Foster Avenue’s Year-in-Review

As we reflect on the year, we’re proud of all that our mission-driven client partners and our team have accomplished. In the face of inflation and many other challenges, our clients found creative ways to forge connections, overcome staffing shortages, and keep on asking. Our team doubled down on our areas of strength and continued our quest to deliver the modern campaign.

We hope you will join us for a look back at our 2022!

The Modern Campaign

In partnership with forward-leaning, mission-driven institutions, like our partners at the NIU Foundation, we’re equipping advancement teams for the modern campaign.

Our friends at Madhouse helped us to bring this “Great Reboot” concept to the big screen (or at least, hundreds of laptop screens). We have continued to gain traction and deliver on the five elements we believe are essential to modern campaign communications.

Throughout the course of this year, we answered the call to support our clients’ campaign planning efforts earlier and earlier in the process, helping them to articulate campaign vision and priorities before feasibility testing. By helping them engage interviewees with great clarity and power, we helped raise donors’ commitment and honed campaign messaging throughout the leadership phase and well before launch.

This earlier involvement has made our work more efficient and accelerated clients’ planning efforts, allowing for (and even expecting) the inevitable evolution of campaign plans throughout each phase of the campaign.

This year, we were excited to celebrate campaign launches with:

• King’s College
• The Peddie School
• Rowland Hall
• Saint Joseph’s University
• University of Evansville

Adding Advice to Art

In 2022, we further focused on helping our client partners embrace hyper-personalization, instill team-wide fluency, build internal capacities, and foster collaboration. While we will always place great importance on delivering stellar creative, that’s not enough. We’re introducing even more counsel and coaching to support your team’s growth.

Foster Avenue has always taken a high-touch approach to customer service, but now more than ever, we are tailoring our services and deliverables to the unique needs of our client partners. We know every campaign presents a unique challenge, every team member has a unique responsibility, and no two engagements are the same.

Sharing Knowledge: Screen-to-Screen and Face-to-Face

After almost no travel during the pandemic, 2022 brought a return to in-person conferences, fluency training, and client meetings. As a fully distributed team, we love working remotely and creating opportunities to collaborate in person.

This year, we hit the road for fluency training with West Virginia University, Ball State University, and the University of Evansville; and an on-site project kickoff with Northern Illinois University.

You may have seen Cory Andersen and other members of our team representing Foster Avenue and Ovrture at in-person industry conferences and virtual webinars:

• CASE All Districts Conference – Virtual
• National Association of Cancer Center Development Officers (NACCDO) – Kansas City
• Giving Institute Summer Symposium – Chicago
• Woodmark Summit – Virtual
• Association of Donor Relations Professionals International Conference (ADRP) – Albuquerque
• Woodmark Webinars (Team Fluency for Fundraising Success & Major Donor Engagement:                Unlocking the Potential of Personalization)
• Association of Healthcare Professionals International Conference (AHP) – Chicago
• CASE Campaigns Workshop – Chicago

We hope to see you at an industry event in 2023!

Leadership Transition

You may have heard about a leadership transition within our team back in July when I was honored with a promotion to President of Foster Avenue. The shift from Director of Account Leadership has been smooth, especially since Chris Snavely, who previously led the Foster Avenue team, remains “of counsel” while he continues to devote more time to our rapidly growing Ovrture platform.

I’ve been learning everything I can from Chris, Larry, and Jon Snavely, and it has taken some time to get used to introducing myself as “President” on video calls. I’m proud to lead this talented and passionate team, and I’m looking forward to continued growth, boundary-pushing, creative solutions, and connection in 2023.

As we look ahead to 2023, we’re excited to dive head-first into new partnerships and projects and provide even greater interconnected value to our clients.

Thank you for following along on this look back at 2022, and we hope to connect with you on the other side!

Wishing you a safe and happy holiday season,

Maria Barton
President

Effective May 1, 2023 — Snavely Associates is now named Foster Avenue. We have updated this post accordingly.