Watch the full-length version on YouTube (60 minutes)

The moment I keep thinking about is from early in his career. A few weeks into a data job at the Science Center, he watched a school bus unload a crowd of kids into the free museum, and something clicked. One of them might catch a spark that day, go to college, change the whole arc of their life, and philanthropy is the engine that lets places like that exist. He still gets the chills. That is the person telling me “data is a big part of the relationship,” and he means it literally. Knowing a donor’s grandkid’s name years later is either instant rapport or instant deflation.

So why do we still treat the engagement side of the shop as an afterthought sometimes, with no one owning the analytics? And as AI absorbs the low-value work, will we spend the time it gives back on what matters? Chris is pragmatic to the core, but underneath it is something tender: getting one small detail right is how we honor a relationship over a lifetime.

Big Themes This Week

• Data and operations are not back-office plumbing, they are part of the relationship itself.

• Good data equals good relationship. Getting one detail right, like a grandkid’s name, is either instant rapport or instant deflation.

• With AI, automate the high-volume, low-value work, but start with governance so you never expose your donor data.

Team Discussion Questions

• Who actually owns engagement analytics on our team, and what happens if the answer is no one?

• Are we using our current systems to their fullest before we go shopping for new ones?

• What low-value work could we automate to free up time for the human moments?

  ---

  Register for our Next Agora

  Topic: Talent Development
  

  Title: Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity
  

  Date & Time: Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.
  

  Event Type: TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion
  

  Speaker: Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant
  

  Register for the Agora

  
  
  
  
  

I’d usually clarify back then that I was part of a unique team called Strategic Operations at Longwood University, where alumni and career services was organized alongside the marketing, communications, enrollment, and student success teams. The team I led was not part of advancement — a distinction I made a point of stressing whenever sharing ideas. To this day, I’m not aware of another unit that’s similarly aligned. The alignment seems to work at Longwood.

As for career services as part of advancement, something I’ve learned more about as a consultant. I was wrong. I think it’s fair to say that at most schools, the organizational shift hasn’t worked out, and this approach remains an enigma — it feels right conceptually, but the vision at most schools that tried it was never realized.

It’s no longer a trend.

Many of the colleges that pioneered the alignment — UCSD, Colgate, Bucknell, Lafayette, and the University of Richmond — have all since moved career services out of advancement, most often into academic or student affairs. A few holdouts remain and champion the alignment, like the University of Northern Colorado, William & Mary, and Washington and Lee, where alumni and career still sit under one senior leader, or career services still lives inside advancement.

I see three primary reasons why career services, as part of advancement, remains an enigma.

Career services engagement strategies never pivoted to focus on donors

One reason to align alumni and career services under advancement should have been to converge their strategies on a specific segment: recent-to-mid career graduates who are also annual-giving-level donors in order to keep them involved. Too often, that convergence never happened.

Career services leaders were used to working with a different cohort of alumni — one whose donor status didn’t matter. They’d lean on alumni from well-known brands to anchor the recruiting and mentoring community, but rarely worked with advancement to cross-reference engaged donors and prioritize that overlap.

Advancement leaders struggled to articulate how the career-in-advancement dynamic was designed to help successfully fuel today’s campaign, not tomorrow’s.

Investment in mentoring technology has failed at the vast majority of schools

The opt-in network platform era has been rough on advancement and the alumni-career relationship. Since around 2010, approximately a dozen companies have sold opt-in networks promising alumni-student mentoring and affinity group-based engagement at scale and other features as well like calendars and newsletters. Long-time readers will probably recall my sentiments about them, but let’s just say I’ve been a “platform skeptic.”

These mentoring platforms only work when they’re grown organically, first as communities. The tech companies tried to solve alumni network access for students and recent grads in the wake of the Great Recession to find jobs, but never reinforced from the beginning the importance and challenge of building online communities and taught schools how to build them — and alumni and career teams were neither prepared nor staffed for the long game of community building. I can think of very few success stories from the prevailing technology of the last decade that was supposed to bring alumni and career teams together. Over the last five years, I’ve worked with about 50 colleges and universities. Most of them procured a platform over the last decade. They’ve been a failure almost everywhere.

The failures of these platforms created so much friction between alumni and career teams that, I’d argue, this dynamic caused a deceleration around this important cross-campus collaborations and thwarted any near-term realignment. If a merger was ever going to take place, this broad-based failure around network platform technology has created doubt and conflict around important new digital engagement initiatives that better meet the moment.

