The All-Ask Trap — and How UTEP Escaped It
From our first Agora.
Every advancement shop knows the bind Sydney Bertram opened with at our very first Agora: engagement goals keep rising, but the content calendar has quietly become an endless tug-of-war between building genuine community and hitting transactional campaign deadlines. By 2023, UTEP’s channels had gone almost entirely ask-heavy — give, attend, volunteer — while the warm, story-driven content that actually builds affinity kept losing to bandwidth, a shrinking pool of the same featured volunteers, and a hard funding bottleneck. They needed more and better content, and they couldn’t hire a single full-time creator to make it.
Their answer was to look outward instead of inward. UTEP launched the Miner Nation Contributors Program — fractional alumni freelancers, recruited on LinkedIn, who write the articles, shoot the videos, and tell the stories staff didn’t have the capacity to chase. As Assistant Vice President for Strategic Communications and Engagement, Sydney detailed the whole build: starting with three alumni in a pilot, moving to a pay-per-piece model, and — crucially — wiring it to a CASE-metrics funnel so she could prove it worked. The results made the case for her: a far more balanced content mix, organic social growth, and contributor content landing as UTEP’s highest-engagement content type in FY25. Even better, development officers started bringing stories to her team, turning the program into a low-pressure entry point for donor cultivation and stewardship.
Then Sydney did what the Agora is built for — she turned it back on the room. Rather than hand out a checklist, she left everyone with three diagnostic questions: How balanced is your funnel between transactional asks and true value-add storytelling? Are you experiencing a content production stall worth solving with fractional talent? And is your storytelling engine stuck in a marketing silo, or hardwired into your development pipeline? Then the group broke into huddles to wrestle with them together — which is exactly the point of an always-on conference: a big idea, proof it can work, and a few new contacts to carry forward. Our next Agora is at the end of June.
