Integrate to improve your advancement outcomes

When you work in institutional advancement, whether in higher education or at an independent school, your success is measured in meeting or exceeding goals. Whatever those goals may be— increasing contributions to the school’s annual fund or obtaining a certain number of major gifts—integrating your advancement team can get you there faster. 

The benefits of working together

Too often, different departments within educational institutions are closed off from each other in a silo effect that can lead to repetitive efforts and missed opportunities. Breaking the walls around departments—integrating your advancement team— leads to improved staff coordination and workload alignment achieving greater results. This team effort solidifies an institution-wide culture of philanthropy, bringing your many stakeholders (e.g., board of trustees, head of school, students and alumni) together in a shared vision.

When your institution has an integrated advancement team, with its increased collaboration and a streamlined work process, you will achieve more than better outcomes. You will be:

• Aiding a comprehensive strategic planning process
• Refreshing programming
• Fostering cross-collaboration
• Generating buy-in to your collective goals
• Improving staff morale 

How to integrate your advancement team

A successful integrated advancement team consists of staff from advancement, marketing/communications, and alumni relations.  To help all these departments and personnel come together, CASE recommends several best practices such as:

Know who does what. The first thing you will want to do is to understand the specific roles everyone plays in the process. You’ll want to understand what their work entails and their specific challenges. Also, you’ll want to understand what strengths and skills the team and its members bring to your shared effort.

Work towards alignment. Review your processes and determine if and where there is overlap and where you can better achieve alignment. You’ll want to find ways to streamline processes and roles. 

Use and share metrics. Use shared metrics (e.g., reports, data, campaign results) to measure outcomes and report success, helping to quantify your institutional standing. With this shared knowledge, you can identity your fundraising priorities and track overall outcomes.

Common communications. View your communications and storytelling as the common thread tying together your various stakeholders. You should all share a common vision and story about your institution. Communications officers should understand how to match the language and tone to reflect the school’s personality across all channels (e.g., social media, website, etc.)

Meet regularly. Whether you hold occasional brown bag lunches around a specific topic or have monthly all-team meetings, you should aim to gather regularly for coordination and camaraderie.

Read CASE’s resource on how to integrate your school’s advancement office for more in depth content.