Closing Remarks on a Great Week

A few months ago, I wrote an article on LinkedIn called “If I were building Advancement Engagement from scratch.” I got quite a bit of outreach about it, because it argues for an entirely new organizational structure for advancement engagement. The conversations I’ve had since have convinced me, more than ever, that this is the direction most leaders should take — particularly those in the run-up to the public phase of a campaign when it’s crucial to develop approaches for both depth and breadth of engagement.

In that article, I advocate reorganizing teams by journey rather than by program. The most difficult part of this shift is also the part to tackle first: building cohesion between two teams that, in a journey model, have to operate as partners — a Volunteer Engagement team and an Experiential team. The Volunteer team owns the people: sourcing, placing, and stewarding alumni contributors, and tracking their involvement over time. The Experiential team leads the experience: designing and delivering the events those volunteers show up for and help facilitate.

A volunteer team should also lead engagement tracking and make sure volunteers actually succeed in their roles. And “success” is usually where the friction starts — because in a model where programs are the alignment structure, directors get territorial about “their volunteers.”

To see why, look at how most alumni teams are built today. They’re organized to build and execute programs: traditions like Homecoming and Reunions, chapters and clubs, career-based initiatives, and programming for young alumni and students. Each program team owns everything in its lane — communications, recruiting and stewarding its own volunteers, planning and running events, and looping in annual giving when it makes sense. Over time, that creates a structure where volunteers are tied to a specific program rather than to the institution and its broader priorities.

In a journey-based alignment, that structure shifts. Take chapters and affinity groups. The Volunteer team would recruit, onboard, and steward the regional and affinity leaders, track their participation, and look for ways to re-engage them in other roles down the road. The Experiential team member would work alongside those same volunteers to plan the event calendar, shape the experience, and handle logistics. Both colleagues are working on the same chapter or the same affinity program — but with clearly defined roles: one focused on the people and their ongoing involvement, the other on the experience being delivered. They’re partners across teams, with different vertical reporting lines.

It's also a real development opportunity for your team: organizing around journeys means putting people in roles that play to their strengths, not just whatever their program happened to need.

That first job — cataloging — is bigger than it sounds. On every campus, volunteerism is already happening in silos and pockets outside of advancement. There are school- and department-based advisory boards. Coaches in athletics pull in alumni throughout the year. A handful of faculty, especially in business and engineering, bring alumni in as classroom speakers. Career services keeps a list of alumni who help with mock interviews. To build a journey-based approach, all (or most) of these need to be cataloged and folded into an institution-wide strategy.

Done well, and with a lot of coordination, the idea is that an interplay develops over time between the central volunteer team and the rest of campus, as new volunteers are placed and those who’ve finished a role are intentionally brought back for another.

The team should also stand up and lead pan-university programs of its own — ones where alumni can offer advice, reflections, and, now and then, congratulations to students at key moments in their journey. And one of the most valuable things a central team can do is bring more alumni donors into volunteer roles, not just the usual volunteer pool.

A centrally coordinated volunteer function lets an institution move past episodic engagement into something steadier and more intentional. Volunteers who show up for one initiative can be re-engaged in the next. Alumni who raise their hand once can be guided into deeper involvement over time. And the people already giving can be brought into volunteer roles that reinforce the connection they already have.

A journeys-based approach and alignment allows for the scaling of volunteerism and a focus on engagement retention.

None of this is easy, and that's exactly why it's worth doing. The hard part isn't the org chart — it's asking people to give up a kind of ownership they've held for years and trust a new way of working that doesn't have a playbook yet. But the institutions that figure this out won't just run better programs. They'll build relationships with alumni that outlast any single event, director, or campaign.

Discussion: What do you think would be the hardest part about standing up this new model at your organization?

About Speaking Engagement

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About the next Keynote

If this has you rethinking how we organize teams around people, Monday's Keynote takes on the leadership side of that same question: I'm joined by Shanna Hocking — author of One Bold Move a Day and founder of Hocking Leadership. New episode drops Monday on LinkedIn, YouTube, here on Substack, and on your favorite podcast app.

Listen to the full-length version on YouTube (58 mins)

Omar described sitting at his own UVA graduation, the first in a lower-income family to make it there, certain he’d just been handed a guarantee. “I will never be unemployed,” he remembers thinking. And then, plainly: that’s not true anymore. Coming from someone who spent his early career as a true believer, someone who literally hung his diploma in his Teach for America classroom, this is quite the statement even if he’s right! The promise he built a life on has changed, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.

If the old compact is gone, what replaces it? Omar’s bet is entrepreneurship, not as a major but as a method we teach the way we teach the scientific one, and as the most connective thing an advancement shop has after athletics (perhaps). It raises real questions for our work.

If alumni light up around building things, why do we still mostly approach them as donors? What would it take to convene entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list? And if nimbler organizations can move faster than we can, what’s the durable thing only a university can still offer? I think people connect to Omar because he’s an optimist who won’t look away, which is exactly what this moment asks of the rest of us.

Follow Omar on LinkedIn and subscribe to his Substack, “Deepfake it Till You Make It.”

