Growing a national network from the ground up: The Advancement Strategic Communicators Network
This panel will share how we built a national professional network: a community of major gift proposal communicators sharing ideas, resources, and solutions that move all of our collective work forward. We’ll also forecast plans for our network’s future growth as we continue to share proposal trends and best practices, benchmark impact, and form resource subgroups around shared interests and expertise.
Our panel includes three fundraising communication leads who direct philanthropic proposal services teams at our respective research universities: the University of California, Davis; the University of Miami; and Northwestern University. Our teams have become an invaluable resource and a sounding board to each other, and we saw a valuable opportunity to scale up this collaboration by building a national network of colleagues doing similar work—and facing similar challenges—at peer institutions across the country.
While professional affinity groups exist for college marketing communicators, corporate and foundation grant writers, and other specialized groups of higher education communicators, no comparable group previously existed for philanthropic proposal writers—so we decided to help create one. Since launching the Advancement Strategic Communicators (ASC) Network in 2022, we’ve grown rapidly from a small group of approximately 20 interested colleagues into a robust network of 140+ members representing more than 85 public and private universities in 38 states. We meet quarterly to exchange ideas, mutual challenges and best practices, and we’re growing and expanding in new directions all the time.