412. How Cornell Reimagined Donor Engagement at Massive Scale - Ashley Budd

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Overview

Meet Ashley. Ya’ll. We gotta talk about the jaw-dropping + disruptive + groundbreaking way Cornell reimagined its team structure to unleash radical engagement. Reorganizing teams can be anxiety-inducing, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Cornell’s restructure led to a paradigm-shifting ripple in engagement - like moving from raising $600M to nearly $1B in less than three years🤯 This is a brilliant case study in how to radically unlock the potential of the bottom of your donor pyramid to yield big gains not just financially, but in engagement, story, awareness, event attendance, and loyalty🤝

💡Learn

How to reimagine the ways teams can interface + amplify each other

Strategies for aligning departments for greater engagement
Tips and tools for reinventing team structures at your org

Today’s Guest

Ashley Budd, Director of Marketing Operations for Alumni Affairs and Development, Cornell University

“The leadership buy-in was not necessarily buy-in to try something new, because we’d been trying new things ahead of our industry for a while. It was legitimizing these digital interactions as engagements.”

— Ashley Budd, Director of Marketing Operations for Alumni Affairs and Development, Cornell University

Episode Transcript

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Episode Highlights

Ashley’s story and journey to where she is today (2:00)
Case Study for Reimagined Donor Engagement (8:10)
Brand, Brains + Brawn (13:00)
Legitimizing digital engagement (26:20)
Ashley’s One Good Thing: Innovation mindset (43:30)
How to connect with Ashley (45:35)

Powerful Quotes

"When people ask me what's the next team member I should hire, I usually am saying either data or email." -Ashley

“The reason you do a campaign is because you want to step it up and you want to be able to operate at a higher level. In order to do that, you have to invest, you have to inject new strategies, it means new tools, it means more staff, and you have to do a really big investment to get yourself to that next level.” -Ashley

“When our other engagement outlets shut down. Online was where it was at so we used that as an opportunity to get everybody in line on the same communication calendar.” -Ashley

“How are we going to get them to show up? Everyone needs something and how do we insert the university into that conversation?” -Ashley

“How do we really meet them where they are, and sneak our way into the conversation?” -Ashley

“The leadership buy-in was not necessarily buy-in to try something new, because we'd been trying new things ahead of our industry for a while. It was legitimizing these digital interactions as engagements.” -Ashley

“You have to carve out space for innovation, you can not put it on your well-oiled machine.” -Ashley