Advancement is the Unlocked Door to Institutional ROI
With CMO perspectives from Megan Horton and Binti Harvey
Megan Horton
Associate Vice President of Brand Management
Oklahoma State University
Binti Harvey
Vice President for External Relations
& Institutional Advancement
Scripps College
____
Higher education has a system problem disguised as a strategy problem.
In this year’s Higher Ed CMO Study, we asked marketing leaders to rank their top growth priorities: enrollment, brand, and advancement. Nearly universally, enrollment came out on top. Brand came second. And advancement? Only 6% of CMOs ranked it first, and 58% ranked it as their last priority.
The Framework
Brand builds trust. Experience reinforces it. Advancement converts it.
When brand, enrollment, and advancement operate as separate functions with separate leaders and separate metrics, institutions trade a growth engine for three departments doing their jobs in parallel. The pressures on higher ed leaders today are unending. Paired with fragmented internal systems and structures, it’s not a surprise that many teams and leaders default to focusing on what they think is within their immediate influence. Central marketing focuses on brand, enrollment focuses on admissions, and advancement focuses on fundraising. Leaders are thinking about the right priorities in brand strategy and digital experience, but many are operating within a broken system that erodes the opportunity to unite strategies that can effectively elevate reputation, yield, and donations. When it comes to advancement, specifically, the potential for this work to serve as an entry point into enrollment, reputation, and institutional positioning goes largely unrealized.
What Advancement Unlocks
When an institution runs a strong advancement campaign, it’s doing something enrollment marketing rarely gets to do at scale: it’s activating the deepest believers in the institution’s mission and asking them to put that belief into action.
Corporate and foundation partnerships built through advancement generate brand associations, workforce pipeline relationships, and industry credibility that prospective students and families actively respond to. Alumni networks, activated through advancement, are the most credible enrollment referral engine in higher education. In many cases today, institutions treat them like a donor list instead of a strategic asset. Institutional reputation, built in part through advancement success, signals to prospective students that this institution is invested in by people who know it best.
The Data Tells the Story
The institutions that will win on reputation and revenue are those with the strongest brand relationships and the most clearly articulated value proposition. The broad, diffuse engagement model that once worked as a substitute for that clarity is losing ground. When brand, advancement, and enrollment teams are operating in harmony, results compound.
And, advancement campaigns become a flywheel that builds credibility, accelerates enrollment, attracts partners whose alignment strengthens the academic portfolio, and activates alumni networks that expand career outcomes in ways that feed directly back into the enrollment proposition.
____
Two Perspectives
How are institutions tackling advancement as an opportunity?
We asked two CMOs who are navigating this in real time — at very different institutions — to share their perspectives in writing.
QUESTION 01 · STRUCTURAL ALIGNMENT
When strategically aligning enrollment, advancement, and marketing became a more intentional discussion for you — what changed in how the work gets done?
Megan Horton, Oklahoma State University
The honest answer is that the conditions forced it. A leadership transition and strong donor sentiment created a window, but the lesson was that you have to build in the quiet so you can move when the moment comes.
“A moment like that only works if the relationships and the groundwork are already there.”
Practically, I advocated for a seat at the fundraising campaign leadership table, not as a service provider, but as a strategic voice. We broadened socialization early, pulling in enrollment management, alumni relations, and athletics from the discovery phase. The structural shift followed the relational shift. When people trust each other and share a line of sight, the org chart starts to matter less.
Binti Harvey, Scripps College
Successful structural changes were predicated on three key paradigm shifts to lay the foundation for meaningful alignment of advancement, enrollment, and marketing efforts.
First, collective responsibility. Each team adopted a sense of shared responsibility for the institution’s reputation, revenue, and relationships. By establishing revenue targets for alumni engagement, reputational objectives for philanthropy, and constituent relationship metrics for marketing and communications, we embedded all three priorities into every team’s goals.
We adopted a shared definition of success centered on lifelong affinity, which expanded and redefined campus partnerships beyond Admissions. Student affairs, facilities, and business affairs, became integral, strategic partners in advancing institutional goals.
“Think about a prospective student as a future donor, a current donor as a brand promoter. Marketing is the connective tissue — from prospect to student to alum to volunteer to donor.”
Third, we extended the marketing imperative to focus not only on stewarding institutional identity but to stewarding constituent identity at every stage – particularly inflection points such as prospect to student and student to alum.
Where They Converge
Both leaders describe the same sequencing: relational trust precedes structural change. You can’t reorganize your way into integration. The formal alignment follows informal groundwork built in small moments, long before any campaign demands it.
