Across both, the conversation keeps returning to treating engagement as the strategy and philanthropy as one of its outcomes, and to building a culture of philanthropy that starts well before the first gift. It also gets practical about the real barriers, staffing, budget, accountability, and patience, and what schools on a tight timeline can do right now.

Referenced in this episode:

• Kelly Dolan-Sapp and Yiesha Thompson, “Why Alumni Networks Are the Most Undervalued Belonging Strategy,” University Business: https://universitybusiness.com/alumni-networks-are-the-most-undervalued-belonging-strategy/

• Darren Miller, “A Joking Truth: Why It’s Time to Move Beyond Annual Giving,” LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/joking-truth-why-its-time-move-beyond-annual-giving-darren-miller-shvle/

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.

We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

“Inconceivable!”

If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, this rings bells for you. If you haven’t here’s some context: One of the characters, a gangster named Vizzini, uses (er, misuses) the word repeatedly the Dread Pirate Roberts overcomes challenge after challenge to try to rescue the titular princess, whom Vizzini has kidnapped. Another character—his coll…

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If you’ve seen The Princess Bride, this rings bells for you. If you haven’t here’s some context: One of the characters, a gangster named Vizzini, uses (er, misuses) the word repeatedly the Dread Pirate Roberts overcomes challenge after challenge to try to rescue the titular princess, whom Vizzini has kidnapped. Another character—his colleague in crime, Inigo Montoya—finally says to him: “You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

In alumni and donor engagement, we have a word like that. It’s “community.”

It appears on our websites, strategic plans, donor appeals, and social media posts. It’s operationalized through programs and events, such as tech platforms, happy hours, tailgates, networking nights, and 5K runs, to name a few.

The roots of that approach, as Richard Millington noted in a recent Keynote episode, are in part structural. The founder of FeverBee and expert in online communities explained that, while higher ed advancement teams have no shortage of staff with event-planning or content-creation skills, they lack people with skills specifically geared toward community building.

But the reasons are also philosophical. Too often, when our own institution’s engagement efforts fizzle after an initial burst, we look outward for other ideas. We ask, “What programs earned a CASE Award for alumni engagement last year?” “Who in our field is the best at building community among their constituents?”

If an advancement team had a specific community engagement specialist position, and that person were well-versed in community-building strategies, they’d ask a different question:

Do we know what community means to our people?

The answer is likely, “Not really.”

Historically, we’ve tracked how alumni feel about us through proxy metrics like response rates, RSVPs, and net promoter scores. Yet these metrics don’t measure relevance—which is what the latest National Alumni Survey results show as critical to alumni’s interest in engaging and giving back to their alma maters. To have that kind of relationship, alumni need the institution to show up in their lives organically, no matter their age or stage.

(Spoiler alert: “Showing up organically” doesn’t mean through an annual report or tear-jerker Giving Tuesday appeal.)

Answering the question of what community means to our alumni and donors isn’t easy. Our knee-jerk reliance on “best practices” or other institutions’ models likely won’t help much—both because I’m not sure there’s an institution that’s really figured this out, and because what works for one alumni population may not work for another.

An answer I keep circling back to is a bit of a paradox: What if building a stronger alumni community is less about connecting alumni to the institution and more about connecting alumni to one another? What if a key to keeping the institution relevant in the lives of alumni has very little to do with the institution itself?

In our first episode of Keynote way back in April, Whop’s John Hill spoke with Ryan about how, in an AI-driven world, human connection is becoming a commodity. Community, in a sense, has a luxury item. With sophisticated data collection, analysis, and—yes—some help from AI tools, alumni engagement teams can become purveyors of this luxury item to their constituents.

They can help people moving to new cities, states, or even countries find at least one person with a shared connection to show them the ropes. First-time parents in an area could connect with fellow alumni to compare notes on potential babysitters. Someone seeking a weekly running group could find local graduates who lead one. When the football team comes to town to play a local rival, alumni could coordinate a meetup for themselves and their families.

What are the mechanics of this kind of model? That’s where I get a little stuck. Is it a new kind of digital platform that succeeds where we’ve previously failed with Facebook groups and bespoke alumni communities? Is it an investment in staff whose entire job is to focus on building these kinds of communities, rather than leaving it all up to volunteers?

