their time and financial resources. This includes systems that aid in managing relationships with our constituents and tools to track donations of both individuals and organizations. The systems also help the University assure a gift’s use matches the donor’s intent and aid in recognition and acknowledgement. In addition to advancement activities, this area also supports community based programs such as United Way.

Today, advancement programs are distributed across the University, with each division having its own independent advancement office.  This is supported by a shared Advancement Services operation which performs gift processing and other aspects of coordination.

The current, primary advancement system at the University of Rochester is FIST, Fundraising Information Systems Team. This system keeps track of alumni, parents and friends (individual and organizational) of the University. Information tracked includes:

• name, address, employment information (320,000 biographic records)

• degrees received, activities before and after graduation (108,000 academic records)

• all gifts to the University and Medical Center since 1976 - 1977 (1,020,000 gift records)

FIST was created by Administrative Computing Services in conjunction with the Development and Alumni Affairs staff of all University divisions. Hundreds of requests for data and reports are completed by the FIST programmers each year. In addition to the FIST system, the Advancement organization also utilizes two supplementary systems known as Gifted Memory and Folio.

Gifted Memory is vendor software which was purchased to assist with the tracking and managing of major gift prospects.

Folio is a homegrown application which was established based on the need to further integrate FIST with other University systems. 

FIST and Gifted Memory data is available for reporting via the University's Data Warehouse.

The University is preparing to launch a significant multi-year comprehensive campaign which will require careful coordination of solicitations and collaboration among the University's advancement programs.