(In this clip, Kathryn shares the importance of alumni volunteers at Life at Elon.)

There’s a lot of relationship development happening. These programs are doing something about isolation and intergenerational distance that no four-year model touches, at least as they’re designed today, and it’s part of advancement at these schools and others, where the instinct is to measure everything in gifts. Both directors were careful here: the giving is real, but it follows the relationship, it never leads it. We talk during this session about the degree of integration that could or should be part of lifelong learning programs.

Text primarily written by AI

November Agora

Topic: Everybody’s Working for the (William & Mary) Weekend!

Date: Thursday, November 5 from 12 - 1 pm ET

Speaker: Kelly Holdcraft, Executive Director of Alumni Success at William & Mary

Kelly will detail William & Mary Weekend DC 2026 which featured nearly 50 events with more than half sold out, over 1,100 attendees, and 15 university schools and units represented over a four-day weekend. From a kickoff celebration with NFL alumni to an immersive MLB college game day to a presidential conversation on artificial intelligence to tours of our 90-foot coastal marine research vessel to a sold-out auction and more, the William & Mary Weekend offered once-in-a-lifetime intellectual, professional, cultural and social experiences to all who participated!

More details and register

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

Underneath that instinct is a lot of unglamorous craft. He starts every event with roughly twenty questions before anyone talks about flowers. He’ll tell you the staffing plan matters more than the centerpiece, because “if you can arrange staffing correctly at an event, it doesn’t matter if the florist brought the wrong color flowers.”

And then the line that outlasts the whole conversation: traditions need a purpose. UVA keeps its traditions by letting them adapt, turning thousands of graduation balloons into a cohort that collects them for the children’s hospital. A tradition is only worth keeping as long as it still means something to the people living it now. The best events, like the best traditions, aren’t monuments. They’re built, every time, around the people in the room.

Big Themes This Week

• Design the room around the guest, not the venue

• Staffing and attention beat decor every single time

• Traditions survive only when they still serve the people in them

Team Discussion Questions

• Which of our events are quietly planned for the space instead of the people in it?

• If we had to name the five people who must leave each event feeling seen, who are they, and who’s responsible for making it happen?

• Which tradition are we protecting out of habit, and what purpose would justify keeping it?

Summary of Keynote is Primarily AI-Generated

November Agora

Topic: Everybody’s Working for the (William & Mary) Weekend!

Date: Thursday, November 5 from 12 - 1 pm ET

Speaker: Kelly Holdcraft, Executive Director of Alumni Success at William & Mary

Kelly will detail William & Mary Weekend DC 2026 which featured nearly 50 events with more than half sold out, over 1,100 attendees, and 15 university schools and units represented over a four-day weekend. From a kickoff celebration with NFL alumni to an immersive MLB college game day to a presidential conversation on artificial intelligence to tours of our 90-foot coastal marine research vessel to a sold-out auction and more, the William & Mary Weekend offered once-in-a-lifetime intellectual, professional, cultural and social experiences to all who participated!

More details and register

In this conversation, Jay walks us through alumni identity — a measure of how much being an alum is actually part of who someone is today, long after they’ve crossed the stage. Drawing on role identity theory, he breaks it into three ingredients (is it salient, is it social, is it tied to a role?), then shows how it can be measured with the Alumni Identity Score and, more importantly, what it predicts.

The numbers are hard to ignore. Alumni with high identity are roughly 10 times more likely to give and volunteer, and when they give, they give far more — an average of about $300 a year versus $2 for low-identity alumni. Identity, Jay argues, sits upstream of engagement and giving: it shapes both intent and behavior before any of it shows up in our metrics.

What we get into:

• Why “affiliation is a fact, but belonging is a choice” — and what that means for your database

• How to measure identity, and the two-minute score anyone can try

• The provocative case for segmenting (and yes, “losing alumni early”)

• Why identity can’t be manufactured after graduation — only activated or eroded

• Jay’s emerging identity-first framework for engagement and philanthropy

The takeaway for practitioners: design engagement to express the identities that are already there — not to manufacture connection.

This is the second Research Exploration of Jay’s Faculty-in-Residence. More to come, including a live Symposium where our members put their own questions to him.

https://alumniidentity.com/

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

I agree with Chad when he shares that too often, brand is a wrapper. The strategy’s done, the goal is set, and then someone says, now make it look pretty. Chad’s point is that brand deserves a seat at the table from the very beginning, not the end, and that great campaigns make a choice. They stake a flag in the ground and own a space, instead of saying everything to everyone and nothing to no one.

He calls his process “fifty percent creative, fifty percent politics,” because, as he put it, politics eats great creative ideas for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Getting hearts and minds bought in, across deans and presidents and donors, is the part he’s least worried AI will take. The future may be easier to render than ever. Getting a whole institution to believe in it together is still a profoundly human job.

Big Themes This Week

• A campaign brand isn’t a logo bolted on at the end. It paints a picture of a future that doesn’t exist yet and makes it tangible enough to believe in.

• Brand drives dollars through clarity, confidence, and belief, and the best brands are easy to understand, remember, and repeat.

• Great campaigns stake a flag in the ground. Saying everything to everyone says nothing to no one.

Team Discussion Questions

• Are we treating brand as strategy, or as a wrapper we add at the end?

• Where are we saying everything to everyone instead of owning one distinct thing?

• Does our communications team have a real seat at the leadership table, early and often?

The conversation turns that into a practical fix: rather than counting activity, measure movement, borrowing annual-giving logic to track first-time and repeat engagers and moving people along a continuum from a class note or a social comment toward a real conversation and a defined role.

They pair it with Upjohn Institute research on where graduates settle, which shows flagship alumni scatter to major metros while regional-public grads stay close to home, and agree the geography is interesting but secondary to simply asking alumni what they want and resourcing the people who do the work.

Referenced in this episode:

• Jeffrey LaValley, “Alumni Engagement Isn’t a Program. It’s a Relationship Strategy.” https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/alumni-engagement-isnt-program-its-relationship-lavalley-m-ed--e0zac/

• Brad Hershbein, “Brain Drain or Brain Gain? Where University Alumni Locate,” W.E. Upjohn Institute: https://www.upjohn.org/brain-drain-or-brain-gain-where-university-alumni-locate

But the moments worth capturing have passed. The small scenes that make a story feel real can’t be re-staged. What’s left is an article built from a gift announcement and a few highly edited quotes. The impact story reads like a press release, features an old portrait of the donors, and says very little about what the gift made possible for students, the university, or the community beyond campus.

I spent years of my on-campus life trying to turn this tide. When I learned that Samantha McCain Alexander and her team at the University of Southern Mississippi were tackling this challenge and succeeding, I leapt at the chance to hear more. She graciously shared how she’s built a team, a philosophy, and relationships across campus to capture stories while they happen. It’s an approach that improves donor stewardship, but also builds habits that can strengthen alumni engagement and other communication priorities across campus.

Staff up for story capture

In 2024, the Southern Miss Alumni Association and the USM Foundation combined resources and established a shared services model. When Alexander joined the team as director of strategic communications for advancement, she had a chance to help build that staff from scratch.

