01
AI-Enabled Advancement Operating Model
How major gift officers, intelligent portfolios and human plus AI productivity work together.
November 5 and 6, 2026
The Program
Two days. Twenty institutions. One enterprise redesign.
What Is.
Day One frames the forces reshaping advancement and what AI is actually doing inside the practice right now. Plenary framing on advancement as an enterprise leadership function. A workshop on the questions presidents and boards are asking advancement to answer for. A featured talk on AI-native institutional strategy. The day closes with a facilitated dinner conversation on what holds advancement back from leading at the institutional level.
What Can Be.
Day Two is the Advancement Studio. Participants enter a simulated future advancement office and work through guided design sprints across four tracks.
The Studio is hands-on and chock-full of live demos. AI agents working inside real advancement workflows. An automated data warehouse purpose-built for advancement. Decision intelligence applied to portfolio strategy and board-level reporting. You see the future of the practice and you leave with the framework to take it, implement it and operate it as your own.
02
Decision Intelligence and Institutional Strategy
Predictive fundraising, real-time leadership dashboards and scenario modeling for boards.
03
Hyper-Personalized Constituent Engagement
Lifecycle orchestration, trust and data governance, experience design at scale.
04
Employer and Workforce Integration
Advancement plus career outcomes, industry partnerships as revenue and relevance engines.
The day closes with an Enterprise Synthesis Forum where Studios report out, patterns are identified and an investment roadmap emerges. Participants leave with a First 180 Days commitment framework.
The room
Each institution sends two participants.
The advancement CEO or SVP. An innovation partner from inside the organization who can translate strategy into operating reality. A chief of staff, a chief data or technology officer, a head of strategy, a head of digital engagement.
Decisions of this scope do not happen in isolation. Attendance is by invitation. Selection is built for strategic peer density, not logo diversity.
The faculty
The room is the curriculum.
The Lab is faculty-light by design. The room is the curriculum. Forty senior leaders working alongside operators from inside Fundmetric, experts from leading AI companies and a small set of domain specialists in data infrastructure.
Trained facilitators run the working sessions. AI and data experts sit in the room to help build strategy as it is being designed, not present it after the fact. Outside speakers join when their content sharpens the work, not for keynote theater.
Convened by Fundmetric. Mark Hobbs, Chief Executive Officer. Rachel Crosbie, Vice President of Strategy and Operations. RJ Valentino, Principal at the NAPA Group. Mark Koenig, Vice President for Technology and Chief Innovation Officer at the Oregon State University Foundation.
The venue
Omni Tempe Hotel at Arizona State University
Tempe, Arizona. Tempe is an intentional choice. It puts the room inside one of the institutions taking the venture-studio thesis most seriously, on a campus that has spent a decade rebuilding what a university can be.
Hold your seat.
Each institution sends two participants. Attendance is by invitation. Selection is built for strategic peer density, not logo diversity.
A thirty-minute briefing call confirms fit before invitation.