“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
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?