Alexander planned to handle much of the writing herself, but knew she’d need to find a talented videographer and photographer. That’s when she hired Chloe Armstrong as the associate director of multimedia and storytelling. Later, she brought on Alexis Rutland as the marketing project manager to own the calendar, coordinate shoots, and triage requests from across the alumni association and foundation. Finally, she hired a recent Southern Miss grad, Gracie Lewis, as the communication and engagement manager to oversee digital, social, and email communications, along with the alumni magazine, The Talon.

When she hires, Alexander looks for what can’t be taught. Technical skills and cultural norms can be learned, she says, but drive and natural ability can’t. Parsing the right narrative from a long interview, understanding the small details that matter the most, or picking out the perfect natural sound from hours of tape are the kinds of things that separate good content from great.

“It’s really important to hire people who really love what they do, and who have fun doing it,” Alexander says. “I don’t put a lot of limits on the team. It’s their job to be creative. I may ask them to bring it back, maybe scale it down to see what we can actually do realistically, but I always tell them to think big.”

Use the calendar to your advantage

Campus life runs on a predictable cycle: move-in, game days, homecoming and reunion, the holidays, commencement. Alexander’s team treats that predictability as an asset. For a small team, knowing what’s coming can help make limited time go further.

Shoots and interviews at one known, upcoming event can supply material for months. For the University’s Joe Paul Leadership Scholars Program, Alexander’s team films and interviews scholarship recipients during move-in week and at a fall welcome-back social, then draws on that footage all semester.

Because the same moments recur each year, the team can follow the same students through different stages of their campus experience. They’ve followed one current Leadership Scholar—now a junior—for three years. By chronicling her growth at every step, they can show rather than tell the impact story to the donor who has supported her journey (or, perhaps, to a potential donor who may want to support a student just like her).

Maximize the mileage of your stories

Alexander is a strong proponent of a create once/distribute widely approach to content. With such a small team, this philosophy ensures content they gather for one project can be useful in many others.

When Alexander’s team learned earlier this year that Gary Stanton—a 2015 Southern Miss graduate and one half of the country duo Muscadine Bloodline—had a concert coming to town, the alumni association reached out to him. Stanton agreed to spend two and a half hours with Alexander’s team, letting them film and interview him. That single session produced a Talon feature, social content, and a membership campaign offering a chance for concert tickets. The campaign brought in several new alumni association members, many from the hard-to-reach 25-to-35-year-old age group.

Alexander’s team also shares the wealth. When its footage overlaps with another office’s goals, the team sends assets to central and school comms teams to support their marketing, so one shoot can benefit several offices.

Get looped in early

To tell a story as it’s happening, you first have to know it’s happening. Alexander says Nicole Ruhnke, Southern Miss’s chief communication officer and a natural people connector, has helped lower the barriers that tend to form between advancement communications and the rest of an institution. Ruhnke has organized a regular campus communicator roundtable, created a shared news release system, and instituted a notification protocol that loops the advancement comms team into communication pieces involving alumni or fundraising.

Selectivity breeds sustainability

A proactive storytelling engine can wear out a small team just as fast as a reactive model can. Alexander’s main safeguard is selectivity.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have time and capacity for every story,” she says. Her team’s workload is largely driven by university priorities. Ideas may start out ambitious and get scaled to what the team can realistically accomplish. Some areas of campus may get more attention than others depending on the calendar, and not everyone will be happy about that. Still, Alexander measures success by the quality of the stories told and the meaningful impact established for the donor, alumni, or friend through the work.

A little planning goes a long way

Few comms shops—in advancement or anywhere else—will ever have enough resources to cover everything on campus. Alexander’s team shows they don’t need to. When leadership asks for an impact story, her team won’t be scrambling for the right ingredients. The footage, photos, and interviews they need will already be at their fingertips.

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.

October Agora

Topic: The Class That Never Ends: Lifelong Learning as a Sustainable Engagement Model

Date: October 8, 1-2 p.m. ET

Speakers: Kathryn Bennett, Elon University; Sarah Rhodes, University of Lynchburg

Register

Synopsis

As the value of a college degree comes under increasing scrutiny, thought leaders have proposed a sweeping shift in higher ed: decades-long partnerships with students instead of graduation as the finish line. Most institutions aren’t built for that kind of perpetual relationship, but those considering it could take a page from universities already running lifelong learning programs for alumni, parents, and community members over age 50.

In this Agora panel, Kathryn Bennett, director of LIFE@Elon (Elon University), and Sarah Rhodes, director of LIFE@Lynchburg (University of Lynchburg) will join Contributing Editor Kristin Hanson for a discussion about their programs. Both follow a similar model but sit at different positions on the timeline: LIFE@Elon is entering its 16th year, while LIFE@Lynchburg is beginning its fifth.

Kathryn and Sarah will share what it takes to launch and sustain lifelong learning programs, from recruiting volunteer leaders and building curriculum to securing philanthropic support and forging local partnerships. Attendees will leave with a vision for turning long-term engagement into a durable revenue stream without waiting for a full reinvention of the college degree itself.

Register

Meet the Speakers

Since 2011, Kathryn Bennett has grown LIFE@Elon from 50 participants in its first year to more than 500 today (with a lengthy waiting list, to boot). Along the way, she has worked closely with faculty, community members, and volunteers to develop lectures, courses, and experiences that foster curiosity and connection. As word of LIFE@Elon’s success spread across higher ed, Kathryn has consulted with other universities interested in developing similar programs.

Sarah Rhodes serves as the University of Lynchburg’s director of donor relations and endowment administration. She has nurtured LIFE@Lynchburg since its inception, watching it grow from a small group of participants into thriving community of alumni and friends. In addition to coordinating LIFE@Lynchburg’s academic programming and community-building offerings, Sarah has been instrumental in securing local partnerships that provide sustainable support for the program.

What was the dynamic behind these interactions?

His answer, after nearly a decade of research across ten institutions, is deceptively simple: alumni give because of who they are, not who we want them to be. The things we usually sort people by, wealth, age, zip code, affinity, describe alumni without explaining them or their giving behaviors.

His challenge to the field landed hardest of all. We say “students, faculty, and staff” constantly, and we leave off the largest constituency we have. On the pod today, Jay shares his test for whether any of this has really changed in ten years is whether our leaders start adding one word: students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Treat alumni as part of the community rather than a source of revenue, he says, and start while they’re still students, because students are alumni too.

Big Themes This Week

• Alumni give because of who they are, not who we want them to be. Wealth, age, and affinity describe people without explaining them.

• What sits underneath giving is belonging, and it’s more stable and measurable than we assume, largely formed in the 18-to-22 identity-making years.

• You can’t install connection with one more event or program. Engagement sticks when it expresses an identity alumni already hold, and fades when we ask them to create one.

Team Discussion Questions

• Are we sorting alumni by what describes them, or by what actually connects them?

• Where are we asking alumni to manufacture a connection instead of expressing one they already have?

• Do our leaders, and our campus tours, treat alumni as part of the community, and does that start while they’re still students?

It’s the question I asked myself last week when I took the official admissions tour at Texas State University. I was in San Marcos to present on integrated advancement with Chris Marshall to a group of volunteers the following day, and I thought the tour would help me understand the vibe of the place. It did that. I came to appreciate the school’s history, traditions, and some of its distinctive characteristics.

