4 Steps to Moving Your Marketing and Fundraising Teams to a Productive Partnership

The advancement leadership at FDU made a radical change in mid-2009 as it merged the development and marketing teams. The teams had worked together in the same room for many years, but pre-merger did so side by side with distinct goals and paths of activity, says Dina Schipper, director of university public relations. The merger shifted the entire team’s reporting to the senior vice president for university advancement. But most importantly, “the shift introduced a trifold charge to the newly merged team — supporting fundraising, recruitment and overall institutional branding, which, in time, significantly enriched its donor profiling strategy,” says Schipper.