Big Themes This Week

• The old college compact — “get the degree, get the job” — has quietly broken, and even brand-name schools can’t rest on their laurels.

• Entrepreneurship as a method, not a major — something we should teach like the scientific method, for every student.

• AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes; the real edge is durable human skills like curiosity, resilience, creativity, and empathy.

• Lifelong learning is the real frontier — education delivered when you need it, not all front-loaded by age 22.

• Entrepreneurial alumni are among the most engaged people in our communities — yet we still tend to approach them as donors.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we still treating alumni transactionally when they actually want to build alongside us?

• What would it look like to convene our entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list?

• Which of our “tried and true” engagement tactics deserve to go under a microscope this year?

• How are we finding and elevating authentic alumni and peer voices, versus relying on top-down brand campaigns?

• If a nimbler organization tried to out-engage us tomorrow, what’s the durable thing only we can offer?

  ---

  Coming Up:

  The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

  Register

  Our next Agora will be about these themes and more plus a moderated networking session.
  

  Title:
  Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust
  

  Date & Time:
  Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.
  

  Speaker:
  Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

Read more

Darden has raised more than $600 million in its most recent campaign. Omar Garriott, who runs the school’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, said on Speaking Engagement that the school still gets a familiar complaint: alumni often feel they are approached transactionally, as donors. Those two facts seem like they should cancel each other out. They don’t.

Read more

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Recent data backs him up. A 2026 survey of 1,000 Gen Z adults found that 72% hold negative or cautious views toward AI-generated content, with human credibility identified as an emerging competitive advantage.

But for many of us, advancement communications teams are already stretched thin. Hiring is hard, retention is challenging, and the content calendar and creative requests keep growing. How are we going to keep this human-first credibility high while also being asked to produce more with fewer resources?

The solution most shops reach for is more automation, repurposing content, and using AI to generate content. These solutions aren’t inherently wrong, but we need to proceed with caution considering how much content we’re all exposed to on a daily basis. We need to consider other creative solutions. What if the talent your content team needs already exists in your alumni community?

I would bet that every alumni base contains individuals who write, shoot video, build audiences, and tell stories. They may do it full-time, freelance, or just for fun on their own platforms. Why not mobilize them with an organization they already have an affinity for?

To look outside higher ed, Redken Insiders is a great example of this. Redken built a creator community for professional hairdressers — stylists who had used the products throughout their careers and genuinely loved them. Insiders posted on their own accounts, not Redken’s. Stylists needed at least 1,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok to join, and the model was built specifically to activate their existing personal audiences. The key differentiator in my mind is that Redken didn’t create an influencer program - they built a community. Professionals who signed up had their own learning hub and ecosystem. It included special workshops, early access to try out products, events and an online peer community. The results: 7,500 pieces of content, 60% of total Redken social mentions, and 60% community growth in 18 months. They activated talent and affinity that already existed — and deepened that engagement through identity, belonging, and community.

Many institutions already have a version of this sitting untapped - Giving Day ambassadors. Many giving day programs include this type of peer-influence and social media mobilization, but we limit ourselves to that one or two days a year. The alumni are recruited to share, advocate, and solicit gifts on behalf of the institution. And many work HARD, on that one day. And then the giving day ends. We might send a thank you for participating and celebrate the most influential ambassador, but that’s it. Most don’t continue to engage with that group of alumni until we invite them to sign up again the following year. What would it look like to keep those ambassadors active year-round — not to ask for donations, but to find and tell stories? What would it look like to deepen their engagement? To create an identity and community for those who have already raised their hands, shared their social platforms, and advocated on your behalf?

There’s a second version of this model worth naming, one that solves the staffing capacity problem even more directly. Rather than activating alumni to create content on their own platforms, it brings alumni talent inside the institutional content operation. Inspired by the one hour a month volunteer program that Ryan Catherwood built at Longwood University, the University of Texas at El Paso has hired fractional alumni freelancers to help fit the gap between how much content needs to be created and the capacity of their staff. As we explored in our inaugural Agora session, Sydney Bertram, AVP for Strategic Communications and Engagement, recruited alumni freelancers on LinkedIn to write articles, shoot videos, and tell the stories staff didn’t have capacity to chase. The content was published on institutional channels — but it was produced by people with a genuine connection to the place. Contributor content became UTEP’s highest-engagement content type in FY25.

Both models are worth considering. One extends your reach through an individual’s account, network, and personal trust - and creates a new identity-based engagement program for those who participate. The other adds real production capacity without adding FTE to your communications team. They’re not mutually exclusive — and in our sector and at a time where hiring freezes and flat budgets are common, they both deserve serious consideration.

Omar’s advice is simple: find the influencers already in your alumni community. Find the ones telling stories about their careers, their industries, their work — and figure out where the institution connects to that story. Ask them to produce something rather than producing it for them. Make it easy to share, scale, and repeat. Then get out of the way.

The talent your alumni community could contribute already exists. The question is: will your shop build anything to receive it?

