Spend enough time around people in advancement, admissions, or a number of other departments on our campuses, and you’re bound to hear plenty of them. New program ideas. New outreach ideas. New ways to do more with less and still improve outcomes.
Working groups and committees are usually effective at coming up with creative new ways to solve old problems. But we shouldn’t confuse creativity with innovation.
Creativity introduces a new idea. It takes the path with a slightly different angle, or a different toolset, or a different voice. Innovation changes the road.
Real innovation examines the structures and systems in which those new ideas work. That’s important in advancement and engagement because we’re usually a very creative bunch. We’ve been asked to do more with less for decades. Creativity is a badge of honor; ‘look at this new way we came at the problem.’
But it’s much easier to create something with a new alumni engagement program without examining the goal of alumni engagement. We can add another channel or messaging to fundraising outreach without paying attention to the actual processes involved in a donor’s relationship with the institution. Which, on some campuses, may well be the only way we can.
What comes from those creations may look like innovation while leaving the underlying systems unchanged. We end up creating around a problem, leaving everything underneath it untouched.
A good example is career support and placement. Connecting students to real-world experience and training is something everyone wants - employers, families, students, and institutions all see it as a foundational part of the college process. The idea that a degree delivery should deliver a one-to-one career return has become nearly universal. Families considering colleges want to know the practical career outcomes before they look at the residence halls. What kind of job will this college and this major result in, and is this investment in a degree program going to make more than it costs?
What resulted from that new calculus has been hundreds of incredibly creative programs that have made materially measurable value and have begun to address the expectations of students and their families. What didn’t come from it, mostly, was real innovation.
Most schools have the same departments in the same places with the same systems of connecting with employers. The same core curricula in degree programs. They do it much better than they used to because of the dedication and the creativity of their staff and leadership. But eventually, doing the same system better will run into its limits.
Then it becomes a systems question.
Kevin Grubb’s work around work-based learning offers a way to think about it. Before expanding to a broad view of the issue, he saw it firsthand at Villanova from the institutional level: what students gained from practical work experiences, where access broke down, and how employers and alumni could help. He also learned how difficult it was for any one campus to solve the problem on its own.
The interesting lesson for advancement is not that work-based learning matters.
It’s that good ideas keep running crosswise with the way our institutions are organized.
A student today probably interacts with career services, college-level programs, alumni relations, corporate relations, and development as entirely different parts of the university. An alumnus may encounter those same offices as five different requests for five different kinds of help.
That is the difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity would build a sixth program for that person. Innovation would let the five offices see that they are talking to the same human being.
Inside the institution, those distinctions make sense. Each office has its own directives, budget, goals, data, and metrics that define its success. But outside the institution, those distinctions can be almost meaningless.
I used to joke that many of the people I talked to seemed to imagine the entire university in one big building with the president at one end and the football coach at the other, and the rest of us just steps away from whatever solution they were looking for.
The alum who can introduce a student to an employer may also be a donor. The employer offering an internship may also be a corporate partner. The graduate willing to mentor a student may eventually become a volunteer.
One person who our systems turn into categories. That’s what makes innovation harder.
When I worked in the advancement office at my alma mater, an alumnus I was an undergrad with became a very successful entrepreneur and started a multimillion-dollar direct-to-consumer brand that grew incredibly fast. Let’s call him Steve.
Steve now has a business relationship with Athletics Licensing, which puts the billboards in the stadium. He works with career services as a business that hosts internships. He’s been invited by the College of Business as a speaker and guest lecturer. Of course, the advancement office is interested in him as a donor, and student affairs knows him as an involved alum of his fraternity and the campus programming organization.
Because Steve loves his alma mater, he says he isn’t annoyed by the overlapping phone calls and requests to appear, but how many like him stop answering some of those calls?
Advancement loves the idea of one person “owning the relationship.” But a real alum’s relationship is nuanced and distributed.
It’s relatively easy to ask alumni relations to create a mentoring program. It’s much harder to build a system in which alumni engagement, career services, advancement, academic units, and employer relations can see that mentoring relationship as part of the same larger experience.
Fundraising has its own versions of the same problem.
We can produce a more creative annual giving appeal while leaving the donor journey unchanged. We add personalization to an email while continuing to segment people according to categories that tell how they give, but very little about why they give. We can adopt artificial intelligence tools to produce content faster while preserving a process that was not particularly effective before AI arrived.
Those things may be worthwhile. But we shouldn’t call them innovation. Putting a faster engine into a machine designed for the wrong job doesn’t fix anything.
So what does real innovation look like?
First, the highest value moves almost never come with a press release or a public announcement. That’s not always true, but much of the true innovation in higher ed is quiet, structural, and far more likely to change something. Some of the most important innovations in advancement may not look particularly innovative.
Letting information move between offices that have always guarded their own data or measuring alumni engagement so that helping a graduate find a job counts towards success, even when no gift follows. Allowing room for the idea that the donor journey shouldn’t just be about upgrade velocity.
We tend to talk about innovation as a way to do something new. Real innovation may be a way to stop doing something old.
That process asks different questions and requires different choices. Budgets, metrics, staffing, data structures. Those are all choices. The separation of careers services and alumni engagement is a choice. All of those choices were probably perfectly reasonable when they were made. Some of them still may be. But until we question some of those choices in light of a changing world, the creative ways we build around them may not be enough.
Creative, dedicated people can become extraordinarily good at compensating for a system that should have been reconsidered. But as W. Edward Deming said:
“A bad system will beat a good person every time.”
I helped build an event at my institution that, by the numbers we measured - attendance, mainly - was a success. We were happy because the room was full.
When we started asking questions about who was in the room, we realized a lot of work went into making a lot of people happy, but those happy people were engaged, in general, only with that event. They weren’t donors, they weren’t volunteers, they weren’t mentors. They weren’t doing anything that we asked of ‘engaged alumni.’
So we changed nearly everything. The concept remained the same, but we designed everything around it to reach and attract the alumni we were looking for specifically.
It worked: new attendees were more involved and more aligned with an engaged alumni base. We quickly realized that, while a few dozen people loved the old event, it was out of step with an alumni base of 250,000.
The new event ran smaller numbers, but after a year, the people in the room were more involved than they had been the year before.
There were a few vocal alumni who were particularly annoyed by the new formats. Those I spoke with were sincere, and I was genuinely disappointed to disappoint them, but I knew what we were doing was better by every measurement that mattered.
The future of advancement will introduce new technologies, new ways of connecting people, and new ways to engage alumni and friends with our campuses. There will be new ways to connect students with experiences and networks that will advance their future careers.
But the institutions that drive real innovative change won’t be the ones with the most new ideas.
They will be the ones willing to ask a different question:
What if we built this around the people we serve instead of the structures we inherited?
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.
Upcoming Member Events
Agora
Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference
A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.
In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.
Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm
Faculty-in-Residence
For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.
We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.
