When Mallory Willsea named discipline as the most important ingredient in community building on this week’s Keynote, I didn’t disagree. But I also thought about every engagement professional I know who is deeply disciplined (you know, the one who shows up every day, who cares enormously about the work, and frankly, is exhausted)... and still can’t build the kind of consistent, compounding community presence that actually moves relationships forward. So what’s actually getting in the way?
When everything is a priority, nothing is. And in most advancement shops, everything is a priority.
The average alumni engagement professional is managing a calendar of events, a volunteer board, a social media presence, a newsletter, a giving day, a reunion, a young alumni program, and sometimes a community platform that someone launched three years ago and nobody quite knows what to do with. Discipline applied across all of that doesn’t build anything. It just keeps everything from falling apart.
Mallory named the underlying dynamic clearly: the first move in true innovation is subtraction, not addition. Higher ed almost never subtracts. We add. A new initiative gets launched. An old one never quite gets retired. The portfolio grows, the staff stays the same size, and everyone gets a little more spread out and a little less effective at any single thing.
Community building is particularly vulnerable to this because the launch moment is the easy part. There’s a campaign kickoff, a platform launch, an announcement that signals something new is underway. What comes after that, the slow, unglamorous work of showing up consistently, adding value regularly, and trusting that connection compounds over time, is where most initiatives quietly stall. That kind of work gets deprioritized in organizations that reward visible activity. It’s harder and takes longer to measure. The launch gets celebrated. The tending doesn’t. So it waits while everything else gets done first - and then it’s always waiting.
And so the communities fail. Not because the people running them lack discipline. But because discipline requires focus, and focus requires making choices about what not to do. Those choices are genuinely hard in environments where every stakeholder has a program they care about and subtraction feels like abandonment.
Here’s the other thing worth naming: you don’t need a new platform to build community. That assumption — that community requires a dedicated app, a new login, a custom space — is one of the reasons so many initiatives die before they find their footing. The community technology graveyard in higher ed is littered with tools that had great demos and empty discussion boards.
Mallory’s MarCom Barbie community started as a party and became a Slack channel. It has hundreds of members and is, by her description, thriving. No custom platform. Just a consistent space, a clear sense of who it’s for, and someone showing up in it regularly. The technology was already there. The discipline to tend it was the differentiator.
So what would subtracting first actually look like in your shop?
It might mean auditing your event calendar and retiring the one that’s been running for years out of inertia rather than impact. It might mean closing the LinkedIn group nobody is posting in and redirecting that energy into the one that has some momentum. It might mean choosing one community initiative — a focused newsletter, a small cohort that meets quarterly, a LinkedIn group with a clear purpose and a consistent moderator — and giving it the protected time it needs to actually compound.
None of that is glamorous. All of it takes time. But it’s the work that actually builds something.
Mallory said that innovation stalls not because of bad ideas, but because of process barriers, resource barriers, and the discipline to do the thing. The invitation here isn’t to work harder. It’s to work on fewer things, and protect the time to do them well.
The programs that last aren’t the most sophisticated ones. They’re the ones someone decided to show up for, every time, without stopping. And the only way to show up for the thing that matters is to stop showing up for the things that don’t.
That’s what subtracting first means. Not doing less. Building something that actually has a chance.
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.
Annie began her career in frontline fundraising at the University of Missouri, first as a regional and planned giving officer and then as director for the School of Law. She is also co-founder of Advancement Talent Co., a community for advancement professionals focused on talent management and organizational strategy.
Week 3 - Learning Guide - Key Themes - Questions to ask your teams
Themes
Marketing and communications teams are increasingly being asked to carry institutional survival through enrollment, retention, trust-building, and brand positioning.
Communications cannot fix a broken student or alumni experience, even if marcomm teams are often the first to recognize the problem.
Engagement should be measured by how people feel about the institution, not simply by activity metrics like opens, clicks, attendance, or impressions.
Community-building requires discipline, consistency, and strategic subtraction rather than constantly adding new initiatives and platforms.
Advancement and marcomm teams need better ways to identify emotional connection, belonging, and relational drift before disengagement shows up in traditional dashboards.
Questions
Are our marketing and engagement teams being asked to solve problems they do not actually control?
Where are the biggest disconnects between institutional messaging and lived experience at our institution?
If our marcomm team is the “canary in the coal mine,” are we listening closely enough to what they are seeing?
Do our dashboards measure activity, or do they measure relationship strength?
How would we know if alumni no longer felt emotionally connected to the institution?
Are we trying to build too many communities, initiatives, or programs at once?
What parts of our alumni journey currently create friction, disappointment, or distrust?