Annie Quade is an advancement strategist with more than 15 years of experience spanning major and planned gifts, alumni engagement, annual giving, talent management, and organizational design. She serves as the Associate Vice President of Advancement Strategy & Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she oversees integrated engagement, talent and people operations, and the division's growth strategy — and currently provides interim leadership of the development team.

Big Themes This Week

• The old college compact — “get the degree, get the job” — has quietly broken, and even brand-name schools can’t rest on their laurels.

• Entrepreneurship as a method, not a major — something we should teach like the scientific method, for every student.

• AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes; the real edge is durable human skills like curiosity, resilience, creativity, and empathy.

• Lifelong learning is the real frontier — education delivered when you need it, not all front-loaded by age 22.

• Entrepreneurial alumni are among the most engaged people in our communities — yet we still tend to approach them as donors.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we still treating alumni transactionally when they actually want to build alongside us?

• What would it look like to convene our entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list?

• Which of our “tried and true” engagement tactics deserve to go under a microscope this year?

• How are we finding and elevating authentic alumni and peer voices, versus relying on top-down brand campaigns?

• If a nimbler organization tried to out-engage us tomorrow, what’s the durable thing only we can offer?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more plus a moderated networking session.

Register

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

Recent data backs him up. A 2026 survey of 1,000 Gen Z adults found that 72% hold negative or cautious views toward AI-generated content, with human credibility identified as an emerging competitive advantage.

But for many of us, advancement communications teams are already stretched thin. Hiring is hard, retention is challenging, and the content calendar and creative requests keep growing. How are we going to keep this human-first credibility high while also being asked to produce more with fewer resources?

The solution most shops reach for is more automation, repurposing content, and using AI to generate content. These solutions aren’t inherently wrong, but we need to proceed with caution considering how much content we’re all exposed to on a daily basis. We need to consider other creative solutions. What if the talent your content team needs already exists in your alumni community?

I would bet that every alumni base contains individuals who write, shoot video, build audiences, and tell stories. They may do it full-time, freelance, or just for fun on their own platforms. Why not mobilize them with an organization they already have an affinity for?

To look outside higher ed, Redken Insiders is a great example of this. Redken built a creator community for professional hairdressers — stylists who had used the products throughout their careers and genuinely loved them. Insiders posted on their own accounts, not Redken’s. Stylists needed at least 1,000 followers on Instagram or TikTok to join, and the model was built specifically to activate their existing personal audiences. The key differentiator in my mind is that Redken didn’t create an influencer program - they built a community. Professionals who signed up had their own learning hub and ecosystem. It included special workshops, early access to try out products, events and an online peer community. The results: 7,500 pieces of content, 60% of total Redken social mentions, and 60% community growth in 18 months. They activated talent and affinity that already existed — and deepened that engagement through identity, belonging, and community.

Many institutions already have a version of this sitting untapped - Giving Day ambassadors. Many giving day programs include this type of peer-influence and social media mobilization, but we limit ourselves to that one or two days a year. The alumni are recruited to share, advocate, and solicit gifts on behalf of the institution. And many work HARD, on that one day. And then the giving day ends. We might send a thank you for participating and celebrate the most influential ambassador, but that’s it. Most don’t continue to engage with that group of alumni until we invite them to sign up again the following year. What would it look like to keep those ambassadors active year-round — not to ask for donations, but to find and tell stories? What would it look like to deepen their engagement? To create an identity and community for those who have already raised their hands, shared their social platforms, and advocated on your behalf?

There’s a second version of this model worth naming, one that solves the staffing capacity problem even more directly. Rather than activating alumni to create content on their own platforms, it brings alumni talent inside the institutional content operation. Inspired by the one hour a month volunteer program that Ryan Catherwood built at Longwood University, the University of Texas at El Paso has hired fractional alumni freelancers to help fit the gap between how much content needs to be created and the capacity of their staff. As we explored in our inaugural Agora session, Sydney Bertram, AVP for Strategic Communications and Engagement, recruited alumni freelancers on LinkedIn to write articles, shoot videos, and tell the stories staff didn’t have capacity to chase. The content was published on institutional channels — but it was produced by people with a genuine connection to the place. Contributor content became UTEP’s highest-engagement content type in FY25.

Both models are worth considering. One extends your reach through an individual’s account, network, and personal trust - and creates a new identity-based engagement program for those who participate. The other adds real production capacity without adding FTE to your communications team. They’re not mutually exclusive — and in our sector and at a time where hiring freezes and flat budgets are common, they both deserve serious consideration.

Omar’s advice is simple: find the influencers already in your alumni community. Find the ones telling stories about their careers, their industries, their work — and figure out where the institution connects to that story. Ask them to produce something rather than producing it for them. Make it easy to share, scale, and repeat. Then get out of the way.

The talent your alumni community could contribute already exists. The question is: will your shop build anything to receive it?

Annie Quade is an advancement strategist with more than 15 years of experience spanning major and planned gifts, alumni engagement, annual giving, talent management, and organizational design. She serves as the Associate Vice President of Advancement Strategy & Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she oversees integrated engagement, talent and people operations, and the division's growth strategy — and currently provides interim leadership of the development team.