The collecting, curating, and creating of applied work and experiential learning opportunities never materialized

At the heart of this alignment is the need to do two things at once: scale volunteer opportunities that lead to experiential learning and micro-internships, and use the campus’s internal referral network to place students in the right roles.

But the teams were never given new resources to make that happen. They struggled together to build and prioritize new workflows, and mostly defaulted to the old ones: the alumni team still ran traditional events, and the career team still booked one-on-one appointments with students. The merger asked teams to stop doing things the old way and treat the work as a new enterprise — not one unit bolted onto another, but a whole new way of doing engagement from perspective student to former.

A final point: career services may belong in academic affairs anyway. The most important dynamic is that career and professional themes — along with alumni volunteers — have to be part of the classroom experience. That’s the real first step toward scaling experiential learning: making alumni involvement in the classroom expected. Everything else runs downstream from that cultural shift, in my view.

About Speaking Engagement

This week was an important milestone because we published our first guest post on Wednesday. Anna Gonzalez from Madison College writes about the four archetypes for alumni engagement.

If you enjoy writing and would be willing to share your views on Speaking Engagement, I’d love to hear from you. I offer a small honorarium and a few different types of articles you might consider.

About the Keynote for Monday

When I set out to create Speaking Engagement, I wanted to make sure to include lots of voices from the operations side of the house. My conversation next week is with Chris Cannon. Chris is the Founder of Generosity Collaborative, Inc. and former Chief Strategy Officer at the Zuri Group. Chris is also the author of two books on fundraising operations. I know you’ll enjoy my wide-ranging conversation with him.

Thanks for being a part of this community!

Ryan

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.

• The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.

• Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.

• The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.

• In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?

• Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?

• Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?

• Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?

• How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?

After a spring spent soul-searching about trust, Yale quietly rewrote a mission statement it had only adopted a decade ago. Out went the language about improving the world and educating leaders who serve society. What’s left is a single line about creating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge. Brian Rosenberg’s Inside Higher Ed …

Read more

I found one possible framework where I least expected it. In The Hero and the Outlaw, Margaret Mark and Carol Pearson adapt Carl Jung’s belief that humans understand relationships and roles through 12 universal archetypes and apply that idea to brand identity. They argue that the most memorable brands know who they are and communicate it clearly. A brand that tries to be everything to everyone ends up meaning very little. A mentorship ask with no defined shape may feel like too much for an alumnus to accept with a confident yes. What if we gave alumni a clear identity on the “board of advisors” that fits who they are, not just what they’ve accomplished?

Four Archetypes

Of the 12 archetypes identified by Mark and Pearson, I think four map most directly to what students need during early career transitions and best reflect the distinct gifts alumni can share in ways that feel approachable. I have included a few familiar examples for those who are new to this framework.

The Sage offers knowledge earned through years of practice (Gandalf, Dumbledore). Sages support from a distance and offer the kind of thoughtful insight that can only come from lived experience. Students need a Sage to help them understand not just what the work is, but what it means to do it well.

The Hero shows students what is possible by having already done it (Katniss Everdeen, Miles Morales). When students connect with a Hero who comes from a similar background or holds a similar identity, they walk away with proof that unlikely outcomes are possible because someone else has walked a similar path.

The Caregiver supports students with compassion, warmth, and trust (Ted Lasso, Leslie Knope). Caregivers help students navigate the unwritten rules of professional culture and the disorientation of early career transitions, offering a steady presence throughout.

The Ruler creates opportunities and chooses to share them (Professor X, President Bartlet). Rulers offer job shadows, internships, introductions, and network opportunities grounded in a genuine understanding of the student’s potential. They most closely fit the traditional mentor role and offer access not as a transaction, but as an investment in a student’s trajectory.

These four archetypes work best not in isolation but in concert. A student who has been emboldened by a Hero, steadied by a Caregiver, and guided by a Sage arrives at the Ruler’s door ready to make the most of the opportunity waiting there. No single alumnus must carry it all alone: they only need to show up with their own gifts. When the role fits, the answer is more likely to be yes.