QUESTION 02 · CONNECTING THE WORK
Can you share an example of how you’ve connected an advancement effort to enrollment or broader institutional goals — and what made it possible?
The shift toward fewer, higher-capacity donors makes the brand-advancement connection more urgent than ever. Both shared concrete examples of what that looks like in practice.
Megan Horton, Oklahoma State University
We launched The Code Calls, a $2 billion comprehensive fundraising and branding campaign built on the Cowboy Code, OSU’s shared values identity. The campaign launched on the third try, after two postponed announcements and a team stretched thin by leadership transitions.
“One of our guiding campaign goals was to remove the gap between donor and student. That framing changed everything.”
The implementation team included enrollment, athletics, admissions, foundation, and alumni as co-architects, not stakeholders to be briefed. The launch brought nearly 5,000 participants across five campuses and 160+ million impressions. The key unlock: our donor research told us the brand wasn’t strong enough. That feedback gave us internal permission to make unified messaging non-negotiable — and caused advancement to let go of a separate fundraising brand entirely.
Binti Harvey, Scripps College
The College faced an enrollment challenge: strong application volume paired with declining yield. The issue wasn’t marketing. It was funding. Competitive institutions with deeper financial aid endowments were winning admitted students away.
When a private foundation announced a $500 million grant opportunity for liberal arts colleges to increase enrollment for lower‑income students, we reframed the problem as an opportunity. This became the catalyst for alignment of advancement, enrollment, and brand strategies.
We convened academic affairs, student affairs, business affairs, admissions, and philanthropy to build a unified proposal rooted in Scripps’s women’s college identity, student success and retention outcomes, and the strength of the Claremont Consortium. Scripps was selected as one of only ten institutions nationwide.
“An enrollment problem became an advancement opportunity. An advancement win became an enrollment outcome.”
The results compounded: reputational boost, a matching challenge that galvanized community fundraising, financial aid endowment growth, reduced loan packaging, and improved yield.
Where They Converge
The stories differ in scale, but the mechanism is the same: a unified brand and a shared goal unlocked outcomes that siloed work never could. In both cases, advancement was creating the conditions for enrollment, reputation, and institutional momentum to accelerate simultaneously.
QUESTION 03 · LEADERSHIP REQUIREMENTS
What does this kind of work require from you as a leader — that’s different from how you might show up in a more siloed structure?
Integration is as much a personal leadership challenge as a structural one. We asked both what it demands of them on a human level.
Megan Horton, Oklahoma State University
Doing the people work and not taking emotional shortcuts. Trust is built in small moments over a long time, often with people who are protective of their brand and their lane.
“The temptation is to route around the points of friction. But the friction is where the real work happens.”
I’d also add: start small. Before The Code Calls, we built alignment through social media and web strategy which were small wins that created the relational foundation for something much larger.
The other thing this work requires is empathy for where your colleagues are. Every interaction is a relationship-building opportunity. Leading with empathy opens the door to trust.
Binti Harvey, Scripps College
Building organizational capacity is the leader’s primary responsibility, which means being future-oriented while keeping sight of near-term milestones, progress, and momentum.
Accept the invisible phase. This work takes far longer than action-oriented leaders want it to. Much of the progress will seem intangible until it suddenly isn’t.
Get close to partners you haven’t historically prioritized, especially business affairs, to foster enterprise-level alignment and impact.
“Get close to your money people. The more aligned you are, the stronger every other partnership becomes.”
Where They Converge
Both leaders return to the same truth: this work is slower, harder, and more relational than any org chart redesign can capture. The leaders who build integrated institutions are the ones willing to do the invisible work long before anyone is watching.
____
The CMO’s Strategic Opportunity
For marketing leaders, this is the argument worth making to your president and provost: advancement and marketing working together is an underdeveloped growth lever, and marketing has the brand intelligence, audience research, and creative capability to help unlock it.
This is an opportunity to bring the research that helps advancement teams understand their most motivated prospects, the brand framework that makes value propositions compelling and consistent, and the creative capability that ensures advancement campaigns build brand equity while they raise money.
The institutions that successfully navigate the evolving landscape will build a system where each function reinforces the others, where brand builds the trust that advancement converts, and where advancement success reinforces the brand that enrollment depends on.
The door is already there. Advancement is the key to opening it.
Ready to act?
Read the full 2025 Higher Ed CMO Study for the complete data on how marketing leaders are navigating enrollment, brand, and advancement. Then take our Growth Ambitions Check, where you’ll receive a maturity stage score, a plain-language read on what it means for your institution, and a clear picture of what separates your current stage from the next one.