Big Themes This Week

• The old college compact — “get the degree, get the job” — has quietly broken, and even brand-name schools can’t rest on their laurels.

• Entrepreneurship as a method, not a major — something we should teach like the scientific method, for every student.

• AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes; the real edge is durable human skills like curiosity, resilience, creativity, and empathy.

• Lifelong learning is the real frontier — education delivered when you need it, not all front-loaded by age 22.

• Entrepreneurial alumni are among the most engaged people in our communities — yet we still tend to approach them as donors.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we still treating alumni transactionally when they actually want to build alongside us?

• What would it look like to convene our entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list?

• Which of our “tried and true” engagement tactics deserve to go under a microscope this year?

• How are we finding and elevating authentic alumni and peer voices, versus relying on top-down brand campaigns?

• If a nimbler organization tried to out-engage us tomorrow, what’s the durable thing only we can offer?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more plus a moderated networking session.

Register

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

There’s no shortage of talking heads preaching about the need to infuse AI and entrepreneurship more seamlessly into higher education. But most of those discussions focus on curriculum innovation. What I found most interesting about Omar Garriott’s conversation on the Breakout podcast with Ryan Catherwood was the idea of adopting innovation not only in …

Read more

“It isn’t even just the student-facing products. It’s our operations themselves,” said Garriott, who serves as Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

“It’s how we innovate ourselves in this moment, which is calling for that. It’s our business models. It’s our tech investments. It’s how we collaborate as different units within higher ed. It’s how we show up in a coordinated fashion for students and alumni.”

I latched on to that last part in particular—the idea that engagement and comms shops can and must adopt a position of operational entrepreneurship to best serve alumni and donors.

But it’s important to note that “innovation” doesn’t have to be synonymous with “overhaul.” “Entrepreneurship” isn’t the same as “winging it.”

Advancement doesn’t have to choose between clinging to “the way we’ve always done it” and turning the entire “tanker ship” through sweeping, disruptive changes. Instead they can use data, AI, and an entrepreneurial mindset to try out new programs and strategies and make small, constant iterations.

I see this concept a lot with some of my content marketing clients who are in the federal tech consulting space. Through a process called rapid prototyping, they take a use case, build something they think can solve the challenge in a secure sandbox, and test it relentlessly. The goal isn’t to get the product perfect on the first try but to make tiny iterations over a short period of time. If the prototype shows promise, it gets scaled. If it doesn’t, the team starts over without the endeavor having cost them significant money or time.

How might advancement teams take this approach? What could that look like? Let’s take alumni chapters, as an example. University A’s engagement team wants to improve its flagging regional chapter program.

They conduct some quick research about what alumni in two or three different hubs really want from local engagement (use case). The alumni engagement team takes that data, creates two or three events, and assesses each (rapid prototyping). They use that information to adjust those events, hold them again, and reassess (iteration). The most successful events stick around. The least successful events don’t. Through it all, the engagement team keeps assessing alumni sentiment, using that knowledge to make changes to their chapter strategies to best meet their “customers’” needs.

This kind of entrepreneurial mindset ensures that engagement and communications teams can be nimble, adjusting their approaches at the speed of alumni sentiment instead of lagging months or years behind. Investments can be made based on what evidence shows is working rather than basing budgetary decisions on vibes or “what we’ve always done.” On the other side, alumni will see an institution that’s trying its best to serve their needs, rather than the other way around.

What are examples of operational intrapreneurship at your institution? Add your thoughts to the comments.

Kristin Simonetti Hanson is an award-winning editorial content strategist, writer, and editor based in Baltimore, Md.

For nearly 20 years, she’s served higher ed and nonprofit organizations with her distinctive, creative voice and sharp, strategic insight, turning complex priorities into clear, compelling narratives. In 2021—after working in-house for Johns Hopkins University, the University of North Carolina Wilmington, The Washington Center for Internships and Academic Seminars, and Elon University—she went out on her own, founding Kristin Hanson Writes, LLC.

Big Themes This Week

• The old college compact — “get the degree, get the job” — has quietly broken, and even brand-name schools can’t rest on their laurels.

• Entrepreneurship as a method, not a major — something we should teach like the scientific method, for every student.

• AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes; the real edge is durable human skills like curiosity, resilience, creativity, and empathy.

• Lifelong learning is the real frontier — education delivered when you need it, not all front-loaded by age 22.

• Entrepreneurial alumni are among the most engaged people in our communities — yet we still tend to approach them as donors.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we still treating alumni transactionally when they actually want to build alongside us?

• What would it look like to convene our entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list?

• Which of our “tried and true” engagement tactics deserve to go under a microscope this year?

• How are we finding and elevating authentic alumni and peer voices, versus relying on top-down brand campaigns?

• If a nimbler organization tried to out-engage us tomorrow, what’s the durable thing only we can offer?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more plus a moderated networking session.

