About the content this week

I’ve been mulling over the idea of an “all-comer” university.

During the Keynote this week, Michael Latsko described Arizona State’s efforts to make it possible for anyone who wants to attend, at any phase of life, to have access. The doors are open.

I very much appreciate the idea of an institution putting access front and center, but I can also see the drawbacks. From the student perspective, and potentially from faculty and staff, having a wide range of capabilities within the student body might make for a disjointed experience.

Two of the three universities where I’ve worked, I’d call elite. Washington and Lee University and the University of Virginia are highly selective. Every student admitted was clearly capable of doing the work. The result was consistent rigor. Classroom dialogue was strong because everyone could contribute at a similar level.

Longwood University was a little different as a regional public university. The admissions team understood the profile of prospective students who, if admitted, are unlikely to make it through college and graduate. But they need to admit everyone else, and sometimes take a chance. The result is a community of students containing a wide range of scholars. I was surprised the few times when I compared the work of two seniors; there was often a significant disparity in their output.

Access is important, but it changes the dynamics. When students are grouped, and there’s a real ability gap, the experience can become uneven and frustrating. Some students carry more of the load. Others struggle to keep up, and that causes a more challenging academic experience for students — all of them.

None of this makes the “all-comer” model wrong. As Michael pointed out, ASU isn’t claiming it’s the best model, just one that meets a real need.

About Speaking Engagement

This week was all about putting to bed the question of whether any higher ed leaders would see the vision behind the business and take a leap. Does Speaking Engagement pass the smell test?

I have friends in our space who are willing to join this next year and help me iterate on the platform and our professional development offerings. Thanks to the teams at UVA, Dartmouth, Bucknell, William & Mary, and Ohio State for saying yes and giving Speaking Engagement at try. Seriously.

On Wednesday, we announced our first Agora coming up on May 26th. This one will be open to all subscribers and paid members. Sydney Bertram from the University of Texas at El Paso is the perfect practitioner to bring to life the concept behind the Agora — share a problem, how it was tackled, and what the results have been in a TED-talk style presentation. From there, we’ll have a round-robin networking session to keep the conversation going. Registration is now open for the Agora at speakingengagement.org.

Thanks again to everyone who has helped us get this idea off the ground.

Onward!

Ryan

About the content this week

I’ve been mulling over the idea of an “all-comer” university.

During the Keynote this week, Michael Latsko described Arizona State’s efforts to make it possible for anyone who wants to attend, at any phase of life, to have access. The doors are open.

I very much apprecia…

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The idea of a “60-year degree” sounds new, and in many ways it’s new conceptually, but as we discussed in this week’s Breakout, it’s really a reframing of something higher education has been tryin…

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Michael Latsko came to Arizona State University in January 2023, about a month after ASU had wrapped its first-ever faculty and staff engagement survey. Sixty percent of employees responded. Affinity for the institutional charter landed in the upper 90s, not just agreement with what it said, but belief that the university actually lived it out.

Latsko has a useful frame for what makes that number meaningful. He spent years before ASU working at the University of Virginia, where he had also been a student for undergraduate and law school. As an alum, his affinity for UVA was genuine. As an employee, something different happened.

“My experience as an employee,” he said, “was nowhere near what my experience as a student had been.”

Most advancement professionals would hear that, nod, and move on.

That’s the mistake.

The chain actually runs the other direction.

Students form their sense of a place through the people they encounter. Those people are, almost entirely, employees. Faculty who show up for office hours. Staff who navigate administrative friction so a student doesn’t have to. Advisors who remember a name. The quality of the student experience, the one that creates lifelong affinity, flows directly from whether the people delivering it feel connected to the institution themselves.

Disengaged employees don’t create transformative student experiences. They create transactional ones. Transactional experiences produce alumni who graduated from a place, not alumni who belong to it.

By the time advancement enters the picture, the affinity has already been formed or it hasn’t.

