What happens when a gift officer sends one email to a stranger's inbox? On this episode of the Steppingblocks DataU podcast, we found out. Hosts Amanda Kallach and Ed Weisman sat down with Carol Hill, Senior Director of Major Gifts for the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University, and Tena Latona, CEO of Working In The Schools (WITS) and a two-time Wayne State alumna, to trace the story of how a single data-driven outreach turned into a multi-year partnership. That partnership now spans a planned gift, a seat on the Board of Visitors, and a genuine friendship.
Click here to listen to the conversation.
Carol opened with a challenge that will sound familiar to anyone in alumni relations: alumni don't tell you when they change jobs, move cities, or get a new email address. Before Steppingblocks, Carol's team was working from a CRM that hadn't been updated in years. While prepping for a trip to Chicago, a city with a large concentration of Mike Ilitch School of Business graduates, she discovered her CRM still had Tena Latona listed as living in Clinton Township, Michigan. It wasn't even close.
So Carol turned to Steppingblocks. She searched for alumni in Chicago, with salaries in the six-figure range, who had graduated from the Mike Ilitch School of Business. That search returned roughly 40 to 50 names: real, current data pulled from public sources rather than a decade old database entry. Carol downloaded the list, ran a mail merge, and sent the same email to all of them.
Tena was the first to respond. Within minutes.
As a fundraiser herself (she started her career as a development officer at Wayne State while earning her MBA there), Tena knew exactly what Carol was doing, and she was frankly surprised it had taken this long. She held two degrees from Wayne State, had worked there for three years, and had received a scholarship that let her leave the MBA program without six figures of debt. On top of that, she'd quietly named Wayne State as a beneficiary in her Vanguard and Northwestern Mutual accounts years earlier: a planned gift no one at the university knew existed.
Carol's email was the first real outreach Tena had received in years. She said yes immediately, and the relationship took off from there. A follow-up visit to Chicago, a reconnection with a former Wayne State colleague to formalize the planned gift, and eventually an invitation to join the Mike Ilitch School's Board of Visitors, as its first ever representative from the nonprofit sector.
For Carol, Tena's addition to the board wasn't just about securing a gift. Historically, the advisory board had been filled by rotating representatives from Detroit's major industries, a placeholder model that looked diverse but didn't function like a real nonprofit board. Bringing in a nonprofit executive added a perspective the board had been missing entirely, and Carol credits it with elevating the board's ability to actually govern: shaping curriculum direction, guiding fundraising strategy, and thinking critically about where the school needs to go next.
Tena, for her part, has used the seat to give back in ways well beyond a check, including floating a $3,000-a-year named scholarship as an easy, meaningful entry point for fellow board members to get more involved in giving.
Ed and Amanda asked Carol how her use of the Steppingblocks platform has evolved. Her answer: the core workflow hasn't changed much. She still filters by city, school, and salary range before every trip, but the impact of that data goes well beyond individual outreach. Steppingblocks helps Wayne State's advancement, career services, and marketing teams tell a bigger story: where alumni end up, how their degrees translate into careers on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, and in nonprofit leadership, and how that placement data feeds into U.S. News & World Report rankings.
That storytelling matters right now. Wayne State is in the early stages of its first-ever billion-dollar campaign, already 55% of the way to goal ahead of a public launch next year, and Carol described the university as "Detroit's best-kept secret." With a student body that includes a large share of first-generation students and a track record as one of the top universities in the country for improving social mobility (14th nationally), the data gives Carol's team a factual foundation for a story that's often gone untold outside the region.
Closing out the conversation, both guests offered advice for anyone doing this work.
Carol's philosophy: philanthropy literally means "love of people." Too often, gift officers assume major gifts only come from CEOs and executives, and they talk themselves out of the ask. Her advice is to approach every alumnus as if they're capable of giving at a major-gift level, and to help them find a cause they're genuinely passionate about.
Tena's advice, from the donor's side of the table: just ask. She reminds her own team daily that a "no" is a perfectly good answer because it lets everyone move on. It's the endless "maybe" that stalls progress. And having accurate, current data going into that first outreach, she said, is what lets a gift officer show up prepared and confident instead of guessing.
This episode is a reminder that good data doesn't replace relationship-building in advancement work. It makes it possible in the first place. Carol's team couldn't have found Tena through an outdated CRM record. One accurate email address, combined with the willingness to ask, turned into a planned gift, a board seat, and years of partnership that continue to shape the Mike Ilitch School of Business today.
Click here to listen to the full episode for the entire conversation.