Register

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

My conversation with Omar Garriott, who leads the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology at UVA’s Darden School, kept circling one idea: the old promise of a college degree has quietly changed, and the schools that thrive will be the ones willing to say so out loud. These three clips are the spine of that argument. Watch them in order and you get the whole arc, from why the ground is shifting, to what higher ed should do about it, to how those of us in engagement and advancement actually tell the story.

Read more

Listen to the full-length version on YouTube (58 mins)

Omar described sitting at his own UVA graduation, the first in a lower-income family to make it there, certain he’d just been handed a guarantee. “I will never be unemployed,” he remembers thinking. And then, plainly: that’s not true anymore. Coming from someone who spent his early career as a true believer, someone who literally hung his diploma in his Teach for America classroom, this is quite the statement even if he’s right! The promise he built a life on has changed, and he refuses to pretend otherwise.

If the old compact is gone, what replaces it? Omar’s bet is entrepreneurship, not as a major but as a method we teach the way we teach the scientific one, and as the most connective thing an advancement shop has after athletics (perhaps). It raises real questions for our work.

If alumni light up around building things, why do we still mostly approach them as donors? What would it take to convene entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list? And if nimbler organizations can move faster than we can, what’s the durable thing only a university can still offer? I think people connect to Omar because he’s an optimist who won’t look away, which is exactly what this moment asks of the rest of us.

Follow Omar on LinkedIn and subscribe to his Substack, “Deepfake it Till You Make It.”

Big Themes This Week

• The old college compact — “get the degree, get the job” — has quietly broken, and even brand-name schools can’t rest on their laurels.

• Entrepreneurship as a method, not a major — something we should teach like the scientific method, for every student.

• AI fluency is fast becoming table stakes; the real edge is durable human skills like curiosity, resilience, creativity, and empathy.

• Lifelong learning is the real frontier — education delivered when you need it, not all front-loaded by age 22.

• Entrepreneurial alumni are among the most engaged people in our communities — yet we still tend to approach them as donors.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we still treating alumni transactionally when they actually want to build alongside us?

• What would it look like to convene our entrepreneurial alumni as a community instead of working them as a list?

• Which of our “tried and true” engagement tactics deserve to go under a microscope this year?

• How are we finding and elevating authentic alumni and peer voices, versus relying on top-down brand campaigns?

• If a nimbler organization tried to out-engage us tomorrow, what’s the durable thing only we can offer?

  ---

  Coming Up:

  The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

  Register

  Our next Agora will be about these themes and more plus a moderated networking session.
  

  Title:
  Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust
  

  Date & Time:
  Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.
  

  Speaker:
  Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (53 mins)

The Gallup-Purdue Index, the largest study of college graduates in U.S. history, found that one relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and a lifetime of engagement and yet it still reaches fewer than a third of students. What makes this urgent is that the early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — are breaking, with AI now pulling out the very jobs new graduates were counting on.

For those of us who think about lifelong connection, the episode raises questions worth sitting with. Why is “lifelong learning” the single most common phrase in college mission statements when we do almost nothing to deliver on it? What would it mean to treat a degree not as a four-year burst but, in Brandon’s words, as “an evergreen tool” an alum returns to across a career? And if that becomes the model, what is alumni engagement’s role inside it?

Brandon’s answer is hopeful and a little uncomfortable. He believes the institutions that win won’t be the ones with the best marketing, but the ones authentic to a value proposition they can actually deliver and he’s convinced any school willing to be intentional can build it. What I keep coming back to is that the diploma is permanent, but the relationship behind it is not. The schools that treat alumni as members of something worth renewing, rather than a population to solicit, are the ones who will still matter in twenty years. That possibility sits at the center of this conversation.

Big Themes This Week

• One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.

• The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.

• “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.

• With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.

• Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

• If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?

• As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?

• What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?

• Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?

• Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

Title:

Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:

Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:

Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

I call this narrative the “Hiring Manager’s Story.”

Here’s how I used to tell the Hiring Manager’s Story to both students and alumni as a way to explain network-building. I try to use the word “hiring” as much as possible, and tell the story of how referrals are the key to securing opportunities.

I used to say...

Back when I used to work on a college campus, I would tell the Hiring Manager’s Story to students as often as I could. Alumni are the solution to this short stack vs. big stack problem students face in landing a great job or internship. For students and alumni, a strong network will hopefully generate future referrals. The strength of our university networks is about the health and vibrancy of our referral systems.

Colleges and universities must teach students how, where, and when to introduce themselves to alumni that understand and share career aspirations, and not rely on the university connection alone. This is step one before any actual opportunity can be secured.

A university network must produce referrals for it to have value. The hope is that as we build and activate volunteers, donors, and nurture our relationships with alumni, our referral system matures and strengthens too.

If your school is one of those that is working to differentiate in this area, it’s actually the Hiring Manager’s Story that must be tackled first and most often.

About Speaking Engagement

This week was a vacation week for me. I spent time with family in Hilton Head, South Carolina at my Dad’s place. It was great to take a little more down time. I was texting back and forth with Annie Quade (friend and also SE Contributing Editor) this week and lamenting that it’s tough to stay proactive producing and publishing content AND also be on vacation.

Annie told, me that I should, “Cut myself some slack.”

Noted.