Whatever the solution is, it’ll require experimentation. Maybe, for one year, it’s transforming Homecoming from an on-campus event to a regional observance, empowering local alumni to celebrate their shared tie to the institution wherever they are. Maybe it’s transferring some of the funding for an alumni chapter program that’s floundering to building, maintaining, and moderating digital tools that alumni can use to build community on their own.

The entire program won’t be perfect from the get-go. And, as Millington says, it shouldn’t try to be.

“If you look at how communities generally develop, the ones that really succeed and are sustainable for the long term, they usually begin small,” he says. It can be as few as five or ten people organized around one particular idea.

“Associations and alumni groups often go wrong because they try to launch a hundred groups at once, and then they’re surprised when all these groups don’t burst to life. But that’s not how it works,” he says. “You create one group at a time, get that going, then move on to the next one.”

Ten graduates deeply connected over issues that matter in their lives may sound small, but they’re probably worth more to an institution than a thousand dormant accounts on an alumni portal. It’s not a number that CASE will hand out an award for, and it may not turn the heads of institutional leaders. But it’s a starting point.

Maybe an alumni community that serves the institution and keeps it relevant in graduates’ lives isn’t so inconceivable after all.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.

We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

(Watch the full length version on YouTube - 54 mins)

That scattering is why he says the word we all reach for, integration, has become “the most abused word” in advancement technology, thrown around for anything down to moving a file out of one system and into another. His team poured effort into engagement scoring, and he admitted, plainly, that very few of their customers use it, because everyone defines engagement differently and few have a plan for what to do with a score once they have one.

Kalyan is refreshingly clear that AI is an enabler of human work, not a replacement for it, and genuinely optimistic that we can make every donor feel stewarded like a major one. I think people connect to him because he is both a builder and a straight shooter, and our field could use more of both.

Big Themes This Week

• Declining participation, not total dollars, is the real threat to a program’s long-term sustainability.

• “Integration” has become the most abused word in advancement tech. Real integration means seeing the same person whole across every system.

• Engagement and fundraising aren’t two worlds with a handoff, they’re one continuum, and our systems and teams should reflect that.

Team Discussion Questions

• Are we watching participation as closely as we watch dollars?

• Where do our tools promise to connect but quietly don’t, leaving the same person split across systems?

• Do we treat engagement and fundraising as a continuum, or as a handoff?

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

(Watch the full length version on YouTube - 54 mins)

That scattering is why he says the word we all reach for, integration, has become “the most abused word” in advancement technology, thrown around for anything down to moving a file out of one system and into another. His team poured effort into engagement scoring, and he admitted, plainly, that very few of their customers use it, because everyone defines engagement differently and few have a plan for what to do with a score once they have one.

Kalyan is refreshingly clear that AI is an enabler of human work, not a replacement for it, and genuinely optimistic that we can make every donor feel stewarded like a major one. I think people connect to him because he is both a builder and a straight shooter, and our field could use more of both.

Big Themes This Week

• Declining participation, not total dollars, is the real threat to a program’s long-term sustainability.

• “Integration” has become the most abused word in advancement tech. Real integration means seeing the same person whole across every system.

• Engagement and fundraising aren’t two worlds with a handoff, they’re one continuum, and our systems and teams should reflect that.

Team Discussion Questions

• Are we watching participation as closely as we watch dollars?

• Where do our tools promise to connect but quietly don’t, leaving the same person split across systems?

• Do we treat engagement and fundraising as a continuum, or as a handoff?

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (57 mins)

Back in 2016, Liz was co-presenting on social listening at a higher ed marketing conference. The room was so full people sat on the floor, and afterward the line to talk to her was long, and everyone said the same thing: this makes complete sense, and here is why I will never be able to do it on my campus. “Listening and showing up really aren’t the same thing,” she says. You can learn what a community thinks without barging in to correct the record, and most of the time barging in is exactly the wrong move.

Liz is rigorous and refreshingly honest, no single metric to rule them all, no barging into every Reddit thread. But she is also optimistic that people are finding their way back to real community, online and in person.

Big Themes This Week

• The most trusted voice about your institution is usually an anonymous peer, not your official account. Trust is transferable, and it moves in conversations you aren’t watching.

• Listening and showing up aren’t the same thing. You can learn from a community without barging in, and often you should stay out.