I am excited by the opportunity to rethink how we extend the invitation to mentor. What if outreach helped alumni recognize themselves in one of these roles and helped students understand the value of each. The ask would shift from, “would you like to mentor a student?” to “which of these feels most like you?” That single shift in framing might be what helps an alumnus feel like the invitation was made for them.

The next time you extend the invitation to mentor, which archetype could you lead with? And which alumnus has been waiting to recognize themselves in that invitation?

Anna Gonzalez leads alumni relations and community engagement at Madison College. A former theatre community-engagement leader and longtime educator, she brings a relationship-centered, access-minded approach to advancement.

Anna is our special guest contributor this week.

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.

• The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.

• Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.

• The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.

• In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?

• Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?

• Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?

• Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?

• How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?

Not the sexiest term, I’ll grant you, but it’s one of the most important priorities a college or university’s advancement office—and its overall administration—can pursue.

It’s also one of the first places Christine Cruzvergara, Handshake’s former chief education strategy officer, would look to if she were helping an advancement team improve its alumni engagement efforts.

What is data hygiene? It starts with making sure information about students, alumni, faculty, and staff is entered into university databases accurately and consistently in the first place. But accurate data sitting in siloes won’t help much. The bigger challenge is having systems that can securely share that information across divisions and departments. When different divisions and departments all have access to the same data, no one office has to work off a partial picture. And none of this works without having clear rules for who can access personally identifiable data and how they’re expected to use it.

Why does this matter in advancement? Take this example:

A gift officer discovers that an alum is the CEO of a fast-growing tech company. The advancement office is collecting information in their Raiser’s Edge database about this alum as they cultivate her for a major gift.

At the same time, the Career Center is trying to build a relationship with this alum in hopes of creating a bespoke internship program with her company. They’re building a profile for her in Handshake.

But the databases aren’t connected.

So, the gift officer and the director of Career Services each reach out to the alum independently. The alum doesn’t have much free time, so she only accepts one of the invitations. Secretly, she wonders why each office doesn’t just coordinate to meet with her together—but that’s not her concern.

This is a painfully common phenomenon. One office gets in. The other one’s left out. In the best case, this scenario leads to toes getting stepped on and egos getting bruised. In the worst case, it can completely turn the alum off to any kind of engagement with the institution.

“The right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing if they’re not sharing,” Cruzvergara told Ryan Catherwood on the Speaking Engagement Keynote podcast. The vital question becomes “what system or process are you putting into place to actually share information? And even if it’s not literally opening up your platform or giving the executive of the Career Center access to log into your platform, there has to be a regular stream of information that is flowing in both directions.”

With interoperable databases, each office on campus with access is working from a single source of truth about their constituents. Returning to the previous example: Let’s say the university has gotten its act together and implemented an enterprise-wide database for constituent information. The Career Center has received word this alum has received a big award and updates her record. The major gifts officer sees that activity and sees an opportunity to connect.

But before they do: the gift officer connects with the Career Center to see if they’re planning to do any outreach to the alum. Turns out, they were hoping to capitalize on this opportunity, too. So, instead of making separate attempts to speak with the alum, they make a combined ask to meet. The alum accepts the invitation, during which they discuss potential internship opportunities for students and a potential gift to the school from which the alum graduated.

With a central, integrated, and continuously updated database—and, of course, some governance developed around it—colleges and universities can connect with everyone in their orbit more efficiently and effectively. This work matters beyond advancement, too. As more institutions pilot and scale AI tools to support fundraising and engagement, a trustworthy database is the foundation that those tools depend on. An LLM trained on duplicate, outdated, or fragmented records can exacerbate the problems and bottlenecks it’s meant to solve.

With accurate data becoming the lifeblood of alumni engagement and fundraising teams in the 21st century, data hygiene has never been more important. And for many colleges and universities, it’s beyond time to wash up.

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.

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.

• The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.

• Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.

• The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.

• In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?

• Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?

• Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?

• Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?

• How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?

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

On the show this week, Christine shares an idea of hers that she championed while she was at Wellesley and elsewhere in her journey. Every student, she argues, should graduate with a personal board of advisors, at least three alumni in their field they can actually turn to. “Same thing goes for our students. They need a board,” she told me.

In an AI world where so much can be automated, Christine believes the real, in-person connection between a student and someone a little further down the road matters more than ever, and it is one of the few things only an institution can provide. What would we uncover if we simply shared what each side already knows, the young alumni already recruiting on campus, the annual-fund donors who would gladly mentor if anyone asked? And are we brave enough to treat career outcomes as an engagement strategy rather than someone else’s department?