That said, this IS the “conference on engagement that never sleeps.”

During vacation this week, I was able to line up two more Keynote guests, our next Book Club read and the author’s involvement, our next Agora speaker and date, and secure two more university partnerships. They all came together this week.

The good news is that I’m really enjoying this work! I also enjoyed some downtime this week, too.

About the next Keynote

Coming up on Monday’s Keynote is special guest Omar Garriott. Omar is the Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Technology at the UVA Darden School of Business.

I first met Omar back during my tenure at the UVA when he worked at LinkedIn. Omar has a tremendous set of professional experiences and is was great to catch up in order to discuss the changing nature of college.

I highly recommend readers subscribe to Omar’s newsletter on Substack called Deepfake It Till You Make It.

I call this narrative the “Hiring Manager’s Story.”

Here’s how I used to tell the Hiring Manager’s Story to both students and alumni as a way to explain network-building. I try to use the word “hiring” as much as possible, and tell the story of how referrals are the key to securing opportunities.

I used to say...

Back when I used to work on a college campus, I would tell the Hiring Manager’s Story to students as often as I could. Alumni are the solution to this short stack vs. big stack problem students face in landing a great job or internship. For students and alumni, a strong network will hopefully generate future referrals. The strength of our university networks is about the health and vibrancy of our referral systems.

Colleges and universities must teach students how, where, and when to introduce themselves to alumni that understand and share career aspirations, and not rely on the university connection alone. This is step one before any actual opportunity can be secured.

A university network must produce referrals for it to have value. The hope is that as we build and activate volunteers, donors, and nurture our relationships with alumni, our referral system matures and strengthens too.

If your school is one of those that is working to differentiate in this area, it’s actually the Hiring Manager’s Story that must be tackled first and most often.

About Speaking Engagement

This week was a vacation week for me. I spent time with family in Hilton Head, South Carolina at my Dad’s place. It was great to take a little more down time. I was texting back and forth with Annie Quade (friend and also SE Contributing Editor) this week and lamenting that it’s tough to stay proactive producing and publishing content AND also be on vacation.

Annie told, me that I should, “Cut myself some slack.”

Noted.

That said, this IS the “conference on engagement that never sleeps.”

During vacation this week, I was able to line up two more Keynote guests, our next Book Club read and the author’s involvement, our next Agora speaker and date, and secure two more university partnerships. They all came together this week.

The good news is that I’m really enjoying this work! I also enjoyed some downtime this week, too.

About the next Keynote

Coming up on Monday’s Keynote is special guest Omar Garriott. Omar is the Executive Director of the Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Technology at the UVA Darden School of Business.

I first met Omar back during my tenure at the UVA when he worked at LinkedIn. Omar has a tremendous set of professional experiences and is was great to catch up in order to discuss the changing nature of college.

I highly recommend readers subscribe to Omar’s newsletter on Substack called Deepfake It Till You Make It.

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Some of the most important leadership signals have nothing to do with title.

They show up in how you communicate during uncertainty. How you carry yourself in meetings. How you present ideas to senior leaders. How confidently you operate in rooms where decisions are being made.

Our next Agora will be about the…

Read more

But is anyone actually doing it?

Read more

Brandon Busteed thinks the first rungs of the career ladder are disappearing. On the Keynote, he laid out the erosion: 8.2 million college students wanted an internship this past year, and 3.6 million got one. Teen employment started falling off a cliff around 2010. Entry-level white-collar work is now the part of the labor market most exposed to AI. The bottom of the ladder, the part graduates used to climb onto without thinking about it, is thinning out underneath them.

That changes what an alumni network is for.

A harder question sits underneath the pitch: which of those is it?

Most institutions act as though career connections surface on their own. Hold the reunions, run the affinity groups, host a few networking nights, and the relationships take care of themselves. The reach exists, so the value must be in there somewhere. The institutions producing the strongest outcomes treat relationships the way they treat fundraising and enrollment and the academic program: as infrastructure that someone owns, funds, and is accountable for.

Busteed has the data on what happens when an institution actually builds it. During his time at Gallup, the school that scored highest on alumni saying they’d had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams was an online, adult-serving university. Nobody would have guessed it. It had no quad, no residence halls, no homecoming weekend. What it had was full-time staff whose entire job was mentoring students. The outcome people associate with deep campus tradition came from a place with none of it, because the place decided mentoring was a function and staffed it like one.

Set that against where the engagement dollars actually go. Homecoming and reunions absorb tens of thousands of dollars a year at most institutions, sometimes more. These are real community-builders and worth keeping. But they answer a question alumni are asking less and less. Reunions ask whether you remember this place. The graduate watching the entry-level market close behind them is asking something else: is this place still useful to me now?

Those are different relationships. One runs on memory. The other runs on whether the institution shows up at the moments that matter after graduation, which are increasingly the career moments. An alumni office optimized for the first will keep reporting strong attendance numbers while the second relationship quietly goes unbuilt.