The student experience gets investment. Identity-forming programs, milestone rituals, senior traditions, living-learning communities. The alumni experience gets investment too: regional events, digital engagement, reunion programming, giving campaigns.

The employee layer gets managed.

The issue isn’t HR. It’s that advancement treats the employee experience as someone else’s problem, even though its outcomes depend directly on what that experience produces.

At ASU, the charter’s 94–96% affinity numbers among employees aren’t a feel-good HR metric. They’re a leading indicator for everything downstream, including what alumni think about the institution twenty years after they left.

Latsko was already thinking about this at UVA, before he ever got to Tempe. His goal in HR, he said, was to recreate the “magic sauce” of the student experience in the employment experience, so the through-line would hold. Most institutions don’t have anyone thinking about it in those terms.

The typical response when alumni engagement underperforms is more. More events, more touchpoints, more messaging, more personalization.

Those things matter. They’re just downstream of the problem.

Alumni affinity that was never fully formed can’t be repaired by an alumni program. The work is with what was built during the years the institution had the person in its ecosystem. If the employee layer was broken during that window, the effort to rebuild, or explain why the institution deserves renewed affinity, is much heavier than most shops account for.

The reframe isn’t that advancement should own HR. It’s that advancement should understand what it’s actually measuring when it measures alumni engagement.

Most alumni engagement audits start with the alumni: who’s participating, who isn’t, which segments are we missing. Latsko’s observation suggests a different starting point.

Before asking why alumni feel disconnected, ask a harder question:

Did the people responsible for their experience feel connected themselves?

Alumni affinity isn’t built at graduation. It’s inherited from everything that came before.

Michael Latsko came to Arizona State University in January 2023, about a month after ASU had wrapped its first-ever faculty and staff engagement survey. Sixty percent of employees responded. Affinity for the institutional charter landed in the upper 90s, not just agreement with what it said, but belie…

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Speaker: Sydney Bertram, Assistant Vice President for Strategic Communications and Engagement

In this session, we’ll explore how the University of Texas at El Paso built Miner Nation as a unifying engagement framework that connects students, alumni, and supporters through shared pride and purpose.

Sydney will unpack how alumni “contributors,” operating like freelancers, have strengthened Advancement communications by expanding digital touchpoints and content creation. More importantly, she’ll show how scalable participation models —and Miner Nation Contributors (MNCs) with donor experience — are turning affinity into sustained engagement, and ultimately, into pipeline.

Register

What the Agora Is

The Agora is our live gathering space. But it’s not another webinar.

Each session is designed to do two things:

• Surface a bold idea

• Create meaningful connection around it

We start with a 15–20 minute TED-style presentation

Then we shift into 40–45 minutes of active conversation. You’ll be placed into small, rotating groups to talk, react, and connect.

Recently, the Washington Commanders made a puzzling announcement. The team announced that its uniform mix for the 2026 NFL season would include an alternate helmet that showcases an image of a spear shooting through the Commanders’ “W” logo.

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This week’s Breakout starts with a deceptively simple observation: when something feels generic, it’s almost never a writing problem, it’s a decision problem. What shows up on a website, in a case statement, or in a campaign isn’t just abo…

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During this week’s conference on Speaking Engagement, everything centers on these ideas:

Innovation is for the bold:

“Sometimes there are culture clashes, and sometimes not everybody works out when they come here, to fit into what it takes to make ASU keep its special spot.” Michael Latsko - Chief Human Resources Officer at Arizona State University

Listen to the Week 2 Keynote on Speaking Engagement with Michael Latsko

Questions to consider and discuss when you bring your team together:

• The employee experience sits between students and alumni — and it’s often disconnected to advancement other than when fundraising. Where could employee disengagement be eroding long-term alumni connection?

• What does it mean to have a university that’s anti-elite and accessibility is the main objective? How does that change the experience for everyone?

• If innovation is a tradition, and everything is always changing, what does that mean for creating memorable, shared experiences?

