Outside of the relatively small world of independent school administration, I’ve become used to that unmistakable look of confusion when I’m asked that question and answer that I work as a director of advancement. Even among members of my own school community, this professional self-description can often be as bewildering as saying that I am a master clay modeler or geospacial analyst. Follow-up questions are usually in short supply.
When I was a primary school student, I recall wanting to become an archaeologist when I grew up. My colleagues remember wanting to be politicians, inventors, teachers, or doctors. One of my friends, age 5 at the time, wanted to become a hedgehog. But no one dreamed of becoming an advancement professional. So perhaps it’s not surprising that friends and colleagues often have little or no frame of reference when it comes to understanding the work I do.
Even for those of us on the inside, agreeing upon a definition of advancement as an organizational function has been the subject of much discussion. Is advancement synonymous with school communications and marketing, development/fundraising, and alumni relations? Should we add admission and enrollment management into the mix? And what about the increasing importance of organizational innovation in our schools, whereby we take time and space to anticipate new business models and future scenarios that may be out there? After all, it’s one thing keeping the wheels of the institution moving forward, but most of us would no doubt agree that we also need to start thinking about the “forward” into which we are moving.
When people ask me now what I do for a living, I’ve learned that it’s easier to just say that I am a storyteller: I tell the story of my school, and I help people find their place in that story. I think about what the story of the school is today, as well as what it might be tomorrow. I try to find new ways to connect this story to people at each stage of the school’s lifecycle. And I manage, alongside members of my team, a set of processes that enable all of this to happen in an engaging and coherent way.
Defining Advancement
Getting to this answer was a process—for me as well as for my school, the International School of Brussels. But don’t for one moment think that it emerged out of a clearly articulated, planned decision-making process. Most of the time I was simply making models in my head to make sense of my role as a director of advancement.For example, about 10 years ago, I started to wonder why admission, communications, and development colleagues tended to sit in the room together. In asking this question, I thought about how, in his well-known book The Hero With A Thousand Faces, author Joseph Campbell introduces us to the idea that every story has a “hero,” and that the hero’s journey follows a consistent path across space and time.
This lifecycle works on two levels. It is not only an explanation of why we sit in the same office, but it has become an important visual reminder of the centrality of the universal family experience that sits at the heart of everything we do. It forces us to think about how our families are experiencing the story of our school at different stages—where the story is experienced as relevant and engaging, as well as where it might be breaking down.
Setting the Table
There is no doubt that over the past 60 years, the advancement function in education institutions across the world has evolved from its more traditional roots in fundraising, alumni relations, and communications and marketing.Today, advancement professionals are the people in schools who are responsible for brand and reputation management, visual identity, public relations, marketing, crisis communications, website development, publications, data privacy, admission and enrollment management, alumni relations, fundraising, volunteer recruitment, events—and much more. Sometimes, large, complex teams carry out these functions. Sometimes,
many (or all) of these functions and duties fall on the shoulders of a single person.
Keeping track of this ever-expanding list of tasks and responsibilities is daunting, even for the most seasoned advancement professional. So, one day, while thinking about and looking for an organizing framework for each one of these individual tasks, I found myself looking to science for inspiration—specifically at the Periodic Table of Elements.
The genius of the Periodic Table, I realized, is the manner in which it brings order and pattern to the apparent haphazard and chaotic nature of the physical universe.
There is no genius in what happened next, but I started to wonder whether we could break advancement down to a series of essential, irreducible, yet related elements. Just as the atomic structure of the universe has been mapped, and just as it has been determined that some elements lie in familial juxtaposition to one another,
I realized that there was indeed a simple harmony, connection, and pattern to all of the work that we do as advancement professionals in schools.
This led to the development of The Periodic Table of Advancement™ (see image below).
This Periodic Table didn’t automatically appear, however. Like many things in the history of innovation, there was just something that was really bugging me—the lack of definition about what advancement
actually is. So when, one Sunday morning, I sat drinking my coffee at my kitchen table, I found myself trying to make sense of it all and to organize my thoughts.
Everything we do, I thought, is organized around three fundamental pillars or activities: story, people, and process. We tell the story of our school. We help people find their place in that story—as prospective parents, students, teachers, donors—and we manage a set of processes that enable these two things to happen. That’s just about the sum of it.
But to stop here only led to overgeneralization. So I began to write down, alongside each pillar, a series of interrelated elements. Each element, it seemed, gave rise to a strategic question that drives the work that we do, and together they appeared to capture the role of advancement as I knew it.
Arranging the elements into a Periodic-like Table, I eventually discovered that it was possible to discern a number of both vertical and horizontal connections. So, for example, in its final form there is an intended progression from Mission (1.1) to Legacy (7.1) inasmuch as these are all components of what it means to tell the story of a school. Similarly, there is a suggested link between Mission (1.1), Governance (1.2), and Policies (1.3).
Given its unlikely origin, and unlike the Periodic Table of the physical universe, however, my organizational chart was never based on scientific evidence. It was simply my best caffeine-assisted guess at making sense of the advancement universe. In sharing the table with close colleagues, however, I quickly found it to be a useful conversation tool, helping us to find new patterns and make new connections in the work that we do each day.