This is the gap between affiliation and connection. Affiliation comes free with the degree: you went here, so you’re one of ours, and the reunion invitation arrives on schedule. Connection has to be earned at the point of need. The Gallup mentorship finding is connection. So is a warm introduction to an alum three industries over when a graduate is trying to make a pivot. So is a mid-career alum getting a call from their school during a layoff instead of during a giving campaign. None of that emerges from a network you merely have. It comes from one someone is responsible for.

It’s worth being honest about why this is hard. The nostalgia model is easier to run and easier to measure. Attendance is a clean number. A mentoring match that pays off four years later is not. The infrastructure costs more than the events do, and the return shows up on a timeline that doesn’t fit an annual report. So the work that alumni say they want, the networking and the mentoring and the career help, stays in the category of things everyone hopes will happen on their own.

Advancement professionals already understand the underlying principle. Third-time event attendance is one of the strongest predictors of future major-gift behavior. An alum who keeps coming back is telling you something. But institutions that obsess over bringing people back for the social weekend rarely apply the same rigor to bringing them back for the thing that compounds over a career. The relationship that produces a major gift years later often starts with the institution being useful much earlier, and usefulness is increasingly about work.

Underneath nearly everything Busteed talked about was the same idea: relationships matter. From his Gallup research forward, the students who thrive are the ones who had a mentor, a real connection, a person who encouraged them. The mistake is hearing that as a student-experience problem that ends at graduation. It doesn’t end there. The alumni network is where relationship-rich is supposed to keep going, and at most institutions it stops the day the diploma is handed over.

If the early career ladder is breaking, the alumni network is one of the few structures positioned to put rungs back. Whether it can depends on whether an institution treats it as a standing asset to maintain or a list of names to mine when the campaign clock starts.

What are you doing at your institution to address the changing career?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.

His perspective sits at the intersection of strategy, systems, and storytelling, with a focus on helping organizations act with greater clarity and intention.

Dave is a lifelong learner, husband and dad, and lives in Oklahoma.

Big Themes This Week

• One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.

• The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.

• “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.

• With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.

• Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

• If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?

• As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?

• What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?

• Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?

• Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

Brandon Busteed thinks the first rungs of the career ladder are disappearing. On the Keynote, he laid out the erosion: 8.2 million college students wanted an internship this past year, and 3.6 million got one. Teen employment started falling off a cliff around 2010. Entry-level white-collar work is now the part of the labor market most exposed to AI. The bottom of the ladder, the part graduates used to climb onto without thinking about it, is thinning out underneath them.

That changes what an alumni network is for.

A harder question sits underneath the pitch: which of those is it?

Most institutions act as though career connections surface on their own. Hold the reunions, run the affinity groups, host a few networking nights, and the relationships take care of themselves. The reach exists, so the value must be in there somewhere. The institutions producing the strongest outcomes treat relationships the way they treat fundraising and enrollment and the academic program: as infrastructure that someone owns, funds, and is accountable for.

Busteed has the data on what happens when an institution actually builds it. During his time at Gallup, the school that scored highest on alumni saying they’d had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams was an online, adult-serving university. Nobody would have guessed it. It had no quad, no residence halls, no homecoming weekend. What it had was full-time staff whose entire job was mentoring students. The outcome people associate with deep campus tradition came from a place with none of it, because the place decided mentoring was a function and staffed it like one.

Set that against where the engagement dollars actually go. Homecoming and reunions absorb tens of thousands of dollars a year at most institutions, sometimes more. These are real community-builders and worth keeping. But they answer a question alumni are asking less and less. Reunions ask whether you remember this place. The graduate watching the entry-level market close behind them is asking something else: is this place still useful to me now?

Those are different relationships. One runs on memory. The other runs on whether the institution shows up at the moments that matter after graduation, which are increasingly the career moments. An alumni office optimized for the first will keep reporting strong attendance numbers while the second relationship quietly goes unbuilt.

This is the gap between affiliation and connection. Affiliation comes free with the degree: you went here, so you’re one of ours, and the reunion invitation arrives on schedule. Connection has to be earned at the point of need. The Gallup mentorship finding is connection. So is a warm introduction to an alum three industries over when a graduate is trying to make a pivot. So is a mid-career alum getting a call from their school during a layoff instead of during a giving campaign. None of that emerges from a network you merely have. It comes from one someone is responsible for.

It’s worth being honest about why this is hard. The nostalgia model is easier to run and easier to measure. Attendance is a clean number. A mentoring match that pays off four years later is not. The infrastructure costs more than the events do, and the return shows up on a timeline that doesn’t fit an annual report. So the work that alumni say they want, the networking and the mentoring and the career help, stays in the category of things everyone hopes will happen on their own.

Advancement professionals already understand the underlying principle. Third-time event attendance is one of the strongest predictors of future major-gift behavior. An alum who keeps coming back is telling you something. But institutions that obsess over bringing people back for the social weekend rarely apply the same rigor to bringing them back for the thing that compounds over a career. The relationship that produces a major gift years later often starts with the institution being useful much earlier, and usefulness is increasingly about work.