• Followers and reach are vanity metrics. Measure the conversations that matter, and whether you’re activating other people to tell your story.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we broadcasting at people when we should be listening to them?

• Which metrics are we reporting that don’t actually connect to our goals?

• Who among our students and alumni are already telling our story well, and how could we support them?

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

I finally read Will Guidara’s excellent book, Unreasonable Hospitality, and it took almost two-thirds of the book before I got to the examples I was expecting of how teams can go the extra mile to create extraordinary experiences for people. It wasn’t until page 202 that the insights I had been expecting emerged.

The wait was worth it.

The first 200 pages make it clear that Guidara’s ideas for executing this extraordinary level of hospitality actually live downstream from essential leadership. It’s not possible to get to the top echelon of service he describes without building towards it, carefully but deliberately over time. So this week, I thought I’d write about the leadership constructs that really connected with me, and next week I’ll come back to the tactics he describes to create Unreasonable Hospitality, and both the connections and implications for advancement teams.

Go slow to go fast

“We’re building the plane while flying it.” It’s the phrase I hear often as a consultant and the one I hate most because it’s usually how leaders describe never slowing down. I understand what this means in terms of having to make adjustments while still moving forward, but in reality it usually means chaos and leadership isn’t taking the time to make sure everyone is on the plane, and no one is left on the tarmac.

Everything is go-go-go, and it usually doesn’t work out very well.

Will talks about a realization that while the leadership at Eleven Madison Park was pushing hard to go from three to four Michelin stars, and the team was on board, he soon realized the pace was causing a meltdown he hadn’t anticipated. Everyone at the restaurant was so busy putting the patrons first that they forgot to take care of themselves.

This dynamic happens in the advancement field all the time. We’re so busy taking care of alumni and donors on nights and weekends after we’ve worked all day, too, planning those events, that self-care is often neglected.

He writes, “We encouraged them to find their oxygen and to take the time to breathe. Slowing down wasn’t just about nurturing them in the moment. It was about building a more solid foundation for the future, so that when we needed to speed up again (and we would, very soon) our minds and hearts were in top shape.” (pg. 158)

Of all the excellent concepts in the book that are important for creating a culture where next-level hospitality can thrive, this one stood out to me as the most important. It’s also something that engagement pros are really bad at. We’re always adding, and rarely subtracting. It’s incredibly important to build this muscle of slowing down in order to eventually gain speed again. Deconstruct in order to rebuild, but better.

Empower young staff to “own something”

Another concept from the book that I love is that Guidara bolds certain text containing a key point he wants to get across. On page 110, he writes (in bold), “Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready.”

He describes how he empowered his new team members to own important aspects of the restaurant during his time at Eleven Madison Park. He assigned ownership of all components of the restaurant’s coffee service to one person who was particularly knowledgeable of and passionate about it. He assigned beer to another person. Same with the linens and organizing the reservations office. Ownership of these tasks was offered to new team members as they began working in the restaurant.

He writes, “These ownership programs gave these motivated, creative people a project to engage with while they earned their stripes. And the investment of time and trust and education was almost always worth it, because when we mentored someone into full ownership, our jobs became easier over the long term.” pg. 108

In a typical alumni/advancement office, we tend to fold these opportunities into job descriptions and spread them across a program team. We also treat ownership as a reward for seniority rather than something that propels career growth. His idea of ownership is about a new hire who appears to have a knack for something taking on a task before clearly demonstrating readiness for it.

What could a young person have ownership over? For starters, I’d give someone ownership over a swag program and even something as big as owning the visiting-volunteer experience on campus, and they can decide how to build it and make it great.

New traditions for the team that meet a need

In our space, we tend to think of traditions as a events or symbols we honor and steward for our alumni and the broader university community. However, it’s rare for advancement teams to have a special tradition that allows the team members to feel seen and heard.

In Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara describes how Thanksgiving became a special occasion not just for guests, but for the team that works at Eleven Madison Park. He writes that, “People who are gifted at hospitality tend to be sensitive. They notice everything, feel deeply, and care a lot. These are superpowers, though that tenderness can also make them a handful to manage.” (pg. 145)

My own experience with engagement pros is that they’re similar in nature to hospitality professionals and need that extra dedicated time along with something to look forward to. Often, advancement leaders tackle these challenges but without building a tradition for the staff that serves a purpose or fills a need. It’s usually a big employee appreciation event in the dining hall, but for everyone who works at the school. It’s a staff awards program that leadership starts, but the staff feels is forced and a bit of a drag.

