How Rutgers University Foundation Traded Deadline-Chasing for Strategic Work with ClickUp

The Challenge

When ambition outpaces every tool on the shelf

Rutgers' engagement operation is vast in scope: four homecomings across three campuses plus one abroad, a steady stream of marketing requests, alumni programming, stewardship letters, and annual giving campaigns, all run by a 50-member team for around 630,000 alumni. The talent was never the question. The tools simply couldn't carry the weight of the work.

Smartsheet was "basically just fancy Excel," says Karen Kaminski, now Senior Director for Engagement Strategy. Creative staff saw a spreadsheet and shut down. Information scattered across spaces with no consistency, and searching it was, in her words, "a mess." When a new AVP asked something basic — how many marketing requests does the team field? — answering it meant exporting data into Excel and stitching the picture together by hand.

The steepest cost was human. Karen, a strategic, data-minded leader, had been reduced to making sure other people hit their deadlines. "I was a senior manager basically doing assistant work because it had to be done," she says.

She wasn't the only one underwater. Deadlines slipped because no one could see where their work stood, and the division had carved out an entire full-time role for a single purpose: chasing people down. One staff member's whole job was deadline follow-up.

The Solution

One task, many homes: closing the visibility gap

The move that made Homecoming manageable (four events, three campuses, dozens of stakeholders) was deceptively small: a single task can live in more than one space. Communications work now shows up in the comms workspace and the project workspace at once. "Previously, tasks would live in the project, separate from where the marketing team did their work. They were constantly missing things," Karen says. "Now it's all the same thing."

Approvals that once ricocheted between email, Box, and Slack, with no clear record of the latest version, now happen inside the task itself. The project manager who built Homecoming's ClickUp space turned wikis into a single source of truth: dates, locations, email schedules, signage status, all findable without asking anyone.

When a simple lookup stopped being a fight

Karen's favorite jolt of surprise wasn't a marquee feature launch. It was the first time she ran a search. "ClickUp makes it so simple. Here's the thing you're looking for, here's the link, here's an article about how you find it. And do you want me to make you lunch? I'll buy you a coffee." After years of fighting Smartsheet's search, even a simple lookup felt like a gift.

Super agents that turned email chains into one-click routing

A communications or event request used to arrive through a ClickUp form and set off a chain of manual handoffs: "I did my part, now let me send an email to the next team." An agent now runs the entire route, assigning tasks, spinning up subtasks, and notifying the right people. The Alumni Owned Business Directory is the clearest case. Every new business has to clear research, approval, a welcome package, a website listing, and a database entry across five separate teams, and one agent now triggers each step in turn.

Karen KaminskiSenior Director, Engagement Strategy, Rutgers University Foundation

"The Super agents have been so helpful in making things happen that used to be manual. When a request comes in with a lot of conditional logic, the agent assigns tasks, creates subtasks, and notifies the right teams. It's made it so easy."

The Impact

Self-Service Reaches the Corner Office

Karen's Vice President quickly recognized that Smartsheet wasn’t the right fit for the way he needed to lead the division. It was time-consuming to navigate and didn’t provide the level of dashboarding and reporting visibility he needed to make informed decisions efficiently.

With ClickUp, he was able to complete his novice certification and now independently pulls division metrics directly from dashboards. Karen has built shared views across the division that can be accessed through a public link, giving leadership instant visibility without requiring additional training. The shift has significantly eased the response to ongoing requests for metrics and reduced the burden of manual reporting.

From seven years of reactive work to the first taste of working ahead

Senior role absorbed, no backfill required. When Karen was promoted into the Vice President's office, the division didn't refill her old position. ClickUp had trimmed the administrative workload enough that her former direct report could take on the responsibilities and add strategic work on top.

An entire FTE freed from deadline policing. The staff member who once spent every day checking on every request now builds dashboards, designs views, and helps colleagues get more out of the platform.

Leadership adopted the system on its own. The VP completed training and now uses dashboards for the metrics he once had to request by hand, a shift that signals real trust in the platform as the division's single source of truth.

Meeting prep down to a 30-minute agent summary. Twice-weekly marketing reviews that used to demand hours of request-by-request auditing now open with a pre-built summary from a ClickUp agent, complete with direct links to every relevant task.

Cross-team handoffs that run themselves. Multi-step processes like the Alumni Business Directory, once a relay of sequential emails between five teams, now advance automatically as each step completes.

The next wave brings the full engagement division onto ClickUp: Alumni Engagement and its five sub-teams, Stewardship, and Annual Giving, each in dedicated spaces. The stewardship team plans to retire a manual, Excel-and-email scholarship letter process in favor of automated imports, form-driven student responses, and task creation.

The roadmap is ambitious, but Karen isn't waiting on it to measure what ClickUp has already done.

Karen KaminskiSenior Director, Engagement Strategy, Rutgers University Foundation

"ClickUp didn't just fix our project management, it eliminated the administrative drag that was consuming entire roles. We absorbed a senior position with no backfill, freed a full-time employee from chasing deadlines, and for the first time in seven years, we feel proactive instead of behind."

How Rutgers University Foundation Traded Deadline-Chasing for Strategic Work with ClickUp

1 senior role

1 FTE freed

~300 staff on one platform

When ambition outpaces every tool on the shelf

One task, many homes: closing the visibility gap

When a simple lookup stopped being a fight

Super agents that turned email chains into one-click routing

Karen KaminskiSenior Director, Engagement Strategy, Rutgers University Foundation

Self-Service Reaches the Corner Office

From seven years of reactive work to the first taste of working ahead

Karen KaminskiSenior Director, Engagement Strategy, Rutgers University Foundation

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