Exclusive Interview with Vice President for Advancement at Texas State University

In this exclusive interview, pioneering fundraising leader, Brooks Hull, Vice President for University Advancement at Texas State University and Executive Director for the Texas State University Development Foundation, shares his vision for further expanding Autonomous Fundraising.

Q: Your team currently has two Virtual Engagement Officers but you plan on adding two more to the fundraising team. Can you share how you intend to build that out?

A: Our mindset around expansion is two-fold. The first phase is to add two more VEOs to the team, one focusing on athletics and the other responsible for Giving Day impact. And then, phase two is to add school-specific VEOs.

Q: You mentioned Giving Day, and we both know how important these campaigns are for driving donations. How will you use a VEO to specifically cultivate Giving Day donors?

A: We want to build the VEO portfolio to have maximum impact for Giving Day. We’re going to take a look at past Giving Day donors and other unmanaged donors who have the most potential to influence Giving Day and assign them to the VEO portfolio. That’s 1,000 donors the VEO will engage year round, which is the targeted approach we need to strengthen those relationships and connect them with the right opportunities when Giving Day comes around.

Q: What a great strategy. Can you talk a little bit about phase two and the school specific VEOs?

A: We are very lucky in that we have deans who are regularly asking how our University Advancement office can partner with them to cultivate donors to provide support for the great work they’re doing with students, faculty, and research. So we really need a way to not just direct major gift efforts, but purposefully build a pipeline to sustain those efforts. The solution for us was clear—a VEO working on prospects and leads for every school.

Q: How would you roll that out?

A: We’d start with the school most ready: they have the budget and a good base of alums with not only capacity, but established affinity or demonstrated giving history. But what’s key here is that the content shared with these donors will be very specific and college driven. This creates a pipeline of donors each school can now engage and move closer towards a major gift.

Q: What is your ultimate vision for Autonomous Fundraising?

A: My vision is to have a Virtual Engagement Officer for every single major gift pipeline across the organization.

Q: How are you determining when it’s time to expand your team of VEOs?

A: We have over 200,000 constituents and only a handful of frontline fundraisers. That ratio will never be able to capture the one-to-one engagement needed to cultivate sustainable revenue. Broad-based marketing, while important, doesn’t move the needle for us in a significant way. We saw the success from adding a VEO to our team and the multiplier that it is in managing more donors. Our base and subsequent opportunities are so large that it’s completely shifted the way I’m thinking about how we target our efforts. Reaching donors with the right content is what’s making a real impact, and so I knew that adding more VEOs to specialize in very specific fundraising efforts will change the pipeline trajectory.

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