Christine’s answer to a lot of this is disarmingly simple. Don’t gatekeep, hire people who can lead change, and stop pretending students experience our org charts. I think people connect to her because she makes the strategic feel practical, and because underneath all of it is a genuinely human bet: that the thing worth protecting, even now, is the connection between people.

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, July 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• Career readiness is everyone’s job, but it still needs a leader and a central office, or it turns into chaos.

• The personal board of advisors: every student should graduate with at least three alumni they can actually turn to.

• Advancement and career services lose real opportunities when they gatekeep information and relationships from each other.

• The young-alumni-donor overlap is a bridge, annual-fund donors who are also natural mentors and volunteers.

• In an AI world, the human connection an institution can broker is becoming more valuable, not less.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where do our career and alumni offices operate as if the other does not exist, and what would sharing look like?

• Could we set a real goal of three alumni relationships for every student, and what would it take to get there?

• Who are the young alumni already recruiting or giving that we have never thought to engage as volunteers?

• Are we treating career outcomes as an engagement strategy, or as someone else’s department?

• How are we helping students become builders with AI while protecting the relational skills employers still want?

I’m looking for a few SE folks who might be willing to make me their AI Agent.

Backstory: I just met a fantastic alumni pro on the West Coast last week. She mentioned to me that, as a consultant, I should be aware that I’ve almost certainly published enough content on LinkedIn and now Substack that someone could easily train Claude or ChatGPT on how I think, how I might lead in certain situations, and then use AI-Ryan to get advice or workshop ideas.

I’ve been thinking about AI-Ryan ever since. Is this a good idea? I don’t know. But I’d really like to see. It sounds pretentious to suggest that I could be a valuable AI agent. And it is, but I think this is the direction we’re all headed. Soon, most of us will add different types of AI agents trained on the personalities and ideas of the people around us.

So someone should actually test what happens when you do it, and I am volunteering to be the guinea pig. Plus, I think it would be fun to test this as part of Speaking Engagement.

I am looking for a small group of SE folks who would be willing to make me their AI agent for the next three to four months. I will gather all my articles and give you what you would need to train an agent that thinks the way I do. From there, you decide how and when to use it. A few things people might try:

Pressure-test a strategy before you bring it to your team

Workshop a new program idea and poke holes in it

Draft talking points before a board or leadership meeting

I do not want to over-instruct you. Part of the experiment is seeing what you reach for on your own.

Two things to be clear about. First, this is a paid experiment for a few people (not sure exactly how many): I will compensate you for your time and for writing or vlogging about the experience along the way, because your reflections are the whole point. Second, the commitment is real. I am asking for three to four months and a willingness to share what it has been like, the useful moments, and the awkward ones. I’d also be interested in any one that might like to give AI-Agent Ryan a try but as volunteer, and without the content creation part.

If AI Ryan is super annoying, I apologize in advance, and you should also keep that possibility in mind.

AI Agent Ryan - Interest Form

About Speaking Engagement

I’ve realized that the Book Club idea has a gap: depending on the book, it asks everyone to purchase a copy. I think that’s a significant enough barrier that I’m going to make a change. After finishing The Generosity Crisis at our final event on July 31 (for members, but reading the whole book isn’t necessary for the discussion), we’ll switch to reading popular books available through the Libby app or your local library like Adam Grant or Malcom Gladwell.

This means I might not be able to get the authors on the podcast, but that’s ok.

An addition is that, in mid-August, we’ll be rolling out our Faculty-in-Residence experience, featuring six-week residencies on SE with authors and researchers who have studied various aspects of engagement. We’ll share articles, podcasts, and events featuring our special contributor.

I’m excited to announce we’ll kick off the Faculty-in-Residence with Mallory Erickson beginning August 17th and running through September 25.

About the next Keynote

I first met Christine Cruzvergara at a meeting of career services directors from Virginia public universities. I was new to my role at Longwood at the time, but could tell Christine was a rising star in the room.

Fast forward ten years, and Christine is coming off an amazing stint at Handshake as their Chief Education Strategy Officer. We discuss the future of career services, her take on higher ed, what we do best, and where we can improve.