I think alumni leaders have an opportunity to build special moments for the staff into the traditions that they construct for alumni and donors; maybe it’s right before or right after reunions or alumni weekend. It doesn’t have to be big, but it does need to be something that the team can genuinely look forward to.

I’m just scratching the surface with the great leadership lessons in Unreasonable Hospitality. More next week!

I’d love your thoughts and examples of how you or your leaders have worked to create a culture that models or resembles the one at Eleven Madison Park described in the book. If you’ve read the book, what leadership lessons stand out to you?

(Also, a big thanks to Matt Brandon at William & Mary for sending me a copy of Unreasonable Hospitality and for the homework assignment to read it and bring some ideas back to the team later in August.)

About the next Keynote

On Monday I’ll be publishing my interview with Kalyan Varma, the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. We discuss the challenges that face engagement leaders from an operational perspective, and Kalyan will share his view on some of the roadblocks that cause teams to stumble from a technology standpoint. I’ve known Kalyan, and I’m psyched to have him on the Keynote.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

The wait was worth it.

The first 200 pages make it clear that Guidara’s ideas for executing this extraordinary level of hospitality actually live downstream from essential leadership. It’s not possible to get to the top echelon of service he describes without building towards it, carefully but deliberately over time. So this week, I thought I’d write about the leadership constructs that really connected with me, and next week I’ll come back to the tactics he describes to create Unreasonable Hospitality, and both the connections and implications for advancement teams.

Go slow to go fast

“We’re building the plane while flying it.” It’s the phrase I hear often as a consultant and the one I hate most because it’s usually how leaders describe never slowing down. I understand what this means in terms of having to make adjustments while still moving forward, but in reality it usually means chaos and leadership isn’t taking the time to make sure everyone is on the plane, and no one is left on the tarmac.

Everything is go-go-go, and it usually doesn’t work out very well.

Will talks about a realization that while the leadership at Eleven Madison Park was pushing hard to go from three to four Michelin stars, and the team was on board, he soon realized the pace was causing a meltdown he hadn’t anticipated. Everyone at the restaurant was so busy putting the patrons first that they forgot to take care of themselves.

This dynamic happens in the advancement field all the time. We’re so busy taking care of alumni and donors on nights and weekends after we’ve worked all day, too, planning those events, that self-care is often neglected.

He writes, “We encouraged them to find their oxygen and to take the time to breathe. Slowing down wasn’t just about nurturing them in the moment. It was about building a more solid foundation for the future, so that when we needed to speed up again (and we would, very soon) our minds and hearts were in top shape.” (pg. 158)

Of all the excellent concepts in the book that are important for creating a culture where next-level hospitality can thrive, this one stood out to me as the most important. It’s also something that engagement pros are really bad at. We’re always adding, and rarely subtracting. It’s incredibly important to build this muscle of slowing down in order to eventually gain speed again. Deconstruct in order to rebuild, but better.

Empower young staff to “own something”

Another concept from the book that I love is that Guidara bolds certain text containing a key point he wants to get across. On page 110, he writes (in bold), “Often, the perfect moment to give someone more responsibility is before they’re ready.”

He describes how he empowered his new team members to own important aspects of the restaurant during his time at Eleven Madison Park. He assigned ownership of all components of the restaurant’s coffee service to one person who was particularly knowledgeable of and passionate about it. He assigned beer to another person. Same with the linens and organizing the reservations office. Ownership of these tasks was offered to new team members as they began working in the restaurant.

He writes, “These ownership programs gave these motivated, creative people a project to engage with while they earned their stripes. And the investment of time and trust and education was almost always worth it, because when we mentored someone into full ownership, our jobs became easier over the long term.” pg. 108

In a typical alumni/advancement office, we tend to fold these opportunities into job descriptions and spread them across a program team. We also treat ownership as a reward for seniority rather than something that propels career growth. His idea of ownership is about a new hire who appears to have a knack for something taking on a task before clearly demonstrating readiness for it.

What could a young person have ownership over? For starters, I’d give someone ownership over a swag program and even something as big as owning the visiting-volunteer experience on campus, and they can decide how to build it and make it great.