• At ASU, alignment comes from a shared, lived mission — not just strategy documents. What is the core idea our institution stands for?
  

• Listen: Keynote with Michael Latsko (Free full version on YouTube) or the watch 25-minute edited version.

Add our content with a membership for you, your team, or institution.

Become a Member of Speaking Engagement

That is the thread running through my conversation with Michael Latsko, Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer at Arizona State University. Michael brings a perspective grounded in culture, workforce strategy, and institutional design, and it reframes engagement as something that is built internally before it is ever expressed externally.

If you believe engagement is more than events, communications, or programming, this conversation will push your thinking. Because if the employee experience is not strong, if the culture is not aligned, then engagement becomes something we try to manufacture instead of something that naturally extends beyond the institution. In a moment where connection and community matter more than ever, that distinction is becoming harder to ignore.

Listeners will hear:

• Why engagement should be viewed as a system shaped by employee experience

• How institutional culture influences alumni connection and long-term loyalty

• What advancement leaders can learn from HR and workforce strategy

• The role of leadership philosophy in scaling engagement across an institution

• Where traditional engagement models fall short in today’s environment

• How to think differently about connection before and after graduation

Explore Membership

That is the thread running through my conversation with Michael Latsko, Vice President & Chief Human Resources Officer at Arizona State University. Michael brings a perspective grounded in culture, workforce strategy, and institutional design, and it reframes engagement as something that is built …

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In June, I’ll celebrate my fifth anniversary in the field of advancement consulting. These have been the most professionally rewarding years of my life, no question. I’ve been meaning to sit down and write specifically about what I’ve learned.

There’s a lot that I could say about worki…

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First, about the content this week.

I’ve been sitting on the idea of John Hill’s “be the job” thinking around democratizing entrepreneurship. We really are at a point where the future is so unpredictable that it’s hard not to reconsider dramatically how colleges and universities equip students with the tools and knowledge to start a business. Advancement teams need to be part of the solution.

The businesses that students are creating look totally different now than they ever have before. My son is in middle school, and I’ll casually check out what he’s watching on TV. Fact check, he’s watching a screen, but never cable, and rarely streaming an actual show or movie. He’s watching YouTube shorts, mirrored from his phone. He’s watching guys playing video games or commenting on basketball highlights.

My point is that the generation that’s in college now is thinking about content and “being the job” in ways that colleges are just catching up on. As I mentioned in my article this week, colleges like Syracuse are getting rid of traditional majors and starting programs designed to teach the creator economy to young entrepreneurs. Alumni teams should hire creators rather than lean solely on staff or student interns. These alumni need to be featured and partnered with.

To quote John, “This is where the ball is bouncing.”

About building Speaking Engagement

It’s been a (mostly) fun ride getting to this point. Speaking Engagement is live, and I’m proud of the reception it received this week when announced on LinkedIn. A lot of people said they thought it was a cool idea. Chris Marshall and my colleagues at Washburn McGoldrick were great and incredibly supportive helping get the word out.

Rock on.

I had some pitfalls, too. I hired a freelancer on Upwork, but it didn’t really pan out the way I’d hoped. It was way more my fault than hers. It would have been hard to read my mind, but then again, I was hoping for someone who could ask me the right questions to get this all set up.

Then I got a real win by finding . She runs an agency that helps Substack newbies bring their business vision to life. Her publication is called . If you’re at all thinking about building a Substack business, she knows the ins and outs and was a great help.

I also rediscovered that I’m not a particularly good speaker when I’m freewheeling. I have a painful number of verbal tics, like saying “sorta” or ending statements with “right?”

It’s been humbling to listen to myself. I think I’ve always known this, however, which is why I’ve focused more on being the interviewer. Thank god for the Riverside platform that I use to edit videos. I can delete these verbal crutches and make myself sound decent.

