When budgets stay flat but expectations multiple.
Universities—and by extension, university advancement—are facing unprecedented financial pressures.
Shrinking enrollment from the demographic cliff. Post-COVID tailwinds. Declining international tuition revenue. And now? New financial obligations like compensating student-athletes that’ll squeeze budgets even tighter.
University presidents are making tough financial tradeoffs and increasingly looking to advancement to do more than just fundraise. They’re expecting advancement to bridge the gap and help solve the institution’s broader financial challenges. Here’s the hard truth: You can’t meet tomorrow’s goals with yesterday’s structure, especially when budget growth and new hires are not realistic options.
It’s Time to Automate the Routine so Staff Can Actually Level Up
The future of advancement isn’t just about raising more money. It’s about raising smarter.
Instead of constantly asking for more staff or dollars, what if advancement leaders focused on unlocking capacity from within their existing teams?
It’s where intelligent automation comes in—not as a replacement for people, but as a way to free them from the repetitive tasks that burn through hours and talent. Think about it: How much time does your team spend on gift entry, loading data, acknowledgment letters, routine data pulls, or even event registration? How long does it take to get stewardship reports out the door? Or pull together potential prospects to plan a trip?
When you remove the repetitive and redundant work, you unlock time for staff to shift into new responsibilities and roles. When you eliminate repetitive work, you create time for staff to take on new responsibilities, providing genuine career growth opportunities, better retention, and more engaged employees.
The Cascade Effect: Tech Creates Capacity, Capacity Enables Growth
When automation is implemented thoughtfully, it’s what actually happens:
- Your advancement services staff stops drowning in data processing and gets retrained to support research, annual giving, or analytics work. Your annual fund and alumni relations people aren’t just coordinating events anymore—they’re stepping into frontline fundraising conversations they never had time for before. Mid-level staff finally gain bandwidth to become engagement or gift officers, managing portfolios and driving real donor engagement.
It’s a talent transformation rooted in practical, tech-enabled workflows—not some fantasy org chart drawn up in a strategic planning retreat.
You don’t need to hire a dozen more people. You need to redeploy the ones you already have, strategically.
But This isn’t a “Flip the Switch” Operation
It’s where most advancement offices stumble: They think automation is just about buying new software and hoping for the best. Wrong.
This kind of transformation requires actual strategic planning—mapping out which processes to automate first, identifying which staff members are ready for upskills, and creating a timeline that ’t disrupt ongoing fundraising efforts. You need to sequence the changes so that automation creates capacity before you redeploy people into new roles.
Without a clear implementation roadmap, you end up with expensive technology that nobody knows how to use and staff who are frustrated by constant change without clear direction. The key is to build a strategic plan that your existing team can execute, with clear milestones and realistic timelines.
Managing the Human Side of Change
The biggest implementation challenge isn’t technical; it’s helping staff navigate uncertainty and change. Many team members worry automation means job elimination, when the reality is job evolution. Here are some tips to manage the change:
- Start change management conversations early and be transparent. Explain that automation creates opportunities for growth, not threats to job security. Share specific examples of how roles will expand rather than disappear. When staff understand ’re being developed for more strategic work, resistance typically decreases.
- Identify change champions among your existing team. These team members are usually people who are frustrated by routine tasks and eager for growth. These staff members become your best advocates for transformation. Also recognize that some team members prefer structured, routine work and may need more support during transition periods.
- Create individual development plans that show clear pathways from current roles to expanded responsibilities. Doing so demonstrates an investment in people, not a replacement of them.
Starting with the Right Technology Foundation
Not all automation opportunities are created equal. Start with high-volume, routine processes that have clear rules and minimal exceptions:
- Gift processing and acknowledgment workflows typically offer the best initial wins. Many of these tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and relatively straightforward to automate.
- Prospect research automation and standard reporting come next.
- Lastly, focus on more complex processes like event management and stewardship communications.
Before implementing any automation, address data quality issues in your existing CRM system. Automated processes amplify data problems, so clean data is essential. Budget time and resources for data cleanup. While it’s not glamorous work, it is critical for success.
Don’t forget to review how automations will work with your current systems. Integration challenges with legacy systems are common. Work closely with your IT team to understand technical constraints and plan for potential work-arounds. Sometimes the best automation solution ’t the most sophisticated one. Many times,it’s the one that works reliably with your current technology environment.
Protecting the Donor Experience
Automation should enhance donor relationships, not be a substitute for the real thing. The goal is to free up staff time for more meaningful, personal interactions with supporters.
Automate routine communications and administrative tasks but preserve human touchpoints where they matter most. Major gift stewardship, complex donor questions, and relationship-building conversations should remain personal. Donors can tell the difference between automated efficiency and automated indifference.
Consider automation as enabling better donor service rather than replacing it. When gift processing happens faster, thank-you calls can happen sooner. When prospect research or management is automated, gift officers have better information for meaningful conversations. When reporting is streamlined, stewardship updates can be more frequent and relevant.
The risk comes from over-automating donor communications. Personalized touches such as handwritten notes, individual phone calls, and customized proposals become even more valuable when routine interactions are automated. Use technology to create space for authenticity, not to replace it.
It’s Not Just Smart—It Resonates with Leadership
Advancement VPs who embrace this approach doesn’t just deliver results—they position themselves as forward-thinking leaders. Picture walking into the president’s office and saying:
“We’re not asking for more head count. We’re applying automation to expand our team’s capacity, upskilling staff to increase impact, and repositioning advancement to meet this financial moment.”
It’s the kind of modern leadership that gets noticed and supported.
Build an Advancement Team That’s Built for 2025—not 2015
The smartest institutions aren’t sitting around waiting for budget increases; they’re building better operational engines with what they already have.
Smart advancement offices are retooling, retraining, and redeploying staff intentionally. Not because it’s trendy, but because it’s the only sustainable path when resources are constrained and expectations remain high.
The breaking point isn’t looming; it’s here. But for advancement offices ready to flip the model, that pressure can turn into real momentum for positive change.