New traditions for the team that meet a need

In our space, we tend to think of traditions as a events or symbols we honor and steward for our alumni and the broader university community. However, it’s rare for advancement teams to have a special tradition that allows the team members to feel seen and heard.

In Unreasonable Hospitality, Guidara describes how Thanksgiving became a special occasion not just for guests, but for the team that works at Eleven Madison Park. He writes that, “People who are gifted at hospitality tend to be sensitive. They notice everything, feel deeply, and care a lot. These are superpowers, though that tenderness can also make them a handful to manage.” (pg. 145)

My own experience with engagement pros is that they’re similar in nature to hospitality professionals and need that extra dedicated time along with something to look forward to. Often, advancement leaders tackle these challenges but without building a tradition for the staff that serves a purpose or fills a need. It’s usually a big employee appreciation event in the dining hall, but for everyone who works at the school. It’s a staff awards program that leadership starts, but the staff feels is forced and a bit of a drag.

I think alumni leaders have an opportunity to build special moments for the staff into the traditions that they construct for alumni and donors; maybe it’s right before or right after reunions or alumni weekend. It doesn’t have to be big, but it does need to be something that the team can genuinely look forward to.

I’m just scratching the surface with the great leadership lessons in Unreasonable Hospitality. More next week!

I’d love your thoughts and examples of how you or your leaders have worked to create a culture that models or resembles the one at Eleven Madison Park described in the book. If you’ve read the book, what leadership lessons stand out to you?

(Also, a big thanks to Matt Brandon at William & Mary for sending me a copy of Unreasonable Hospitality and for the homework assignment to read it and bring some ideas back to the team later in August.)

About the next Keynote

On Monday I’ll be publishing my interview with Kalyan Varma, the Co-Founder & CEO of Almabase. We discuss the challenges that face engagement leaders from an operational perspective, and Kalyan will share his view on some of the roadblocks that cause teams to stumble from a technology standpoint. I’ve known Kalyan, and I’m psyched to have him on the Keynote.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

The conversation works through Dobosz's argument that a first gift is a question rather than a transaction, and his four-part fix for a donor's first 90 days. It also gets honest about why that fix is far harder to run in a real advancement shop than it looks on paper. The episode closes on what actually earns a second gift and gives donors a reason to stay.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

The conversation works through Dobosz's argument that a first gift is a question rather than a transaction, and his four-part fix for a donor's first 90 days. It also gets honest about why that fix is far harder to run in a real advancement shop than it looks on paper. The episode closes on what actually earns a second gift and gives donors a reason to stay.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

My first major gift fundraising role was as a regional gift officer for the east coast, which meant I was on the road every other week, for a week at a time. Often it involved driving around various states because I didn’t go to any of the main metro locations. That drive time lent itself to searching for various forms of content to absorb while I drove…

Read more

I created a new digital habit, and it stuck, but I know from experience they often don’t.

As my career progressed, I found the normal outlets. I went to conferences (maybe once a year) and tried networking with the other fundraisers in my organization. I started a newer fundraiser group for all those new(ish) people to fundraising and we started gathering monthly in person to talk about what we were learning, hearing, and seeing from the road. That was when I started to realize how much community and accessible content or professional development would be critical to my own growth and engagement with work.

Fast forward to COVID and I’ve stepped into my first talent management and senior leadership role. That eagerness to build community, find support, and access resources more easily than once a year at a CASE conference only grew. Fortunately, I was invited to join a group of talent managers in advancement who connected on Zoom monthly. What started as support to make it through the pandemic turned into a regular connection point to talk shop, share resources, and compare notes about what was working or not working in our institutions. No one was presenting at each other — we posed questions and shared our perspectives or resources.

That group eventually evolved into Advancement Talent Co, which now supports hundreds of talent managers across 60+ institutions with thousands of resources being shared. What I learned from watching it grow is something I probably should have known already: the real growth happens not only by consuming professional development but by engaging in it fully with other humans.

Professional development in advancement has mostly been a solo sport. You go to the conference once a year, if you’re lucky and if your institution has the budget. But since 2020, we’ve seen a host of new opportunities crop up that are digital-first, hybrid, and combinations of synchronous and asynchronous learning.