Last thought for this week

I really feel like I hit a home run with the Contributors team. Thanks to Annie Bastida Quade, Dave Hail, and Kristin Hanson for their great articles and Breakout takes. I added Lindsay Anderson, formerly at the University of Denver, towards the end of this week, and I'm excited for her to join the team and make her presence known.

There’s some great content coming. I’m excited to share their thoughts and hot takes, which is great because it allows me to keep more of the “sortas” and “rights” unspoken.

Thanks for your support!

Onward!

Ryan

Explore Membership

They explore how AI has lowered the barrier to creating polished, credible-sounding content, leading to an oversatur…

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They explore how AI has lowered the barrier to creating polished, credible-sounding content, leading to an oversaturation of ideas, especially on platforms like LinkedIn. The real issue isn’t the existence of thought leadership, but the growing difficulty in distinguishing between people with real experience and those simply repackaging ideas.

The conversation introduces the concept of “thought doership”—the idea that execution and real-world testing now matter more than insight alone. But both Ryan and Annie push back on the idea that this is new, arguing that the tension between strategy and execution, or confidence and competence, has always existed.

They connect this shift back to the broader theme from John Hill’s Keynote: if the future of work is about being the job, then credibility increasingly depends on demonstrating real experience. In a world flooded with content, the differentiator is no longer having ideas—it’s proving you’ve actually done something with them.

More content from Week 1

• This week’s learning guide

• Keynote: John Hill, VP Story at Whop

• From Ryan: Advancement can help alumni and student creators

• From Annie: Community Is the Product

• From Dave: When the Story You Tell About Alumni Stops Matching the One They’re Living

• Breakout: Ryan & Kristin discuss the gig economy, alumni magazines, and retirees

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This episode is free to listen. Paid members receive it in their private podcast feed along with…

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This episode is free to listen. Paid members receive it in their private podcast feed along with bonus content each week.

In the debut episode of Keynote, Ryan is joined by John Hill of Whop to discuss how AI and the creator economy are reshaping higher education and engagement.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why students need to learn how to “be the job”

• How AI is shifting institutional thinking — from fear to opportunity

• The rise of the creator economy and what it means for higher ed

• How alumni engagement could evolve in a skills-driven, entrepreneurial world

More content from Week 1 - Launch

• This week’s learning guide

• Keynote: John Hill, VP Story at Whop

• From Ryan: Advancement can help alumni and student creators

• From Annie: Community Is the Product

• From Kristin: AI can enhance the student and alumni experience—but not in the way you think

• Breakout: Ryan & Kristin talk about the gig economy, alumni magazines, and retirees.

I thought I’d start this adventure by making a few promises.

• Know that your feedback is greatly appreciated — good, bad, or ugly. The fact that you’ve taken the time to listen to a podcast or read an article, and even more time to give me your thoughts on how I can make this better. It means a lot to me.

• This is new for us, too, and we’re going to keep getting better at producing content that inspires and propels discussion. There’ll be some great takes and some sloppy ones. At least in the beginning, you might cringe as much as you laugh or nod your head. Consider yourself warned, but know we’re going to work on it.

• We’re going to restrain our use of AI. I’m not saying we’re never going to use it, but I am saying that particularly for our articles, we’re going to take the time to write what we think, and make sure our personalities shine through. That also means you’ll see some of our warts, too.

Now, with a couple of requests, on this, our opening day.

• Let someone know about Speaking Engagement today. It would be huge for us to come out of the gates with some real momentum and excitement. Here’s an article I put up on LinkedIn you can share.

• Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Along with our base in Substack, these will be our hubs of activity. Also, consider learning a bit more about Substack. I’ve already found a ton of great writers with newsletters on philanthropy, business, and education.

• Consider a membership for your team. Give it a try for a few weeks first, sure, but your support will help this brand grow and include more voices over the coming months.

Thanks so much for sharing this journey with me (us) as we work to create the most dependable and accessible professional development for engagement pros.

Sincerely,
Ryan Catherwood
Publisher