I was also curious whether, and how, the word “alumni” came up during the tour, and how the university communicates about its culture of generosity that leads to philanthropy. The word “alumni” came up twice during the tour; once as a fact to describe the population of graduates, and a second time when the tour guide mentioned as a quip that “Bobcats like to hire Bobcats.”

Now, I don’t take very many admissions tours; I’ll admit. Every once in a while, as a consultant, if the timing is right and I’m on campus, I’ll ask for a campus tour. It’s often a personalized tour from an intern in the advancement office, and not the official one from admissions.

I’m not here to knock TXST because it was a perfectly enjoyable experience, the school is doing great with enrollment, and also I’m certain that the vast majority of official admissions tours are quite similar. But if a school wanted to communicate an “Alum from Day 1” message and tout a culture of generosity, there’s a lot of experience design to rethink and implement.

The first step in building a culture of generosity would be to ensure that, at specific stops on the tour, an alum is present and can speak to what the school gave them and the values that matter.

Imagine an admissions tour where the guide serves as more of a chaperone. Instead of the guide delivering most of the talk tracks at different stops, graduates with different backgrounds are stationed throughout the tour, sharing their experience from the perspective of someone who’s lived it and can confidently tout the results. They ARE the result.

At every institution, hundreds of alumni often work there in roles across faculty and staff. The message about value could be delivered in multiple ways. Not only can the alum employee recommend the experience as a former student, but they can also explain why the school matters enough that they chose to work there.

A next step is to create an experience where prospective students and their families see signage with messages of praise, advice, and congratulations from alumni directed at students.

Now imagine a moment on an admissions tour when prospective students and their families walk past a giant wall in the student center or library covered with handwritten posters from alumni volunteers wishing students well for the new semester. Think of the rhetorical significance of a moment like that and how it would be remembered.

Here, you have clear evidence that the alumni community supports students throughout their journey at the institution. They are present both in body and in spirit, en masse.

In addition, display flags or banners across campus featuring successful alumni and their stories of achievement. I’m not talking about just the CEOs and those who are wealthy enough to have their names on buildings. There are tons of alumni innovators doing amazing work in their communities or field of professional practice.

I often think of the Diplomats Forever banner program at Franklin & Marshall College, where a series of banners hang throughout campus. To create a true “Alumni from Day 1” mentality that isn’t just a slogan but real life, students must see these messages day in and day out about their graduates making an impact in their workplace, communities, and on campus as volunteers.

Creating a culture of generosity starts with telling the stories of lifelong involvement not just on the admissions tour, but by making these individuals and their stories visible every day.

The signs and messages are powerful because they create a sense of Alumni Identity (we’ll talk more about this with Jay Dillon beginning next week) from the very beginning of a student’s interactions with their college or university. Students and their families understand that graduates play an outsized role in supporting the school. Alumni aren’t people who graduate and go away. They’re still present, and they continue to pay it forward because they’re every bit a part of the community, just like those who are enrolled.

Educational institutions must make a not-so-difficult decision: focus on experience design through the lens of what communicates lifelong involvement. You can’t create a culture of philanthropy without first dedicating time and resources to communicating “alumni-ness.” It’s not just about emails and social posts, either. The campus and its walls, pathways, and lampposts must be carefully utilized to deliver this critical message.

I encourage everyone reading this to take the official admissions tour at your school and ask yourself, “What does this reveal about our culture of generosity?” My guess is the only sign you’ll find is the names on buildings (unless you happen to take the tour around a giving day). And names on buildings communicate a kind of wealth so far out of reach for pretty much everyone. It puts generosity out of reach, but it shouldn’t. Instead, generosity and Alumni Identity should start with more accessible narratives that show how alumni are truly valued and that people like them actually do it.

Building a culture of generosity and investment begins on the admissions tour but it’s not just for the prospective students. Colleges and universities need to reinforce this message in an ongoing way to ensure that the message is clear: generosity thrives here because we’re kind to each other, we’re proud of one another, and we love to show it.

About Speaking Engagement

One of the most interesting aspects of leading Speaking Engagement is looking at the actual engagement data for the content we’re producing. I’ll admit that I’ve been surprised by the overall lack of activity. Very few people in our community are commenting, sharing, or even hitting the like button on the content, even though people are reading and listening.

Richard Millington is a recent Keynote speaker on SE and an expert in community-building. He recently posted on LinkedIn that community engagement is down 50% overall. That’s a lot!

It’s interesting to think about why that might be. Maybe we’re too busy. Perhaps there’s just too much content out there, and we’re consuming it so fast. At the end of the day, I want SE to be valuable, and your comments and the Contributors team have reflected that. If folks still feel SE is worth the attention without all the comments and discussion, I’m good with that, but please do consider sharing Speaking Engagement with your peers and colleagues around higher ed to help get the word out.

About the Next Keynote

On Monday, we launch our next Faculty-in-Residence with Dr. Jay Dillon on the Keynote podcast. This was a really fun convo with someone I’ve known for a decade or more. Jay is part of my podcasting origin story, having been willing to let me interview him for the Advancement Legends podcast I produced years ago.

We dig into his research on Alumni Identity on the pod, and we’ll get even deeper in the weeds on why it’s so important over the next few weeks. You might even find a few of his takes controversial. Jay is a leader and a disruptor in our space, and I really value that about him. Lots coming!

At the same time, Harvard is dealing with devasting budget challenges associated with the Trump administration freezing 2.2 billion dollars in grants.

The conversation digs into the short-term thinking that makes engagement an easy target, since its return shows up in ten or fifteen years rather than the next two, and the institutional memory that walks out the door when long-tenured leaders leave. Courtney's warning is to do it to yourself before it is done to you, using this moment to innovate on retention, technology, and succession rather than waiting for a verdict. The panel closes on a more hopeful thread, the possibility of reallocating toward new AI-enabled roles, and the caution that every reorganization should start by understanding what each position actually produces or holds.

October Agora

Topic: The Class That Never Ends: Lifelong Learning as a Sustainable Engagement Model

Date: October 8, 1-2 p.m. ET

Speakers: Kathryn Bennett, Elon University; Sarah Rhodes, University of Lynchburg

Register

Synopsis

As the value of a college degree comes under increasing scrutiny, thought leaders have proposed a sweeping shift in higher ed: decades-long partnerships with students instead of graduation as the finish line. Most institutions aren’t built for that kind of perpetual relationship, but those considering it could take a page from universities already running lifelong learning programs for alumni, parents, and community members over age 50.

In this Agora panel, Kathryn Bennett, director of LIFE@Elon (Elon University), and Sarah Rhodes, director of LIFE@Lynchburg (University of Lynchburg) will join Contributing Editor Kristin Hanson for a discussion about their programs. Both follow a similar model but sit at different positions on the timeline: LIFE@Elon is entering its 16th year, while LIFE@Lynchburg is beginning its fifth.

Kathryn and Sarah will share what it takes to launch and sustain lifelong learning programs, from recruiting volunteer leaders and building curriculum to securing philanthropic support and forging local partnerships. Attendees will leave with a vision for turning long-term engagement into a durable revenue stream without waiting for a full reinvention of the college degree itself.

