Building a Professional Community from the Ground Up
From a cross-country phone call to a national peer network
Quick Summary
- ASC Network co-founders Laurel Ode-Schneider (UC Davis) and Caitlin Wood (University of Miami) share their origin story, from a phone call to building a national network.
Our universities are on opposite coasts, so while we talk quite a bit as co-chairs, nearly all of our conversations to date have been virtual. This spring, we were delighted to have the chance to meet in person when we co-presented on the ASC Network at the CASE District III conference in Orlando. It was great to tell the ASC Network's story at this forum and meet with colleagues old and new—and we hope the coming months will bring more opportunities for network members to meet face-to-face! Meanwhile, here's a bit of the story we shared at CASE:
For many years, the proposal team Laurel now leads at UC Davis conducted a small-scale phone survey of about a dozen proposal colleagues at peer institutions. In 2020, her team decided to cast a wider net to see who else might be out there. They developed a list of about 225 R1 and R2 institutions nationwide, aiming to identify likely counterparts based on what they could glean from colleagues, scouring university websites, and good old-fashioned Googling.
Around that time, Caitlin, who had recently been charged with building a new proposal-writing team at the University of Miami, did a little Googling herself to seek out similar teams at peer institutions. She then picked up the phone and called the UC Davis Proposal Services team, sharing her interests in better understanding the national proposal-writing landscape and looking for best practices for building a successful proposal-writing team at an institution that, up until that point, had not fully utilized proposals to assist in major-gifts fundraising.
These shared interests led our institutions to team up on a comprehensive survey in fall 2021. Our focus was on learning more about the range of ways that proposal services are managed at different peer institutions across the country, as well as identifying best practices in this area.
Early lessons learned
That first survey had a small sample size of 22 respondents. But what we found was striking. No matter their size or structure, institutions again and again identified the same key needs, including:
- More resources to hire more writers
- Better information sharing
- Greater clarity around competing priorities
Similarly, we were also struck by the consistency in day-to-day challenges cited, from getting pulled in on projects at the last minute to cumbersome processes for leadership reviews and approvals. There was also consensus about the value-add that a dedicated proposal team brings to an institution—from the role that strong proposal writing plays in moving the needle on donor conversations, to helping fundraisers and leadership crystallize key messages around philanthropic priorities.
Perhaps most importantly, we heard a real hunger for creating a peer group as a resource and a sounding board. 100% of our respondents said that they would be enthusiastic about joining a national network to share resources, ideas, and best practices.
Now, you may be thinking that 100% of 22 people is still not all that many people—and you’re right! BUT, that initial group of survey respondents really became the core of our fledgling network, which grew quickly as those initial respondents spread the word—and shared our survey results—with colleagues they knew, or people they’d met at CASE or elsewhere!
Sharing ideas, resources and best practices
By the time we had our first quarterly meeting a few months later, we already had 85 people joining us. Now, less than two years later, we’re at 175 members at 95+ universities in 37 states. We meet (roughly) quarterly to share ideas and best practices, and we regularly connect via our LinkedIn group and this website to post job opportunities, pose questions and offer fresh ideas.
As noted, we also celebrated a professional milestone this year, co-presenting a discussion about the ASC Network at the CASE District III Conference in Orlando. We were delighted to meet more prospective members there, and raise the profile of the work we do.
And because ASC has grown into such a robust network, when we issued our second biennial survey a little later this spring, we more than tripled our sample size and were able to disseminate it to a much more targeted group—yielding substantially more meaningful data.
Meanwhile, we hope our network’s “origin story” inspires you as much as it does us. We’d argue that the biggest lesson from this story is not really about proposal writing, per se. It’s about the power of building connections across and beyond our home institutions, and how those connections can bring strength to our work, to our development teams and our institutions—and ultimately to the whole industry. Thank you for all you do to strengthen those connections every day!