This team had already exceeded one major campaign, and it was preparing for an even more ambitious one.
Westmont College is a liberal arts college in Santa Barbara. Its advancement team has just exceeded a $250M campaign goal, with one-third the staff a peer institution would carry. The team is now preparing to launch an even more ambitious fundraising initiative.
The team is lean by design and ambitious by mandate: six gift officers, one prospect researcher, a stewardship lead, and the lead of advancement. With 60,000+ alumni and parents, a maturing donor base, foundation reporting volume that has grown 6×, and gift officers each carrying 150 to 170 households, Westmont needed more leverage from the team it already had. Risely partnered with the team to streamline research and unlock capacity without adding headcount.
Campaign goal the team exceeded
Households per gift officer
Alumni and parents
One researcher, six gift officers, and a workflow stretched to its limits.
Westmont's prospect researcher is Neil Di Maggio. He has been at the college for twenty years and supports the entire donor portfolio, running reporting for leadership, fielding ad-hoc requests from gift officers, and writing briefings for every donor coming to a Westmont event.
Each prospect briefing required roughly an hour of work: pulling wealth indicators, personal connections, philanthropic history, and giving capacity from multiple sources, then validating each identity against proprietary tools like LexisNexis to weed out false positives. A single donor meeting cost an hour. A 15- to 20-person event easily ran to 20.
The harder constraint was the constant juggle. As Neil put it: “You've got the urgent and important, and then the really important but less urgent. Research always gets pushed back and back and back, until it becomes the urgent thing, and then you're stressed because you don't have time to do it properly.” An elite team with even more ambitious goals was running out of leverage.
Caseload · 2026
150–170 households per officer
Each gift officer carries 150 to 170 households alongside a single researcher and a stewardship lead. The team is already running lean by design; the workload is not.
Workflow burden
20 hours per event
Single-prospect briefings ran an hour each. A reception with 15 to 20 attendees easily stretched to 20 hours of assembly per event, repeated across an event-heavy advancement calendar.
The work itself changed.
Risely is an agentic AI platform purpose-built for higher education. Its agents pull live donor context from the Advancement CRM, ingest the historical correspondence and stewardship records held in Westmont's institutional files, and enrich every profile with real-time web and LinkedIn signal, surfacing every claim alongside its source. The researcher opens a structured research framework where assembly used to live, and spends his time validating, corroborating, and interpreting.
The deeper shift is in when research happens. Prospect research used to live in tension with the steady stream of urgent ad-hoc requests; it got pushed back until it became urgent itself, then done under deadline pressure. Now, when a news article surfaces about someone connected to the college, or an unexpected gift comes in, the researcher can act on the signal in the moment: run the research, scan the results, return later to validate. Capacity that used to disappear into assembly is now spent on judgment, which prospects to go deeper on, which patterns matter, what the gift officer should actually do with the intelligence.
Before Risely · A Prospect Researcher's Day
Manual navigation across multiple disconnected tools, with no intelligence guiding where to focus first.
- 1Pull a name from a gift officer's requestThe inbound queue had no scoring and no prioritization.
- 2Open a wealth-indicator toolVerify identity and surface giving capacity.
- 3Cross-reference outside giving historyCheck philanthropic capacity and prior gifts in a separate window.
- 4Run web and professional-network searchesFill in employment depth, current role, personal connections.
- 5Write a six-bullet profile by handWord doc, paste links, post the result back to the CRM.
1 hr
Time / briefing
4+
Tools open
With Risely · A Prospect Researcher's Day
The same work now happens inside a single screen, guided by agents at every step. The cognitive load is gone.
- 1Open Risely with full donor contextCRM data, contact reports, opportunities, and engagement history surfaced together.
- 2Generate a research framework in minutesA complete draft, in the researcher's preferred format, ready to validate.
- 3Validate against proprietary sourcesHuman judgment leads. LexisNexis and other tools confirm names, addresses, and family connections.
- 4Surface engagement intelligence and strategyRisely's agents read contact reports and opportunities, returning a complete picture and a forward strategy.
- 5Spend time on judgmentDecide which prospects warrant deeper attention, and what the gift officer should actually do with the intelligence.
31 min
Time / briefing
1
Tools open
The fact that I can use it when I see a gift come in and address that right away, that's something I've always been wanting to be able to do and just never had the capacity to do as a one-person shop.
Neil Di Maggio
Prospect Researcher, on working alongside Risely
From hours of assembly to 4× more strategic research.
In 12 weeks, Risely generated 121 prospect briefs, work that previously bottlenecked at one person and stretched across days of assembly. The team's time is now spent differently.
When a news article surfaces about someone connected to the college, or an unexpected gift comes in, the researcher acts on the signal in the moment instead of filing it for a quieter week that never arrives. Gift officers request and receive briefs the same day. Capacity that used to live entirely in assembly now lives in judgment: deciding which prospects warrant deeper attention, surfacing patterns across a portfolio, and shaping the strategy a gift officer brings into a conversation.
For an elite team preparing for an even more ambitious fundraising initiative, the leverage shows up in the categories of work the team can finally own.
Twelve weeks
An elite team, now equipped with the leverage to take on an even more ambitious campaign.
More strategic research capacity
Framework draft, down from 1 hr
Prospect briefs generated
Gift officers across the team request and receive briefs on the same day. The work that used to begin with data assembly now begins with judgment, and reaches into donor relationships that previously sat outside the team's research capacity. The researcher spends his time on strategy. Gift officers spend theirs face-to-face with donors. The team has stopped trying to keep up with its existing workload, and started building the one the next campaign actually needs.
It's like a little stream that's already running, and I'm going alongside it, and I'm tapping the bank and putting rocks in the way and saying okay, actually you need to go this way a little bit.
Neil Di Maggio
Prospect Researcher, on working alongside Risely