Underneath nearly everything Busteed talked about was the same idea: relationships matter. From his Gallup research forward, the students who thrive are the ones who had a mentor, a real connection, a person who encouraged them. The mistake is hearing that as a student-experience problem that ends at graduation. It doesn’t end there. The alumni network is where relationship-rich is supposed to keep going, and at most institutions it stops the day the diploma is handed over.

If the early career ladder is breaking, the alumni network is one of the few structures positioned to put rungs back. Whether it can depends on whether an institution treats it as a standing asset to maintain or a list of names to mine when the campaign clock starts.

What are you doing at your institution to address the changing career?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.

His perspective sits at the intersection of strategy, systems, and storytelling, with a focus on helping organizations act with greater clarity and intention.

Dave is a lifelong learner, husband and dad, and lives in Oklahoma.

Big Themes This Week

• One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.

• The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.

• “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.

• With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.

• Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

• If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?

• As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?

• What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?

• Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?

• Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

On this week’s Breakout, Annie, Courtney, and I kept circling the same idea. As Courtney put it, “this is messing with their lives.” And it raises a question I don’t think we ask enough in advancement: how much of engagement is really about the benefit, and how much is about identity? The same thread ran through the other two pieces we discussed — research on what genuinely engages employees (connection, communication, appreciation, and voice, not perks) and a new study sorting donors into five profiles of generosity. Different topics, same lesson.

Whether it’s an alumnus, an employee, or a donor, people don’t stick around for a perk or a program. They stay because they feel known. The Duke story is a reminder that the moment an institution treats a relationship as a line item, the people on the other end feel it. And the moment we treat it as a connection worth protecting, they feel that too.

Big Themes This Week

• One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.

• The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.

• “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.

• With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.

• Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

• If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?

• As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?

• What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?

• Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?

• Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.

Almost nothing. The rhetoric is way ahead of the action.

Many of us witnessed that gap close during COVID. As campuses closed and in-person events were cancelled, alumni offices got creative. Live Zoom sessions, virtual interviews with notable faculty, online panels that were suddenly open to graduates everywhere regardless of geography. Alumni showed up — genuinely, consistently, in numbers that surprised a lot of advancement teams. For a brief window, the degree and that feeling of being on campus (even when you aren’t) felt alive again.

Then campuses reopened. Most alumni offices returned to the programming they had always done.

Meanwhile, a husband and wife in New York were building something universities already had the pieces to build. Ty and Felecia Freely moved to the city in 2024 not knowing anyone, and launched Lectures on Tap — an event series where professors and experts give talks at bars, followed by Q&A. Their first event featured a Columbia neuroscience professor at a Brooklyn bar. About 60 people showed up. Videos went viral. Lectures on Tap now operates in five cities, sells out venues in under an hour, and has over 400,000 Instagram followers. Profs and Pints has been running a similar model since 2017, now in ten cities. The founders of Lectures on Tap said it plainly after their first year: there are so many more nerds out there than we could have ever imagined.

Many of those nerds went to college — and many are your alumni.

A handful of institutions are starting to act on this. NYU offers alumni evening classes for $15 a session — faculty-led, in person, with drinks — which is essentially Lectures on Tap built as an alumni benefit. Wharton offers free virtual courses for all alumni each spring with live faculty sessions included. Hopkins runs noncredit Odyssey courses open to alumni with tuition remission. These are good models, but they remain in the minority — and almost exclusively at elite, well-resourced institutions. The majority of the sector hasn’t moved.

Brandon calls it the evergreen degree — the idea that a diploma should be the start of a lifelong relationship with learning rather than a four-year transaction. Most institutions aren’t there yet, but the gap between the mission statement and the reality doesn’t require a major strategic overhaul to start closing. It requires a few good decisions.

Some places to start considering:

• Offer one free virtual event to all alumni — one faculty member, one big idea — as an alumni benefit.

• Create intentional cultivation opportunities between your school or college’s faculty and the donors you’re trying to deepen relationships with.

• Pivot a reunion event from a social gathering to something closer to a lecture series — same weekend, different energy.

• Have a faculty member do a monthly social media takeover, sharing their research or recording a portion of a lecture, giving alumni a window into the intellectual life of the campus.

• Host virtual monthly career panels not for students, but for alumni navigating transitions — connecting graduates to the institution at exactly the moment they most need it.

None of these require a huge budget. They require someone deciding that lifelong learning is central to the identity of your alumni community and acting on it.

What would it look like to build that for your own alumni community?

Annie Quade is an advancement strategist with more than 15 years of experience spanning major and planned gifts, alumni engagement, annual giving, talent management, and organizational design. She serves as the Associate Vice President of Advancement Strategy & Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she oversees integrated engagement, talent and people operations, and the division's growth strategy — and currently provides interim leadership of the development team.

Annie began her career in frontline fundraising at the University of Missouri, first as a regional and planned giving officer and then as director for the School of Law. She is also co-founder of Advancement Talent Co., a community for advancement professionals focused on talent management and organizational strategy.

Big Themes This Week

• One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.

• The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.

• “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.

• With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.

• Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

• If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?

• As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?

• What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?

• Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?

• Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

Title:
Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust

Date & Time:
Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.

Speaker:
Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.