Ryan Catherwood is the Publisher of Speaking Engagement, a platform exploring how organizations build relationships, community, and connection at scale. He is also Executive Vice President at Chris Marshall Advancement Consulting (CMAC) and Senior Consultant with Washburn McGoldrick, advising colleges and universities on alumni engagement, donor pipeline development, and integrated advancement strategy.

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, June 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• We train expert fundraisers but rarely train leaders, and that gap is what holds teams back. Invest in the people and the results follow.

• Networking is service, not transaction. The joy is in understanding what matters to someone else and helping create opportunities for them.

• Visibility is part of the job. Leadership opportunities are not handed to you, they are created by you, which means making your contributions known.

• Self-advocacy is not bragging when you connect your work to the organization’s goals and outcomes. Good work does not speak for itself.

• The strongest leaders have the courage to say “I don’t have it all figured out” and to ask their teams what they are missing.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where on our team are we developing fundraisers but not developing leaders, and what would it take to change that?

• Whose contributions on our team are going unseen because we have been taught that good work speaks for itself?

• What stops us from being visible about our wins, and how could we frame them around institutional outcomes instead of ego?

• When was the last time a leader here admitted they did not have the answer and asked for input? What happened?

• How do we make room for people to be fully themselves, even “too much,” in service of the mission?

Shanna Hocking has spent more than twenty years in advancement, and in this week’s Keynote conversation, she told Ryan that she hears the same sentence constantly from leaders at every level of the org chart: “I forgot that I had to advocate for myself.” I…

Read more

Read more

“I forgot that I had to advocate for myself.”

Shanna Hocking hears that sentence constantly. Not from people six months into the field. From people running advancement shops. She told Ryan Catherwood she has heard it at every level, including from vice presidents, the people who by any reasonable accounting should know better.

Sit with who is saying it. These are not professionals who lack confidence or competence. They have spent careers being good at this. And somewhere along the way they decided their work would be noticed on its own, and then it wasn’t, and they were surprised.

Nobody enters advancement intending to disappear. A lot of us spend years doing exactly that.

Watch how it moves up the org chart. The gift officer assumes the donor and the dean can see what closed the gift. The alumni director believes a 40% jump in event attendance will be obvious to anyone looking. The annual giving manager trusts that the numbers carry their own explanation. The AVP assumes the promotion follows the performance, because it always seemed to before. The VP discovers, often late, that results rarely explain themselves, and that nobody told her story for her because she had spent twenty years telling everyone else’s.

That last part is the whole thing. The skill is real, and it points outward.

Advancement is professionally fluent in redirecting credit. It is most of the job. We write the president’s remarks so the president sounds visionary. We draft the donor citation so the donor feels singular. We build the case statement so the institution looks worthy of a nine-figure campaign. Every one of those documents is engineered to make someone else the subject of the sentence. We are very good at it. I know more than one advancement professional who can write a donor tribute in ten minutes and then spend an hour trying to describe their own contribution to a project.

That instinct is a gift in donor relations. The entire relationship depends on the donor being the hero. Hocking is right that it serves the mission, and it does.

There is a sharper version of the cost. The professionals best at disappearing are often the ones doing the most relational, least quantifiable work: the retention that does not spike a dashboard, the donor saved from lapsing, the colleague mentored into staying. That work is the easiest to overlook precisely because nobody attached it to a number. The reflex that makes someone good at it is the reflex that keeps it unseen.

It becomes a liability the moment the work shifts from raising money to leading people.

Here is the part the profession keeps getting wrong. Leaders are not discovered. They are recognized. Recognition is not automatic and it is not deserved into existence. It requires context, and context requires someone to supply it. The person trained hardest to point the spotlight elsewhere turns out to be the person least equipped to do that for her own contribution. Advancement may be the only profession where people spend two decades mastering the art of shining a light on everyone else, then act surprised when no one can see them.

The reflexive fix is worse than the problem. Tell an advancement professional she needs to be more visible and she hears: become louder, post more, perform expertise, turn into the LinkedIn person who finds a leadership lesson in a bowling pin. That instinct is sound. The advice is just usually wrong about what visibility means.

Hocking’s actual move is narrower and far more useful. She does not coach people to talk about themselves. She coaches them to attach their work to an outcome the organization already cares about. Her example: “I developed a new alumni engagement initiative for this population, and we saw a 20% increase over six months.” That is not bragging. It is the same discipline advancement already practices on behalf of donors, turned inward. We would never let a major gift go unstewarded, unattributed, its impact unnamed. We do it to our own work without noticing.