Register

Meet the Speakers

Since 2011, Kathryn Bennett has grown LIFE@Elon from 50 participants in its first year to more than 500 today (with a lengthy waiting list, to boot). Along the way, she has worked closely with faculty, community members, and volunteers to develop lectures, courses, and experiences that foster curiosity and connection. As word of LIFE@Elon’s success spread across higher ed, Kathryn has consulted with other universities interested in developing similar programs.

Sarah Rhodes serves as the University of Lynchburg’s director of donor relations and endowment administration. She has nurtured LIFE@Lynchburg since its inception, watching it grow from a small group of participants into thriving community of alumni and friends. In addition to coordinating LIFE@Lynchburg’s academic programming and community-building offerings, Sarah has been instrumental in securing local partnerships that provide sustainable support for the program.

But quality content and analytics alone do not guarantee meaningful outcomes for an alumni community. The value of social media extends beyond the number of people reached; its real impact is reflected in the engagement, responses, and connections it creates among alumni.

Speaking Engagement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Creating more meaningful moments means capturing everyday alumni life, recognizing the people who make the community special, encouraging alumni to participate, and continuing the conversation long after a post is published.

Keep Social Media Close to the Alumni Community

Alumni associations can use social media to foster meaningful engagement that goes beyond surface-level interactions. By intentionally highlighting alumni stories, celebrating shared traditions, and creating opportunities for alumni to connect both online and in person, associations can strengthen relationships and cultivate a genuine sense of belonging within the alumni community.

Alumni engagement teams should avoid completely delegating social media management to outside communications departments, which can make content feel disconnected and overly institutional. Instead, assigning ownership to an internal team member ensures a stronger understanding of alumni and enables far more authentic engagement than outsourcing ever could.

Many people have some familiarity with social media through managing their own personal accounts, which provides a strong foundation. Thankfully, social media can be a forgiving responsibility. Even without formal graphic design or video editing experience, accessible tools like Canva and CapCut make it possible to create quality content without an extensive production background.

More important than polished production is being close enough to the alumni experience to recognize the moments worth capturing. Rather than comparing an alumni social media account to more established channels with highly polished content, think of the approach as an “old-school mom with a camcorder shooting family videos,” capturing and celebrating the genuine, common moments of alumni community and togetherness. Getting started can be as

simple as sharing group photos from events, short clips of alumni activities, or candid moments that reflect the community’s spirit. Alumni can also submit photos and video clips of their accomplishments for possible features across the association’s social media channels.

The Power of Capturing the Everyday Alumni Lifestyle Experience

Some of the most engaging alumni content comes from moments never intended to go viral. A quick selfie before a marathon, a group photo from a networking happy hour, alumni volunteering together in their community, or a short clip of former classmates reconnecting at an event can all help bring the alumni experience to life. These everyday moments give followers a glimpse of what it actually looks and feels like to remain connected after graduation.

Once a team becomes more comfortable capturing these moments, social media can become a more intentional part of existing alumni programming. Instead of treating content creation as something that happens after an event, build simple social media activations into the experience itself. Invite alumni to answer a quick question on camera, share a favorite campus memory, make a game-day prediction, or offer advice to current students. These unscripted interactions allow alumni to see themselves reflected on the association’s channels while giving others a reason to join the conversation.

Alumni can also become active participants in the storytelling process. Regional chapters and affinity groups might take over Instagram Stories for a day, offering behind-the-scenes glimpses of their gatherings and communities. These contributions offer authentic perspectives, celebrate the diverse achievements of alumni and strengthen connections throughout the community. The result is a social media presence that appears less like an institutional broadcast and more like a living record of the alumni community. By sharing their experiences and traditions, contributors bring authenticity to the channel and foster stronger community connections.

Recognition Creates Relationship

Analytics can tell us how far a post traveled, but they cannot entirely capture how deeply it connected. Ultimately, the true measure of social media success for alumni associations lies in whether it deepens the connection between former students and their alma mater. The goal is not to produce content that is intended to go viral. It is to create features that make alumni feel recognized, appreciated, and connected to a community they belong to.

Imagine having an alumnus with an interesting life story who has made tremendous growth in their professional life. They continue to show up to alumni gatherings, stay involved in their local alumni chapters, remain a familiar face on campus, and lead other alumni volunteers. Imagine a social media feature on an alumnus that includes a 60-second interview highlighting their life journey and the role their alma mater played in their success. Complement the story with meaningful b-roll of volunteer activities, throwback photos from their time at the university, and images with fellow volunteers.

In the caption, include a highly personalized backstory that thanks the alumnus for their continued contributions.

Almost immediately, you’ll see comments roll in from classmates, former professors, and other volunteers, each willing to share a memory or offer congratulations. The post is shared in alumni group chats, tagged by friends, and quickly garners further engagement, not because it’s a viral sensation, but because it resonates deeply within your alumni community. The featured alumnus feels noticed and appreciated, strengthening their connection to the institution, while other alumni are inspired by the recognition and begin to see themselves as potential future features. This authentic engagement builds momentum, creating a positive feedback loop that deepens relationships across your alumni network.

Creating opportunities for alumni to participate helps build community, but intentionally recognizing the people who make that community special can strengthen those relationships even further. Alumni stories offer a chance to recognize not only professional accomplishments, but also the people who continue to volunteer, mentor, attend events, support their local communities, and stay connected to their alma mater. Making those contributions visible gives alumni another reason to feel recognized and connected.

Engagement Happens After Publishing

Once a post goes live, the work does not end. Publishing content creates an opportunity for engagement, but community management is where relationships are actually built. When alumni take the time to comment, tag a friend, share a memory, or respond to a question, they are opening the door for the association to carry on the conversation.

Replying to comments is one of the simplest ways to acknowledge that participation. A reflective response can make an alumnus feel recognized and strengthen their connection to the community, especially when the reply goes beyond a generic “thank you.” Ask a follow-up question, reference something they shared, congratulate them on an accomplishment, or invite them to contribute to a future post. An alumnus who comments about a favorite campus tradition might have a great story worth featuring. Someone who shares a professional milestone could become a future alumni spotlight. A graduate who regularly engages with event content may be interested in volunteering or getting involved with a local alumni community.

Community management should also go beyond the comments on the association’s own posts. Pay attention when alumni tag the association, share event photos, celebrate career milestones, or post about their connection to the university. Resharing their content, leaving a thoughtful comment, or simply appreciating their post shows that the relationship doesn’t exist only when the institution has something to promote.

Think of social media engagement the same way you would approach an alumni event. You would never welcome alumni into a room, make an announcement from the stage, and then leave without speaking to anyone. Social media should be no different. Publishing the post gets people into the room; responding, listening, noticing familiar names, and continuing the conversation make them feel welcome once they arrive.

Over time, these seemingly slight interactions build familiarity. Alumni begin to recognize a real person behind the account who knows the community, remembers their involvement, and values their contributions. That familiarity may turn occasional followers into active participants, volunteers, advocates, and lifelong activated members of the alumni community.

Measure What Resonates

When evaluating social media performance, pay close attention to engagement and engagement rate. Reach and impressions show how many people saw a post, but likes, comments, shares, saves, and reposts give a clearer picture of whether the content resonated with the audience that follows the account.