Imagining the Future Together
Within a few weeks of publishing the table and a post about its ideation on my blog, fragments2.com, I started to receive feedback that colleagues in my school and beyond were beginning to use the table in different ways. Some printed it out and put it on their wall as an aid for talking with colleagues. Some used it to perform a team audit or identify priority areas for future growth. Some began to look for new connections between elements and started to experiment.As a result, we took the Periodic Table concept a bit further and created a game edition as a tool to foster new kinds of conversations (see below). The game edition is essentially a pack of specially designed cards on which the elements from The Periodic Table of Advancement have been printed. The cards come with a number of suggested activities that provide our advancement team members, our school board of trustees, fellow leadership colleagues, as well as advancement colleagues in other schools, the opportunity to reflect on what advancement is, where we shine, and the opportunity to reimagine new configurations and connections.
To those of us who have been in the advancement field, much of what I am saying might seem obvious. In talking to people, however, I’ve become increasingly convinced that a lot of schools are only just now embarking upon this journey into the advancement world, and it’s like they are opening a chemistry set for the first time. Even for those of us who are used to tried and tested formulae, the landscape of our work is forcing us to go back into the lab and redesign our craft; to have the courage to dismantle what worked in the past and—notwithstanding the occasional “explosion”—experiment a little.
At the International School of Brussels, we’ve begun to give time and space to this playful experimentation in the form of an innovation incubator for advancement. We had always worked hard as a team to generate new ideas and think differently, but the table gave us the confidence to formally decide that we were going to dedicate a percentage of our workweek to applying the principles of innovation and design thinking to our day-to-day work.
We decided to create space, by which I mean time, to step away from our day-to-day work and grow an idea—play with it, test it, adapt it—until it’s ready to be integrated into the operational life of the school. For example, The Periodic Table of Advancement reminds us of the importance of Coherence (Ch)—ensuring that the story we tell is coherent at all stages of the lifecycle of school engagement. But one day, a small group of us working in the admission office realized that we might have been approaching what we do all wrong. Or at least in a way that is somehow incoherent.
We work in schools that have begun to redefine learning around key principles. We know how children learn, and our classrooms today, for the most part, no longer reflect that old idea of simply depositing information or generating efficient workers for an industrial age. Yet many of our admission offices are still stuck in that old industrial model of simply providing endless amounts of information to prospective families.
So we began to imagine together and asked ourselves a series of questions:
- What if we viewed the admission process as a learning opportunity for families?
- What if we reconfigured the admission office as a classroom?
- What if we started “framing” what families see when they go on tour?
- What if we got better at understanding how our brains work and how people make choices when deciding on a new school?
Imagination in Action
Over the past three years, mainly as a result of giving enough time and space to such matters, these questions have literally transformed the way we manage admissions at ISB. In our quest to redesign the core of the admission task, we found ourselves chipping away at what we knew and creating a truly interactive experience in which each member of the prospective family, during an interview when they visit our school, plays a crucial role.Imagine that you are watching a family enter the admission office at the International School of Brussels. Apart from the unique design of the space, it is almost immediately clear that this is not so much about receiving information about our school as it is an opportunity to talk about learning and what is important to
the family when choosing a school.
The family is asked to look at 24 tiles on a large interactive screen in front of them. Each tile contains something that might be important to them when choosing a school—friends, playground, academic results, teachers, and so on. Each member of the family is invited to select a tile and identify what’s important to them. Everyone gets a vote. The family is then asked to consider all of the tiles that have been chosen and put them into priority order. So even if dad has chosen “tuition fees” as an important factor, he may find himself in a conversation with his 9-year-old daughter who has selected “friends.” Of course, there are no right answers. The point is, the family is having a conversation that they haven’t had before—and every member of the family has something to contribute. The point is, also, we are learning to listen and not feeling compelled to speak.
Looking back, it might appear that we were consciously advocating for the “gamification” of admission, applying video game principles to improve user experience and user engagement. But this would be to claim far too much. Maybe we had simply stumbled upon a good idea by accident. Maybe it was just because we were giving space for the new idea to emerge.
We’re still developing the experience as we go, but by giving time to the original idea and incubating it a little, we have uncovered a new formula that has changed the way we think about this particular advancement task forever.
The Future
So, what’s next? We are continuing to work with a set of internally produced professional standards and a continuum of indicators that are intended to mirror the table’s three pillars: story, people, process. These standards are providing us with a new vocabulary and better conversations around professional development and appraisal. They are helping us define what “good” looks like when it comes to our professional practice, as well as how we can grow and develop, as individuals and as a team.We have also just launched a new planning activity that we’re calling “My Advancement Quest,” which is designed to help individuals and teams plot the path that will most effectively move their school forward. We are also beginning to invite others to join this conversation and get involved in helping us redesign our work. More and more, we are finding that The Periodic Table of Advancement is giving us a common language to meaningfully describe and, where necessary, reshape what we do.
In the early days of Facebook, we were all given an option to describe our relationship status when setting up our profiles. We had three options: married, single, and it’s complicated. I’m still tempted to say it’s complicated today when people ask me what I do for a living. If I think I have the time, however, I consider pulling out a copy of The Periodic Table of Advancement and pointing to the 21 elements and saying, “It’s all these things—and probably more.”
Conversation Starters
The Periodic Table of Advancement™ Game Edition offers four activities to get productive conversations started. Each activity is linked to a question:- Does the table capture the traditional functions of advancement in your school? Are there other elements out there in the advancement universe?
- Who is responsible in your organization for each element? Are there elements that no one wants to take responsibility for?
- Which are the elements where you already shine, and where do you still need to grow?
- What new formulae and ways of working can you discover by combining elements in new ways?