The contribution exists. Somebody has to connect it to the goal it advanced, or it stays invisible, and invisible work does not get someone promoted, funded, or trusted with more.

Advancement trains people to make everyone else the subject. It is worth learning, at least once in a while, to put your own work in the sentence. Not as the hero. Just as the cause of something that mattered.

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

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

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

Register for our Next Agora

Topic: Talent Development

Title:
Starting With Yourself: Set Mini-Boundaries to Preserve Your Capacity

Date & Time:
Thursday, June 16 from 12-1 pm ET.

Event Type:
TED-style presentation plus small-group networking and discussion

Speaker:
Ellen Whitlock Baker - Executive Coach and Leadership Consultant

Register for the Agora

Big Themes This Week

• We train expert fundraisers but rarely train leaders, and that gap is what holds teams back. Invest in the people and the results follow.

• Networking is service, not transaction. The joy is in understanding what matters to someone else and helping create opportunities for them.

• Visibility is part of the job. Leadership opportunities are not handed to you, they are created by you, which means making your contributions known.

• Self-advocacy is not bragging when you connect your work to the organization’s goals and outcomes. Good work does not speak for itself.

• The strongest leaders have the courage to say “I don’t have it all figured out” and to ask their teams what they are missing.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where on our team are we developing fundraisers but not developing leaders, and what would it take to change that?

• Whose contributions on our team are going unseen because we have been taught that good work speaks for itself?

• What stops us from being visible about our wins, and how could we frame them around institutional outcomes instead of ego?

• When was the last time a leader here admitted they did not have the answer and asked for input? What happened?

• How do we make room for people to be fully themselves, even “too much,” in service of the mission?

Read more

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (45 mins)

The story from the episode that’s stayed with me goes back to where it started for her. At 18, on scholarship and financial aid, she took a $10-an-hour job in her college’s development office and got pulled in to help with a major donor event. As a student ambassador, they let her stand in the back of the room. She describes it as one of those movie moments where everything goes fast and slow and the music swells, and what hit her was small and enormous at the same time: “I can create meaning out of money.” She knew right then this was the work she was meant to do. I love that the spark was not a campaign goal or a spreadsheet. It was watching philanthropy create access for someone, and deciding she wanted to spend a career doing that for others.

If our profession is so good at building fundraisers, why are we so reluctant to build leaders? Can a field that trains us to put the mission first ever get comfortable letting its people be visible and advocate for their own value? And what opens up when a leader is brave enough to sit at the table and admit they do not have it all figured out, then ask what they are missing?

Big Themes This Week

• We train expert fundraisers but rarely train leaders, and that gap is what holds teams back. Invest in the people and the results follow.

• Networking is service, not transaction. The joy is in understanding what matters to someone else and helping create opportunities for them.

• Visibility is part of the job. Leadership opportunities are not handed to you, they are created by you, which means making your contributions known.

• Self-advocacy is not bragging when you connect your work to the organization’s goals and outcomes. Good work does not speak for itself.

• The strongest leaders have the courage to say “I don’t have it all figured out” and to ask their teams what they are missing.

Team Discussion Questions

• Where on our team are we developing fundraisers but not developing leaders, and what would it take to change that?

• Whose contributions on our team are going unseen because we have been taught that good work speaks for itself?

• What stops us from being visible about our wins, and how could we frame them around institutional outcomes instead of ego?

• When was the last time a leader here admitted they did not have the answer and asked for input? What happened?

• How do we make room for people to be fully themselves, even “too much,” in service of the mission?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Themes This Week

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

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

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

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

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

Team Discussion Questions

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

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

Register

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Themes This Week

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

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

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

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

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

Team Discussion Questions

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

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

Register

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big Themes This Week

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

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

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

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

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

Team Discussion Questions

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

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

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

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

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

  ---

  Coming Up:

  The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

  Register

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to say...

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

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

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

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

About Speaking Engagement

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

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

Noted.

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

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

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

About the next Keynote

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

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

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

But is anyone actually doing it?

Read more

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

That changes what an alumni network is for.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share your thoughts in the comments.

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

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

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

Big Themes This Week

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

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

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

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

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

Team Discussion Questions

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Up:

The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence

Register

Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.

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

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

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