Not every post needs to go viral to be successful. If alumni consistently comment, tag classmates, share posts with their networks, or engage with a particular type of story, that behavior can help identify the content worth producing more often. Strong responses to alumni spotlights, event recap moments, traditions, or community-generated content signal that you should feature more people and experiences like them.

Over time, the goal is to build a channel that comes across less like a stream of institutional messaging and more like a collective account of the alumni community itself. The strongest measurement strategy should help answer a simple question. Does this content resonate with alumni in a way that makes them want to participate, share their experiences, and see their own story reflected in the community?

From Content to Connection

The strongest alumni social media channels do more than promote events, celebrate milestones, or share university news. Over time, they become spaces where alumni recognize themselves, reconnect with one another, honor shared traditions, and contribute their own stories. That should be the goal.

An alumni account should eventually feel less like the university’s account about alumni and more like the alumni community’s account itself. The institution may manage the platform, but the people, memories, accomplishments, conversations, and relationships within it should belong to the community it represents.

Content gets alumni to stop and pay attention, but connection makes the posts matter. It might be seeing an old classmate in a photo, tagging a friend in the comments, sharing a memory, or discovering another way to stay involved.

Over time, the goal is for alumni to feel like the account belongs to them too. They should be able to see people they know, experiences they recognize, and stories that reflect what it actually means to be part of the alumni community.

When that happens, the account becomes more than a place to publish content. It becomes a place where bonds are strengthened, memories are shared, and alumni continue to feel connected to one another and to their alma mater. That is the real opportunity behind alumni social media platforms. Turning the content we create into a connection that lasts.

Dominique Oliver serves as Director of Alumni Engagement, Communications for the University of Miami Alumni Association, where she leads social media strategy and digital storytelling efforts designed to strengthen alumni connection and pride. With more than 10 years of marketing and communications experience across the nonprofit and private sectors, she brings a relationship-centered, story-driven approach to building engaged communities.

Speaking Engagement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Sarah shares that a campaign launch is “not informational, it’s decisional.” People don’t come to your kickoff to finally understand what a campaign is. They come to decide whether they’re in. And “in” doesn’t have to mean a gift that night, it can mean I’m in for the next call, I’m in to learn more. The whole job of the experience is to create the conditions for someone to say yes.

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

Building one of these launches forces advancement, marketing, and leadership out of their silos and onto the same page, because you cannot tell one story in one night unless everyone believes it. The event moves the donors in the room, but it also aligns the institution behind them. That, more than any single gift, might be the real return.

Big Themes This Week

• In a digital age, what an in-person event uniquely delivers is emotion, trust, and belief, the things that actually drive philanthropy.

• A campaign launch is decisional, not informational. The job is to help people decide they’re in, and “in” can just mean ready for the next step.

• Events that work start from what the audience should feel and decide, not from a checklist of who needs stage time.

Team Discussion Questions

• What do we want people to feel and decide by the time they leave our next event?

• Are we designing from the audience, or from our own org chart?

• Where could the work of building an event align advancement, marketing, and leadership behind one story?

Homecoming is the prime example of this, and we’re currently in season.

Typically culminating in a football game, Homecoming is an annual tradition at many schools designed to tug at nostalgic heartstrings. Here’s the problem with Homecoming: it’s no longer a growth strategy; it’s a maintenance program. Many, if not most, colleges and universities do it because they always have, not necessarily because it represents a growth strategy. Said differently, they can’t stop doing Homecoming even if they wanted to.

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So, given that Homecoming isn’t going anywhere, how can we turn it into an effective tactic for growing alumni and donor engagement?

Homecoming needs to become about the future.

College itself is about the future. We’re educating the young people who will take the reins in every facet of life and become leaders in society. The research that’s currently underway will someday change lives, but not yet. Students are incubating the earliest ideas for their future businesses.

Those enrolled in or working for colleges and universities are thinking about today and tomorrow, not the past. In fact, most education organizations are actively pushing back against an entrenched “we’ve always done it this way” mentality, with clear motivations to change and meet the current macroeconomic and cultural moment.

But to make Homecoming about the future, it needs to become about volunteerism at scale. It’s no longer a sit-back-and-revel in nostalgia program for alumni. Instead, it’s about putting alumni to work, engaging students and faculty, and helping to light the runway for what comes next.

Results from the National Alumni Survey clearly show that recent graduates want a more authentic, relevant connection with their alma mater. And they want to help students as volunteers.

Instead of Homecoming, we need a Futures Week.

Ok, let’s keep the Homecoming football game and tailgate party so we can keep those alumni and donors who do engage because of nostalgia, but the idea is to make the annual celebration about the future by involving alumni volunteers across the campus: in the classroom, in the weight room, and in the dark room.

Advancement leaders must evolve their thinking around signature programs, instead of assuming every question has an event as the answer. If we’re taking the National Alumni Survey results seriously, we need to start with the question, “How can we provide meaningful opportunities for alumni to help students at scale?” If the answer is an event, then fine. An event featuring an alumni panel can be a great way to help students by sharing stories, advice, and reflections.

Coming ‘home’ should be about helping students, not partying, and not a one-way speech where the university talks at its alumni.

I wrote last week about what it would take to build and sustain something like a Futures Week -> Homecoming Game sequence. Senior leadership must work together to ensure faculty and staff think about how to involve alumni as volunteers. The Alumni Office then plays a central role in identifying alumni, coordinating involvement, and ensuring a great experience.

Creating a Futures Week, or something like it, is key to updating strategies and tactics that help education organizations stimulate more generosity and investment. Students get to witness this extraordinary moment, with alumni coming back in droves to help them. I’m often asked to help assess how to build a culture of philanthropy. It starts with graduates giving their time in a highly visible way, and teaches an important lesson about what it means to be an alum: someone who is generous with their time and goes out of their way to pay it forward (not back).

About Speaking Engagement

This week we wrapped up Mallory Erickson’s Faculty-In-Residence experience here on SE with a live Symposium. If you haven’t listened yet, you can check it out on the SE LinkedIn page or the Keynote podcast feed. I’m grateful to Mallory for coming along for the ride and giving this a shot.

We’re also about to kick off the next FIR with Jay Le Roux Dillon. Dr. Dillon is the Chief Alumni Officer at Cal Berkeley and also an expert in Alumni Identity. Jay has a ton of great insights into our field and I’m so excited to have him join us for this extended contributor partnership. If you haven’t read up on Jay’s research, definitely have a look.

We have his live Symposium on the calendar already for Tuesday, November 10th at 12:30 pm EST. Please block your calendars and plan to join us.

About the Next Keynote

On next week’s Keynote pod, my special guest is Sarah Winkler. Sarah is SVP at INVNT Higher Ed. She’s an expert experience designer and has helped some of the best schools on the planet develop campaign kick-offs, road shows, and other high-stakes events.

Although I admit to being a bit of a closet AI-doomer myself, one area where I think it’s going to do amazing things is helping create personalized, immersive experiences. We talk about that and more. Join us!

Speaking Engagement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

That said, we’re all fundraisers. I believe that wholeheartedly, and even though I sometimes refer to the “development side” and the “engagement side” of advancement as a sort of short hand, it’s just one big team and should be a holistic effort to stimulate generosity and investment.

In the Symposium which we streamed live on LinkedIn, we get deep into Mallory’s research. Scott Francis from Auburn University and Andrea Devine from UVA led the discussion, and I helped make sure we were on-time.