I said yes to Speaking Engagement because I’ve seen what’s possible when advancement professionals find each other and start showing up consistently. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about it too.

Building ATC was easier in one unexpected way - COVID forced the habit. Everyone was already on Zoom, already looking for connection, already willing to try something new digitally. Speaking Engagement doesn’t have that same tailwind.

We’re asking a new group of people to come together and form a new habit from scratch, and new digital habits are genuinely hard to build. There’s been some impressive growth already - 330+ members across 25 institutions over four months is impressive growth. And yet, the comments are quiet and the synchronous events are still finding their footing. But, this is where the rubber meets the road for community building - to transition from content to community will require intentional engagement from both SE contributors as well as readers.

And, as any good fundraiser would say: I’d be remiss if I didn’t invite you to join us. Make a comment, pose a question or come to our next Agora.

My conversation with Dr. Liz Gross, who founded Campus Sonar and now leads strategic enrollment services at the College Board, is our Keynote for this week. We get deep in the weeds on social listening in today’s internet.

Read more

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (57 mins)

Back in 2016, Liz was co-presenting on social listening at a higher ed marketing conference. The room was so full people sat on the floor, and afterward the line to talk to her was long, and everyone said the same thing: this makes complete sense, and here is why I will never be able to do it on my campus. “Listening and showing up really aren’t the same thing,” she says. You can learn what a community thinks without barging in to correct the record, and most of the time barging in is exactly the wrong move.

Liz is rigorous and refreshingly honest, no single metric to rule them all, no barging into every Reddit thread. But she is also optimistic that people are finding their way back to real community, online and in person.

Big Themes This Week

• The most trusted voice about your institution is usually an anonymous peer, not your official account. Trust is transferable, and it moves in conversations you aren’t watching.

• Listening and showing up aren’t the same thing. You can learn from a community without barging in, and often you should stay out.

• Followers and reach are vanity metrics. Measure the conversations that matter, and whether you’re activating other people to tell your story.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we broadcasting at people when we should be listening to them?

• Which metrics are we reporting that don’t actually connect to our goals?

• Who among our students and alumni are already telling our story well, and how could we support them?

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Learn More (Members)

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

He started helping people with their resumes by hand, passing them around his own network and asking, do you have five minutes to help this person. And people did not just say yes. They came back asking for another one. “It feels amazing to make a difference in someone’s life,” he told me, and that discovery became the whole company. He turned to his partner and said he did not know how he would make money, but this was all he wanted to do. A decade later he still sounds like that.

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (52 mins)

That origin explains why Protopia is built the way it is. AI does the matching in the background so a connection that once took thirty minutes now takes three, but the technology stays out of the way, because the conversation itself is the point. Max is careful about what should never be automated, and his design reflects it.

Big Themes This Week

• AI belongs in the background as a scaling mechanism, not out front as the selling point.

• The smallest act of kindness is often enough. Ask for five minutes, not an hour.

• Design so no one feels guilty and no one feels rejected. No just means not right now.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we asking alumni for more than they can give, when five minutes would do?

• Are we using technology to widen the door to connection, or to replace it?

• What in our process quietly makes people feel bad for saying no?

  ---

Upcoming: Faculty-in-Residence
Aug. 15 - Sept. 25

For six weeks beginning August 17, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.

Learn More (Members)

Although Dartmouth enjoys extraordinary school spirit and alumni engagement feels like it’s part of the fabric of the school much more so than others, it was interesting to listen to discussions about the best way to generate a focused set of strategies that strengthens a “for life” approach, and really hone-in on this part of life — those years immediately post graduation. Even schools that have broad alumni loyalty are struggling to keep recent graduates connected after they toss their caps in the air at Commencement.

Our clear opportunity to boost young alumni engagement

At the heart of the opportunity with young grads is actually the same fundamental dynamic that should shape broader engagement across ages and life stages: average lifetime giving to alma mater is significantly higher among alumni who volunteer.

Howard Heevner’s research and that of my colleagues from CMAC and Washburn McGoldrick around The National Alumni Survey has really elevated the discussion around this important fact about alumni volunteerism. In the recently released Volunteering Signals Engagement and Giving Potential: Supplemental Report to the 2026 National Alumni Survey Annual Report, Heevner and team note that alumni are volunteering, just not with their alma mater. Higher education ranks eighth in the Top 10 Volunteer-Supported Causes.

