SUE CUNNINGHAM
President and CEO of CASE
@CunninghamCASE

Credit: Sean Sime

Over the past two years, CASE has been deeply engaged in reflection on what it means to represent the profession of advancement. This conversation, part of our recalibration effort, led to our strategic plan, Championing Advancement: CASE 2022–2027.

As you engage in the work of championing your institution, CASE (your professional association) understands the growing expectations you face to achieve key institutional objectives. Whether you are just starting out in the profession or are leading the enterprise, you’ll need deep individual skills across distinct competencies to tackle these growing expectations. That will also require even more professionalism across all the advancement teams—regardless of how advancement and its disciplines are structured at your institution. If you work in advancement services, alumni relations, communications, fundraising, or marketing at your institution, then you are an advancement professional. 

A primary element of CASE’s strategic plan is the CASE Career Journey Framework and its implementation across CASE’s programs and services. At its core, the framework aims to bring a comprehensive approach to the professional body of knowledge required for success across advancement disciplines. CASE is designing and creating a learning structure that helps professionals become more successful at championing their institutions in service of advancing education to transform lives and society.

In this issue of Currents, you will hear from CASE’s Vice President for Education, Emily DeYoung, about how the CASE Career Journey Framework will inform our offerings. You can find your place in the framework and understand where you might want to focus your career development or support your team members’ growth—again, in service of championing your institution. 

The CASE Career Journey Framework will build momentum over the coming few years. It is premised on the CASE Competencies Model, announced in 2019 and created out of the good work of a team of senior volunteers and CASE staff. Our CASE Commissions (our think tanks for the disciplines) discussed the framework. And of course, it is rooted in the understanding that professions are based on ethics, principles of practice, and community-derived standards, all of which are published in your professional CASE Global Reporting Standards, a comprehensive guide that is designed to evolve and grow as the profession changes. As of this membership year, I am pleased to share that one digital subscription to the CASE Global Reporting Standards is now included as part of your CASE institutional member benefits. 

As advancement professionals, we must never stop learning. Our institutions require us to understand the external environment and be ready—and nimble—to adapt our strategies, communications, and relationships to ensure our institutions are carefully stewarded. The last two years required us to change, whether we were prepared or not. A hallmark of a professional is having the requisite skills to succeed in ever-changing contexts. These skills may be different depending on our specific discipline or our working environment, but rest assured that through CASE, you have access to professional expertise, instruction, and guidance that is rooted in the deep experience of practitioner-leaders over the course of decades and a global perspective that enables our knowledge base to be enhanced by rigorous application across many settings. 

This is the promise of CASE as the professional association in service to those in advancement. As you do the important work of managing relationships to increase understanding and support among your institution’s key constituents, CASE is doing the important work of creating the curricula and pathways for you to become even more adept. Together, we advance education to transform lives and society.