Thanks for listening and let me know what you think!

Also, mark your calendars for the next Faculty-in-Residence Live Symposium with Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon on Tuesday, November 10 at 12:30 pm ET.

He’s a data person, and he splits donors into three groups: the positive ones already giving, the neutral ones who quietly ignore us, and the negative ones we’ve somehow lost. Most shops obsess over the first group. Cameron argues the neutral and lapsed are the most undervalued people on the list, and the reason they’re stuck there is almost always the same, we led with an ask before we’d earned it. Not every message has to be a solicitation. Sometimes, he says, the first email should just tell a story, or carry a little whimsy, a coloring sheet even, and build from there.

Instead of telling donors their story, at USC, they ask for it. Cameron uses himself as the example: fresh out of school he’d have given to his political science department, but a decade later he’s a foodie with 88 houseplants, and the meaningful ask now is food science or plant biology. “We flipped it to where we’re not telling them the story, we’re asking them to tell us their story.” Get that right and people raise their hand, sometimes for gifts far bigger than anyone expected.

Big Themes This Week

• Being someone’s alum doesn’t mean you’ve earned the right to ask. Trust comes first, and the ask comes after.

• The neutral and lapsed donors are the most undervalued on your list, usually because we solicited before we earned it.

• Flip the storytelling. On the cultivation side, stop telling donors their story and start asking them to tell you theirs.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where are we asking before we’ve earned the right to ask?

• How are we treating our neutral and lapsed donors, and what would it take to re-earn their trust?

• Do we know what our donors care about now, or only what they cared about as students?

Faculty-in-Residence

Topic: Faculty-in-Residence Symposium with Mallory Erickson

Date: Wednesday, September 23 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm ET

Speakers: Mallory Erickson, Kristin Hanson, Andrea Devine, Scott Francis

We’ll conclude our first Faculty-in-Residence experience with Mallory Erickson by hosting a round table discussion on the themes from What The Fundraising. The Symposium will be hosted by Contributing Editor, Kristin Hanson, and led by SE Members, Andrea Devine from the University of Virginia and Scott Francis from Auburn University.

Register for the Live Stream

Allison’s talk perfectly delivered the Agora’s …

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The conversation turns that finding into a question for advancement: since institutions can't recreate a varsity team, how do they cultivate the smaller, more specific connections, a club, a major, a shared campus experience, that carry the same weight years later? They pair it with a European piece, "Seven Ways to Modernize Your Alumni Relations Toolkit," whose core message is to stop waiting for alumni to show up in your channels and instead meet them in theirs, with personal outreach and alumni telling their own stories. The panel lands on a practical truth: this kind of affinity-based, high-touch engagement is often low-budget but never free, because it requires leadership to trade away the big broadcasts everyone is used to.

The traditional approach to introducing a new university leader often includes a multi-city roadshow featuring large-scale events with high production value. At my previous institutions, we looked back at the attendance data for signature regional, campaign, and presidential events and found that while well attended, they did not result in the fundraising and engagement ROI we were tasked with achieving.

I am not suggesting that we sacrifice engagement with our constituent community. More so, I want to challenge the traditional idea of a roadshow as the primary way to introduce new institutional leaders.

Here are a few practical ideas and examples that could be incorporated into a leadership introduction plan that still allows a new leader to build confidence among stakeholders, maximizes staff time, effort, and budget, and drives early fundraising success.

Community and Donor Engagement Events

Target key markets, not every market

Focus on a smaller number of key markets with bespoke events that will draw the most engaged volunteers, donors, and constituents. Reviewing event attendance and other engagement and donor reports can provide more insight than heatmaps of alumni or constituent populations.

Create intimate gatherings

Plan small, regional dinners, breakfasts, or lunches for current and engaged prospective donors hosted by board members or other volunteer leaders.

These intimate gatherings allow participants to better connect with the leader, develop personal relationships, showcase the leader’s vision, and encourages those volunteer hosts to become champions for the new leader.

Having volunteers take the lead in organizing and covering the cost of these events alleviates staffing and budgetary constraints too.

Take advantage of existing events

Build on existing events such as homecoming, family weekend, game days, alumni and advisory board meetings, and other opportunities when alumni, donors, and families are already on campus.

Binghamton University will host the inauguration of President Anne D’Alleva during an investiture ceremony over homecoming weekend, which also coincides with the University’s 80th anniversary later this month.

A Multimedia Approach

Developing a multimedia approach to introducing a new leader can be cost-effective and wide-reaching. By enlisting the support of the university communications team and president’s office, advancement can share the responsibility and budget while finding creative ways to introduce a new leader to a community that meets them where they are.

Create a digital presence

Create content and utilize social media channels that best match the leaders’ personality, humanizing the role, showing authenticity, and allowing them to directly address the community in a lower-key style. While TikTok might not be every leader’s style, finding the platform that showcases their voice can boost recognition and online engagement.

Clemson University’s 16th President, Benjamin C. Ayers (@clemsonprez), already has more than 9,000 followers in his first month on the job. As a side note, Clemson’s university social media presence is a masterclass in content and engagement.

Dartmouth College won a 2026 CASE Circle of Excellence award for President Sian Leah Beilock monthly LinkedIn newsletter that has more than 8,800 monthly subscribers.

Develop ongoing productions like podcasts, vlogs or online video series that move from introduction to long-term engagement. Features such as “a day in the life” or highlights of a leader participating in campus milestones like move-in day, convocation, or graduation show interactions with the community and inspire nostalgia better than a talking head video.

Montclair State University posted a fun YouTube short showing President Jonathan Koppell helping a first-year student move into her dorm and chatting about her ambitions for the year.

The University of Oklahoma President Joseph Harroz, Jr. hosts a regular podcast, Conversations with the President, featuring students, faculty, and staff at the university that showcase the institution.

Ball State University’s, Our Call to Beneficence, hosted by President Geoffrey S. Mearns, is a monthly show featuring conversations with alumni and friends who exemplify “doing good” in their profession or community.

Continue traditional media

Maintain traditional media as a way to formally introduce the leader and provide ongoing updates. Magazines (online and print) and email newsletters continue to be trusted sources of information for alumni and friends across generations.

Opening multimedia channels early in a leader’s tenure can build an attentive audience, so that if more urgent communications become necessary in a crisis, that audience is already engaged and primed to listen.

Blending these ideas into a strategy allows a new leader to build trust and personal relationships with current and prospective donors early in their tenure while broadcasting their voice and vision across multiple channels to the broader community. Done well, this can be extremely effective and cost-efficient.

For advancement teams who find themselves in the midst of an institutional leadership transition, I encourage you to challenge the idea of an expensive and time-consuming roadshow program.

Watch the full length version (58 mins) on YouTube.

When King’s team needed instructors, they didn’t hire consultants. They went to their VP for advancement, Nate Stewart, and asked which alumni were doing this work for real. The list included the head of AI solutions for the federal government at Microsoft and a founder building on agentic AI. They said yes immediately, and one of them hadn’t set foot on campus in over a decade. It’s a way to engage exactly the alumni who are hardest to reach, the busy, accomplished ones a reunion invite never lands with.

