Behind the Conversation: The Invisible Architect of Digital Advancement
Every once in a while, someone reshapes a practice so completely that an entire industry stops noticing there was a "before."
If you work in higher education advancement today, there's a very good chance you are running plays written by Ashley Budd. The digital giving day playbook your institution rolls out every spring? Hers. The argument that email fundamentals matter more than the next shiny platform? Hers. The stubborn insistence on treating alumni like people instead of segmented data points? That's hers, too.
In Episode 4 of Higher Ed Icons, Mallory and I had the privilege of sitting down with Ashley—Senior Director of Advancement Marketing at Cornell University—to put her body of work on the record. But as we dug into the conversation and as I reflected on it for days afterward, I realized a fascinating tension the field of advancement has happily absorbed Ashley's tactics over the last 15 years, but many almost entirely missed her underlying argument.
The Trap of Copying Tactics
Sitting in RIT’s admissions office years ago, watching the enrollment cliff inch closer, Ashley made a bet that higher ed was going to have to learn how to fundraise differently. The old playbook wasn't going to cut it. The current business model was f’ed. She moved to Cornell, joined a brand-new digital innovation team, and fundamentally changed the game with the introduction of crowdfunding and the modern Giving Day.
Dozens of institutions now run giving days that look exactly the same on the surface. They have the countdown clocks, the leaderboards, the matching challenges. But while Cornell’s giving day has grown into a 12-year tradition that reliably scales (surviving everything from snowstorms to market crashes and a global pandemic), peer institutions are plateauing.
Why? Because they copied the outputs without adopting the operating principles.
While the rest of the industry spent the last two decades racing to industrialize—chasing scale, automation, and mass segmentation—Ashley was quietly building a profoundly human practice inside a machine. She understood that a Giving Day isn’t a technological event. It’s a human ritual at scale. The institutions that fail are the ones confusing reach with relationship.
The Cost of Being Right
Holding that line isn't easy. It costs something to stubbornly advocate for human connection when everyone else in the room is distracted by the next platform trend.
Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the inbox. In 2024, Ashley co-authored the book Mailed It! with Dayana Kibilds. They published this at a time when the broader field was proudly declaring email "dead."
In our conversation, Ashley unpacks a deceptively simple truth. Email isn't dead, but we just wish it were because we've made it miserable. When 85% of higher ed communication is a transactional call to action, we train our audiences to ignore us. Her entire career has been animated by the radical idea that alumni actually have lives, and our job is to insert ourselves into those lives in ways that surprise and delight them—whether through Pi Day mobile games, kitchen art for new grads, or emails they actually look forward to opening.
The AI Horizon
We are standing on the edge of a massive technological shift. The advancement field is about to be hit by a tidal wave of AI automation, hyper-personalization at scale, and generated content.
There is an immense temptation right now to hand the keys over to the machine. But listening to Ashley talk through her trust framework—a philosophy as old as Aristotle—clarified exactly where this technology helps, and where it will quietly erode the relationships we’ve spent decades building.
If there is one bold takeaway from our time with Ashley, it’s this:
The institutions that win the next decade of advancement won't be the ones that automated the fastest. They will be the ones that remember alumni are people, and that it’s an honor to be part of their lives.
Listen to the full conversation with Ashley Budd on Episode 4 of Higher Ed Icons, available now:
Listen on Spotify | Listen on Apple Podcasts | Watch on YouTube
A massive thank you to our founding sponsor, OnDeck Marketing, for making these conversations possible.