From Strategy to Support: CASE Currents Cover Story

I've been reading Currents for the past ten years. So seeing my own article featured as the cover story of its fall issue is a pretty special feeling. And, well, validating.

During my eight years at Drexel, I experienced how challenging it can be to move an Advancement marketing and communications team beyond an endless stream of requests. The better we got at delivering, the more people asked us to deliver.

Meanwhile, expectations for our strategic contributions kept growing. And we wanted to be more involved in shaping the work, too, because we saw how much opportunity existed to make Advancement's efforts more effective.

That's the tension at the heart of ​From Support to Strategy​.

In the article, I explore why so many Advancement MarCom teams remain stuck in service-oriented roles, share five practical shifts that can help change that, and briefly introduce my Strategic Capacity Ratio framework.

It examines how much of a team's time goes toward responding to requests vs. work that helps shape strategy and institutional priorities.

My hope is that the article sparks conversations not just among communicators, but with the Advancement leaders who influence their roles, resources, and priorities.

To be what a MarCom director forwards to their VP with a simple "Please read this. This is what we've been talking about."

As I often say, this is a revenue conversation, not a communications complaint.

​Read my CASE Currents cover story: From Support to Strategy​

I'm grateful to CASE for giving this topic such prominent attention, and to the colleagues who shared their perspectives, including UCLA's Rhea Turteltaub, CASE's Terry Flannery, leadership advisor Shanna Hocking, and others.

If you give it a read, I'd love to hear your thoughts. And if you know someone who might benefit from the discussion, please pass it along.

Let’s keep making the case together.

Dan