What I appreciated is how King thinks about the college’s job. He’s blunt that higher ed has been “reactive as opposed to proactive and slow to embrace change,” and he treats Roanoke’s small size as the advantage rather than the handicap.

Most college students today are adults, not eighteen-year-olds, and 43 million Americans have some college and no credential. King wants Roanoke to be their partner for lifelong learning, not just for four years. And the vehicle for that turns out to double as one of the sharpest alumni engagement plays I’ve seen in a while: ask your most accomplished graduates not for money, but to come back and teach.

Big Themes This Week

• The most reachable version of an alum may be a teacher, not a donor. Roanoke’s WorkAI Lab is taught entirely by alumni, including some who hadn’t been back in a decade.

• Small can be an advantage. Roanoke went from a late-night idea to a launched program in weeks, and from a community need to a new degree in under a year.

• The student of the future is often an adult. With 43 million Americans holding some college and no credential, lifelong learning is the opportunity, not the alternative.

Team Discussion Questions

• Which of our accomplished alumni would say yes if we asked them to teach or mentor rather than give?

• Where is our size or structure slowing us down, and where could it actually let us move faster?

• Are we built to serve alumni as lifelong learners, or only as graduates and donors?

Engagement pros can get pretty upset about a lack of resourcing in these areas and transparency around these things, and it makes sense.

The compensation dynamic is disruptive as VPs work to integrate teams and bring engagement and development together around shared goals, such as pipeline building. Transparency around titles and levels, along with clear pay bands and growth opportunities that align career stages with development, are an important North Star to work toward.

But VPs can take other steps to reduce friction and improve internal culture so it’s more collaborative and everyone feels like part of a team. Salaries are tougher to change. But these changes aren’t just good for morale; they’re imperative in our attention economy.

The “this team and that team” — as part of the unit’s name — perpetuates the construct.

Around the world, these teams are called Development and Alumni Relations (DAR) or Alumni Engagement & Philanthropy (AEP). Literally, the name suggests two teams or functions, really, pressed together, perpetually trying to figure out how and when to collaborate, rather than one team doing something holistic. In a different way than compensation, having two different functions called out in the unit name creates the same dynamic.

These names reflect the past and are often shaped by political dynamics at a given moment, but they do more harm than good, in my opinion, and perpetuate siloing. Vice Presidents and other non-profit education leaders who have the opportunity to unite around a single organizational brand can send the message that everyone’s role matters, and that one team must work seamlessly in external relations or university advancement. We’re all doing the same thing — stimulating generosity and investment.

Communications as a service creates the us-versus-them dynamic

Imagine trying to create a stronger, more collaborative internal environment that’s fair and inclusive while also being more strategic. What is something a VP could do to ensure the exact opposite is happening?

Think of a communications-as-a-service model within a DAR unit. Imagine engagement teams competing with development leaders over which projects are priorities, with their colleagues in an understaffed group of marketing and communications pros. Now imagine that the VP has made it known, by admission or omission, that development-related requests should be prioritized. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot and stoking a culture of resentment. Not only do the engagement teams feel their work is valued less than development, but the mar/comms people in the middle feel like order takers. Not what they trained for. At the same time, development really does need communications as a serve, mostly in the form of formatting and design.

Fixing this dynamic means leading with storytelling rather than treating it as an auxiliary function that’s a nice-to-have service staffed at the bare minimum. Communications should be an area of excellence in advancement and highly strategic in ways that teams responding to requests simply cannot be.

The system gets bogged down, and inequities blossom in the service model. As a VP, I’d give my development teams access to an external agency partner and freelancers, and a budget for custom donor materials. Communications strategists must be at the table for engagement strategies from the beginning and have the bandwidth to work at a higher level than day-to-day production. A ten-hour-per-week freelancer can update your Planned Giving pages or take a templated design and personalize it with copy for a donor visit.

Advancement communicators bridge engagement and generosity through messaging all throughout the year. Ensuring this work drives advancement engagement, not just supports it, is crucial to a healthier organization and more traction with donors because it creates more stories to share.

Access to metrics and reporting creates a disparity and perpetuates the this-vs.-them dynamic.

Is there a single better way to make one team feel like the main character and the other like the understudy by giving one access to the metrics they need to do the job at a high level, and giving the other nothing or the resources for incomplete insights?

This is the prevailing dynamic at most colleges and universities. There are many reasons for the lack of metrics and reporting on alumni engagement, but ultimately, it comes down to resources. Advancement leaders need to secure funding to ensure engagement teams have the same data dignity.

Strengthen the entire advancement enterprise by focusing on integration.

Merging Development and Alumni Relations teams to create “DAR” is a form of perpetual “building the plane while flying it” syndrome and an ongoing acknowledgment of a them-versus-us mentality — differing objectives. Advancement leaders can support both culture and output by strategically resourcing communications for donor engagement, rather than reacting to program teams’ demands.

Comprehensive metrics and communication structures ensure your engagement teams can deliver and showcase return on investment. Engagement leaders and their VPs all want to retain their top talent, counter imbalances driven by inertia, and build teams for today’s environment.

Whether it’s what people are paid, what they’re called, how they’re resourced, and what they can measure, there are ways in which these systems cast one group as the main character and the other as an understudy. The most important dynamic is thinking of function, not two. It’s not that one objective is alumni relations and the other objective is development. Everyone is doing advancement.

About Speaking Engagement

I’ve been wanting to write about SE and our AI usage. It’s probably the subject of a whole newsletter and maybe even a static page. Of course, SE wouldn’t be possible without AI. Well, that’s not true. It would be slower and more expensive.

Although I do use Grammarly and have for years, all of my newsletters are written by me and I’ll often overrule the comma police. I do use AI consultation before I publish on how I might strengthen the piece. Great feedback most of the time. I’ve asked all the Contributing Editors and Guest Writers to write without AI augmenting your words. I’m looking for a 100% Human Written notation in Pangram before I publish each article moving forward, and I’m fine with something that’s not as polished as if an AI wrote it. That hasn’t always been the case since the launch of SE, with each writer using their own discretion.

As you probably noticed, I also use AI to create graphics and summarize audio. When the text isn’t the main thing, like in an an opinion piece or a video podcast, I use AI to summarize and more quickly move through the content package creation process.

It’s the only way I can produce SE and still do my consulting work. But to be sure, I realize how important it is to have humans making the meaning and telling stories here on SE.

About the Next Keynote

You might have noticed that I updated my LinkedIn profile this week! I’m excited to work with the leadership team at Roanoke College over the coming months to help launch a portion of their advancement engagement strategies and be a thought partner with the team.

It just so happens, that the timing is perfect to share my interview with Ryan King, Chief of Staff and Innovation Officer at Roanoke College. We talk primarily about the schools new WorkAI program, but the conversation expands out towards the strategic direction of the college. Roanoke College is a private liberal arts school with a Lutheran, faith-based background that’s working to make big changes and meet the moment.

I don’t want us to fail to act to prevent a major crisis that is heading our way. Advancement shops are full of smart and creative people – we can get ahead of this one, if we act now.

The crisis? Women in advancement are often held to different standards than men, standards that can feel impossible (especially in leadership roles) and we’re not going to have many women leaders left if we don’t get proactive right now.

