The country's most elite private schools are using sophisticated technology to track information about potential donors in order to tailor their fundraising pitches and boost profits.
The program, called Potentiality, is being used by over 100 schools in the country, among them several elite schools in Victoria, including Geelong College.
The software builds profiles on each donor, using Census data to estimate wealth based on the average wealth of their suburb and the likelihood of them donating to the school.
It stores every email a parent or donor has ever sent to the school's fundraising body, their payment and donation history, their volunteering efforts, event attendance and community involvement, to build a profile of the donor and measure their propensity to give.
There is also an advanced search engine that uses cross-school data to determine the likelihood of donations based on profession.
Founder and director of the software program, John Batistich, said the data helps the school tailor their funding pitches to individual donors.
"The most effective way of fundraising is taking the most personal approach. If you could walk into everyone's office and sit down and say: 'I need to talk to you about how we desperately need money at the school', that's the most effective way, but it's the most time consuming."
The program tracks school alumni with an advanced search tool called The Lost Member Search Engine, which locates alumni over Facebook, checks their authenticity based on their friends list, and enables the school to send personalised messages to invite them to school activities.
Mr Batistich said he did not think the software program was invasive. The program used publicly available information and social media to make the old practice of tracking school donors more efficient, he said.
"We're just connecting the dots. Any time you talk about capacity analysis, there may be some initial hesitation ... [but] a lot of this program was building on what development officers were doing already. They were already doing an Excel spreadsheets and saying I know X lives here so we'll put him in a high earning bracket," Mr Batistich said. "We're perfectly happy to show where the data sources came from."
Director of community relations at Geelong College, Mike Howell, said the program helped the school track the interests and behaviours of potential donors, enriching their connections to donors.
"It can document how often an alumnus comes to a site, how often they come to a reunion, what information they receive, how they're communicating with other alumni ... tracking things and having that level of engagement is important."
Foundation director of Sydney's Moriah College, Joseph Herschel, said Potentiality was among a range of providers the school used to improve relationship mapping, which could be useful for fundraising.
"We use it mainly for alumni relations. Most schools have a tight-knit community and most databases have the ability to be able to map relationships and mapping those relationships can be quite helpful in terms of understanding how to go about soliciting funds from our supporters," he said.
The program was initially used to engage alumni and was first adopted by schools 17 years ago. It started analysing fundraising capacity two years ago.
Timna Jacks attended the EduTech conference in Brisbane as a guest of Microsoft.
