For most everyone in higher education advancement, the spring and summer seasons are the time for annual goal setting, strategy setting, and plan making.
If your team is like most, one of the questions asked during these days of planning is, “what else could we be doing?”
The idea behind the question is that most people who care about achieving goals want to make sure they are doing all they can to achieve them. And so, brainstorming ensues.
Brainstorming, of course, is a useful tool to jump-start creative thinking. However, we tend to brainstorm cumulatively.
In other words, most advancement teams brainstorm about new activities, solicitations, events, or initiatives – all things we can add to our work. And, in many instances, this leads to a calendar of increased activity but with little assessment regarding increased productivity.
On the other hand, it is much less common for advancement teams to focus their brainstorming on what currently is. For example, asking the following advancement planning question can be helpful:
What are we already doing, that can be streamlined, or reworked, or combined with something else, or stopped altogether?
Brainstorming for new ideas can feel productive (and fun!).
But, you might find that brainstorming for ways to repurpose or reduce what you currently do to be even more constructive.