Is this crisis new? No. But are we starting to see some scary statistics because of it? Yes. It’s time to act.

Women Are Leaving the Workforce In Record Numbers

This startling statistic caught my eye recently, and is what’s causing me to feel like we need to act now or we’ll miss our opportunity to make our workplaces work better for women. According to the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) jobs analysis, women accounted for 100% of the net decline in the labor force in July 2026. You read that right: 100%. The study states that women have left the workplace at roughly double the rate of men since January 2026, with 845,000 women leaving the workforce to 406,000 men.

What does this mean for higher education advancement, where in 2025 women made up 69% of the workforce?

According to CEO of Hocking Leadership Shanna Hocking’s 2025 report, the BOLD Blueprint for Women in Advancement, “women chief advancement executives in higher ed and academic medicine report insufficient onboarding, systems not set up for their success, and lack of institutional support” as key factors in why women are exiting the workforce at an alarming rate.

While Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President for Alumni Engagement at the UCONN Foundation, notes that she hasn’t seen more women leaving the UCONN Foundation than men (they have a very high retention rate, actually – more on that in a moment), she’s not surprised about the NWLC report.

“We’re still running a double standard, one that sets women up for failure,” she says. “I’ve seen women who have led their shops thoughtfully, with care, with kindness, with empowerment, be belittled and raked over the coals, even when their numbers are better than their male counterparts.”

The double standard looks like this. Remember that famous quote about 1930s and 1940s movie star Ginger Rogers – that she did everything her dancing partner Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels? It’s that. We expect everyone we hire, regardless of gender, to excel in their roles. But women face often silent challenges that many men do not. There’s an expectation of perfection, and if a woman shows any emotion at all, she might be labeled as weak. Whereas if a male leader cries, he might be praised as evolved. Women are expected to lead like men because that’s the dominant cultural norm in our workplaces, which were created by and for men way back in the day and haven’t changed much. But we aren’t men, and ignoring our own instincts and constantly having to be thinking how to make sure that we’re acting with “executive presence” (often code for: act like a man) is exhausting.

Like Mo says, she’s seen women run Advancement shops with empathy and care to be ridiculed for that, even if it was working.

And don’t forget the caretaker tax. As much as we don’t want to admit it, women and men who are caretakers are perceived differently, or, it’s much more likely that a woman is expected to do all the things while still also holding down a full time job. Schedule swimming lessons and babysitters and doctor’s appointments and conversations with estate planners, and in addition knowing where the scissors and goggles and charging cords are at any given point in the day.

You don’t have to take my word for it. There’s a lot of research about all this. A lot of evidence that women face a very different standard than men in the workplace. And, you can just ask a woman leader you know how she feels about it. I’m betting she’ll agree that the double standard is real…and is really exhausting.

How can we prevent this crisis?

Advancement: we need to be done ignoring that there’s a double standard for women in our workplaces.

We don’t have to watch our workforce slowly leave, and/or watch women who are excellent and experienced and love the work leave because the workplace is making them miserable.

There are absolutely immediate steps we can – and should – take to get ahead of this crisis. The best thing we can do, in my opinion? Invest in our people. Treat them like they are the most important asset in our workplace. And yes, I say people. We should invest in everyone, however they identify. And, we may need to invest more in women, who are less likely to receive leadership skills training and be assessed for leadership readiness. When’s the last time you did an audit of who is being invested in in your workplace?

“Why would you not practice the same care with your staff as you do with your alumni and donors?” agrees Mo. “You can do both. I get results and I care about my people. They know I care about them. If you’re not investing in your people, this is why people are leaving.”

The UCONN Foundation has invested heavily in its team members, running mid-level manager training programs, hiring executive coaches, creating internal training and development programs, even adding in more all-staff celebrations. They deploy frequent climate surveys to see how employees are doing and take steps to improve as they learn about challenges. They slow down and say no in order to take the time that is needed to fix problems.

All that to say: creating a healthy workplace that people, especially women, want to stay at is completely possible.

What you can do right now to help women succeed in Advancement.

I ask you to do two things upon reading this article. First, I want you to acknowledge the problem. I want you to say, out loud, that there is often a double standard for women in our workplaces.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that for women of color, there’s a double double standard. Watch this TED Talk by Jodi-Ann Burey about the myth of bringing your whole self to work if you don’t think that’s true. If we don’t name it, if we don’t say it out loud, if we pretend that there’s no problem, we can’t work on making it better.

And the second thing I’d like you to do is find one way to invest in your people today, if you hold a leadership position. Investing in your people can be as simple as teaching yourself to slow down during 1:1s, ask real questions about how they’re doing, and listen deeply. It can look like hiring someone to do a workplace health analysis, or going back to the last four years of your annual Gallup survey and seeing what the trends in employee engagement are looking like for you – then talking to your team about the challenges they’re facing.

If you’re not a people leader (and even if you are), a great action step is to read a book by someone from a different perspective than yours (if you need suggestions, I have a list for you) and then discuss it with a trusted friend or mentor. No time for a book? There are so many podcasts and TED talks out there it’ll make your head spin. The point is, it’s time to get curious and learn about how people are feeling about the workplace, then learn how you might be able to make it a place where people, especially women, want to stay.

Invest in your people, especially women, and you can’t lose.

Ellen Whitlock Baker is a coach, facilitator, and speaker who helps leaders create healthier, more sustainable workplaces. A former higher education advancement leader and accredited executive coach, she helps people rethink the habits that contribute to burnout and create better ways to lead and work. She is a Forbes Council contributor and hosts the Hard at Work podcast.

Faculty-in-Residence

Topic: Faculty-in-Residence Symposium with Mallory Erickson

Date: Wednesday, September 23 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm ET

Speakers: Mallory Erickson, Kristin Hanson, Andrea Devine, Scott Francis

We’ll conclude our first Faculty-in-Residence experience with Mallory Erickson by hosting a round table discussion on the themes from What The Fundraising. The Symposium will be hosted by Contributing Editor, Kristin Hanson, and led by SE Members, Andrea Devine from the University of Virginia and Scott Francis from Auburn University.

More details and register

Faculty-in-Residence

Topic: Faculty-in-Residence Symposium with Mallory Erickson

Date: Wednesday, September 23 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm ET

Speakers: Mallory Erickson, Kristin Hanson, Andrea Devine, Scott Francis

We’ll conclude our first Faculty-in-Residence experience with Mallory Erickson by hosting a round table discussion on the themes from What The Fundraising. The Symposium will be hosted by Contributing Editor, Kristin Hanson, and led by SE Members, Andrea Devine from the University of Virginia and Scott Francis from Auburn University.

More details and register

October Agora

Topic: The Class That Never Ends: Lifelong Learning as a Sustainable Engagement Model

Date: Thursday, October 8 from 1 - 2 pm ET

Speakers: Kathryn Bennett, director of LIFE@Elon (Elon University), and Sarah Rhodes, director of LIFE@Lynchburg (University of Lynchburg)

Kathryn and Sarah will share what it takes to launch and sustain lifelong learning programs, from recruiting volunteer leaders and building curriculum to securing philanthropic support and forging local partnerships. Attendees will leave with a vision for turning long-term engagement into a durable revenue stream without waiting for a full reinvention of the college degree itself.

More info and register