Schools must scale volunteerism through Alumni Messenger programs.

I contend that the big reason young alumni aren’t as engaged as they could be is that there simply aren’t enough fun and meaningful opportunities to help. What opportunities exist feel like a heavy lift, like a chapter leadership role, or uninspired, like a digital ambassador social sharing program that’s more about the reshare than the advice.

Every educational organization needs at least one Alumni Messenger program. These are programs where the principle volunteer ask if for a brief amount of time (an hour or less, perhaps) to provide advice, reflection, and/or praise to students or others in the community. Within this classification of programs examples include:

• Alumni writing congratulatory postcards to accepted students

• Alumni making welcome phone calls to students who have deposited

• Grads interviewing prospective or admitted students

• Graduates writing advice on cards that are pinned to the doors of first-year students at move-in

• Alumni volunteers providing feedback on scholarship applications

• Alumni recording short videos of welcome, encouragement, or congratulations that are distributed to students by text or email

• Technology like Protopia that scales alumni-supplied advice to students and faculty

We need to be thinking about thousands of volunteers, not hundreds.

These programs that I’d classify as micro-volunteering are what every university needs: at least one Alumni Messenger program that provides a joyful and accessible way for alumni to help in short bursts of time, no matter where they live. These strategies require creativity and resources, but I’m certain that they’re essential to modern approaches to alumni engagement because they represent both an on-ramp and re-engagement because they can scale and help develop a culture of generosity.

Our main challenge is that we need more volunteer opportunities. Our young alumni aren’t ready to make gifts of treasure, and we’ve not done a good enough job providing avenues for anyone who wants to help to make a gift of time by sharing their reflections, advice, or offering words of encouragement.

This feels like an easy fix, but then again, there’s plenty we’ll have to stop doing in order to start and dedicate resources to Alumni Messenger programs.

About Speaking Engagement

If you’ve come to find our SE community valuable as a professional development resource, there are a few ways that we could use your help spreading the word.

1. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts for the Keynote podcast. This helps more people find Speaking Engagement that might be looking for content on advancement engagement.

2. Follow and share Speaking Engagement on LinkedIn recommend our Page to your network.

3. Download the Substack app for your phone and consider recommending the Publication to your network.

I’m trying to get better at posting Notes in Substack. If you’re a Substack fan, please consider chiming-in! That aspect of Substack is kinda like X/Twitter, which I’m not sure how I feel about. More on that…

About the next Keynote

I’m psyched to share my interview with Liz Gross, Ph.D. Liz is the Executive Director, Strategic Enrollment Services at The College Board and an expert on social intelligence in higher education. During our discussion, we hit on how modern web functions to elevate different conversation that are happening about institutions, often without schools knowing it.

Watch for the episode to drop on Monday at 7 am ET.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Speaker: Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations at Bentley University

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.



Learn more

Register

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

This week I spent two fun days in Hanover, New Hampshire, with the Alumni Relations leadership team from the Dartmouth Advancement Division. The conversation at Dartmouth right now, along with many schools around the country, is about how to engage young alumni and boost declining engagement. We know that recent Gen Z graduates leave college without the same sentiments toward their alma mater as generations past. The Harris Poll has some interesting insights on Gen Z and how they contrast with Millennials.

Although Dartmouth enjoys extraordinary school spirit and alumni engagement feels like it’s part of the fabric of the school much more so than others, it was interesting to listen to discussions about the best way to generate a focused set of strategies that strengthens a “for life” approach, and really hone-in on this part of life — those years immediately post graduation. Even schools that have broad alumni loyalty are struggling to keep recent graduates connected after they toss their caps in the air at Commencement.

Our clear opportunity to boost young alumni engagement

At the heart of the opportunity with young grads is actually the same fundamental dynamic that should shape broader engagement across ages and life stages: average lifetime giving to alma mater is significantly higher among alumni who volunteer.

Howard Heevner’s research and that of my colleagues from CMAC and Washburn McGoldrick around The National Alumni Survey has really elevated the discussion around this important fact about alumni volunteerism. In the recently released Volunteering Signals Engagement and Giving Potential: Supplemental Report to the 2026 National Alumni Survey Annual Report, Heevner and team note that alumni are volunteering, just not with their alma mater. Higher education ranks eighth in the Top 10 Volunteer-Supported Causes.

