It’s fairly easy to find most any advancement-related strategy, program, approach, or tactic within minutes through an old-fashioned Google search.
We can attend professional development conferences in person. We can engage in synchronous and asynchronous online education programs. We can listen to podcasts and read books, blogs, and articles.
Today, we can even engage artificial intelligence to write for us, identify the best prospects for us, and suggest next steps with donors for us.
In other words, we have an abundance of intelligence. It is easy to gather. It is inexpensive. It is ubiquitous.
What we don’t have nearly as much of is practice.
Advancement professionals are renowned for trying an approach for a year and then changing it. For attempting a strategy for a season and then losing interest in it. For starting a program and then replacing it.
The most effective and successful advancement teams are rarely those that, somehow, identify and constantly utilize the newest, most cutting-edge strategies, programs, and initiatives. In other words, the best teams aren’t the ones who have the most knowledge.
The most effective and successful advancement teams are those that identify and engage with the fundamental approaches, strategies, tactics, and initiatives and consistently implement them over years and sometimes decades.
They don’t change the basics. They carefully refine. They thoughtfully perfect. They precisely improve. But they don’t wholesale change.
In other words, the very best teams practice.
