Over the past few months, I have failed in remaining committed to my blog, due to a number of factors, extenuating circumstances, etc. Today, I am recommitting myself to this blog, and to this conversation.  

My original intent was to talk about thinking differently, specifically as it relates to our work in advancement focused on building relationships. As I re-emerge for this blog—and as we all re-emerge from the pandemic—I believe the need to commit ourselves to “thinking differently” and to innovation are paramount to our successes. The pandemic has upended how we have traditionally approached our work and I believe we will not return to the way we left things in the spring of 2020. I also believe that the pace of change will continue to move forward more rapidly than we’ve experienced previously. I embrace this “new normal” wholeheartedly!

We are experiencing, especially in higher education philanthropy, a decline in our base of support that we have never seen. As a result, at the same time, we see an increasing dependence on larger and larger gifts to support our institutions, and to reach our goals. Yet, I continue to observe a resistance in changing how we approach our work. Our commitment to traditional approaches in our segmentation strategies, the lack of flexibility in how our teams operate, and in our use of progressive technology, have all been culprits to that sense of hesitancy. 

This moment excites me and gives me hope. My mantra has been “no involvement, no investment,” yet we seem more focused on building our major and principal gifts programs rather than committing to transforming our engagement strategies and our constituent (annual) giving programs. Are we more committed to reaching our annual goals than we are to the long term successes of the programs we are privileged to lead? It is my hope that we will allow analytics, technology, and data to drive our decisions related to how we engage our constituents. 

New technologies are allowing us to capture more data than ever before. Yet, what I find consistently is that we aren’t utilizing that data, or that we don’t know exactly what to do with it. I encourage you to explore vendors, hire new team members with data analytics skills, and talk to colleagues and leaders across your institutions about the need to approach our work in new ways. Our constituents think they are sending us signals, loud and clear. However, they aren’t seeing us adapt our behaviors in response to the information they are certain we know about them. The result– they aren’t giving.  

What can you begin to do today to adjust your current behaviors? How can you retain more of your current donors? For first time donors, are you acknowledging, or wowing them in response to their decision to make their first gift?

I encourage you to pause, pick one thing to help readapt the way you work, and be that change NOW!