Schools must scale volunteerism through Alumni Messenger programs.

I contend that the big reason young alumni aren’t as engaged as they could be is that there simply aren’t enough fun and meaningful opportunities to help. What opportunities exist feel like a heavy lift, like a chapter leadership role, or uninspired, like a digital ambassador social sharing program that’s more about the reshare than the advice.

Every educational organization needs at least one Alumni Messenger program. These are programs where the principle volunteer ask if for a brief amount of time (an hour or less, perhaps) to provide advice, reflection, and/or praise to students or others in the community. Within this classification of programs examples include:

• Alumni writing congratulatory postcards to accepted students

• Alumni making welcome phone calls to students who have deposited

• Grads interviewing prospective or admitted students

• Graduates writing advice on cards that are pinned to the doors of first-year students at move-in

• Alumni volunteers providing feedback on scholarship applications

• Alumni recording short videos of welcome, encouragement, or congratulations that are distributed to students by text or email

• Technology like Protopia that scales alumni-supplied advice to students and faculty

We need to be thinking about thousands of volunteers, not hundreds.

These programs that I’d classify as micro-volunteering are what every university needs: at least one Alumni Messenger program that provides a joyful and accessible way for alumni to help in short bursts of time, no matter where they live. These strategies require creativity and resources, but I’m certain that they’re essential to modern approaches to alumni engagement because they represent both an on-ramp and re-engagement because they can scale and help develop a culture of generosity.

Our main challenge is that we need more volunteer opportunities. Our young alumni aren’t ready to make gifts of treasure, and we’ve not done a good enough job providing avenues for anyone who wants to help to make a gift of time by sharing their reflections, advice, or offering words of encouragement.

This feels like an easy fix, but then again, there’s plenty we’ll have to stop doing in order to start and dedicate resources to Alumni Messenger programs.

About Speaking Engagement

If you’ve come to find our SE community valuable as a professional development resource, there are a few ways that we could use your help spreading the word.

1. Consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts for the Keynote podcast. This helps more people find Speaking Engagement that might be looking for content on advancement engagement.

2. Follow and share Speaking Engagement on LinkedIn recommend our Page to your network.

3. Download the Substack app for your phone and consider recommending the Publication to your network.

I’m trying to get better at posting Notes in Substack. If you’re a Substack fan, please consider chiming-in! That aspect of Substack is kinda like X/Twitter, which I’m not sure how I feel about. More on that…

About the next Keynote

I’m psyched to share my interview with Liz Gross, Ph.D. Liz is the Executive Director, Strategic Enrollment Services at The College Board and an expert on social intelligence in higher education. During our discussion, we hit on how modern web functions to elevate different conversation that are happening about institutions, often without schools knowing it.

Watch for the episode to drop on Monday at 7 am ET.

Upcoming Member Events

Agora

Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Speaker: Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations at Bentley University

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.

In this Agora, Allison Kerivan will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.

Learn more

Register

Faculty-in-Residence

For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident. We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.

Learn More (Members)

Her central reframe: burnout isn’t a badge of honor, and it isn’t your fault. It’s largely systemic — the product of workplaces that expect too much with too little, and of work norms we absorbed early (first in, last out, always on, say yes to everything) that quietly trained us to live without boundaries.

The heart of the talk was her Honest Capacity Audit, a five-step framework (informed by Immunity to Change and Britt Frank’s The Science of Stuck): (1) name a draining behavior — say, checking email every night; (2) surface the “shadow incentive” — both what you gain by continuing it and what you fear if you stop; (3) calculate the “capacity debt” it’s costing you — the yoga class, the walk with the dog, the time with your kids; (4) set a micro-boundary, deliberately tiny so your brain accepts the change and builds a new pathway (e.g., no phone Wednesdays 6–7 p.m.); and (5) assess how it went — usually the feared consequences never materialize — then loop back and set the next one, chaining small wins into sustainable boundaries.

She closed with three tips: find an accountability partner (not your boss), work on one behavior at a time, and prepare for resistance — when others push back, remember it’s about them, not you.

Topic: Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference

Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm

Speaker: Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations at Bentley University

A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationship…

Read more

Read more