Raise more money by learning how academics and advancement professionals can work more effectively.
While development shops are generally successful at securing the gifts critical to meeting institutional goals, there remains no better representative than an academic leader to pitch an innovative program or solicit an important gift. Unfortunately, crowded agendas and divergent backgrounds often keep academic and advancement professionals from developing truly effective working relationships.
Join your colleagues to strengthen the relationship between these key stakeholders and more effectively raise philanthropic support for your institution. This event will help:
Through a combination of plenary and track-based sessions, this event will bring together faculty, academic administrators, and development personnel to rethink their interactions to form more fruitful fundraising relationships. As such, we strongly encourage you to send stakeholders from both groups to attend - including your advancement managers, corporate/foundation relations professionals, development officers, faculty members, departmental chairs, deans, provosts, and president.
This conference has been approved for continuing education credits toward the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.
After participating in this conference, you will be able to use an initial plan to raise more money through a more intentional relationship.
The "future timeline" strategic thinking and planning tool will be used to conduct "horizon thinking" about the future of philanthropy in the context of higher education. You will identify the potential events, trends, and issues that could impact the institutional landscape over the next five to 10 years. You will use a prioritized list of trends and issues from the timeline to ground your thinking for the remainder of the event and effectively approach the challenges of the anticipated future.
As institutions sought ever-more ambitious campaign numbers over the past decade, advancement shops met their charges by turning to an ever-shrinking number of high-wealth donors. These actions only increased the percentage of alumni who feel the relationships with their institutions have been undervalued or even forgotten. This session will look at this phenomenon and similar issues that frame the challenge the future of fundraising success.
Oftentimes, the most generous prospects for your institution have arrived in their positions through years of hard analysis and negotiation. This session will help you understand how to formulate compelling reasons for these challenging prospects to donate and where those reasons fit in building prospect pipelines.
Academic leaders provide the vision for a fundraising effort, and when they move on to pursue other opportunities, shops are often left in disarray. This session will help development managers understand the steps they must take to stay focused during leadership changeovers and vision transitions.
Fundraising success - already difficult in this philanthropic climate - is only more complicated when multiple gift officers express different center, school, or institutional priorities during donor conversations. This session will offer you tips for crystallizing your vision into clear support planks and help unify your external message across development staffers.
Faculty disconnected from the advancement function are more likely to believe misinformation and act as fundraising "lone wolves," compromising the entire development effort. This session will give you techniques for keeping your faculty abreast of - and engaged in - your work.
Approaching a prospect with a white paper draft can provide a substantive, early-stage connection to a project and allow you to build a focused, results-based relationship without social cultivation. This session will show both development and academic stakeholders how to work together to develop white papers that motivate prospects to give.
Prior to the conference, you will be asked to identify a challenging fundraising initiative at your institution. During the conference's first evening, you will be charged with incorporating new considerations to develop your initiative into a more compelling, white-paper-based project for donors, including:
A strong faculty presentation at an alumni event or campaign rollout can drive far more support than a simple conversation with a development officer. However, well-coordinated, less-noticed duties are just as important to increasing affinity and securing gifts. This session will examine every piece of an advancement gathering and the responsibilities for each party at each step.
As a development executive seasoned in working with many academic leaders, Jim will offer both groups of stakeholders perspective on how he might approach the new and often-difficult fundraising situations faced by most academic leaders. This session will address those situations by explaining when it is important to be collaborative versus independent and how to:
Corporate/foundation relations work is often even more closely tied to research than individual giving, making close academic/advancement coordination even more important. This session will offer you effective tactics on navigating a productive relationship in our time of tighter grant-application requirements and the changing face of corporate philanthropy.
From former students to alumni met at club events, faculty and academic leaders have unique connections into an institution's external stakeholders. However, they must keep advancement staff apprised of these connections to keep development officers operating at peak performance - the more disciplined the communication, the greater the potential for institutional growth. This session will share helpful methods of ensuring these interactions are communicated, tracked, and responded to as needed.
Key interviewing skills are critical when talking to faculty about their groundbreaking research and translating those gains into digestible conversation points This session will help you hone your faculty interview strategies, including preparing the right questions, identifying important responses, and utilizing post-interview best practices.
Advisory boards can be helpful entities, but they often fail to reach their full potential due to one or more obstacles, including an ill-defined mission, unclear or poorly defined membership roles, ineffective group interaction, and uninspired or uninspiring leadership. A task force model can be more productive and offer more satisfying results. This session will help you troubleshoot your challenging advisory board situations with task force solutions.
With your roles and responsibilities clarified, now it's time to put it all together during a time when economic recovery may be slow but donor emotional recovery even slower. This session will help you prioritize your efforts and outline your work together moving forward. Following a brief discussion of the goals to such a plan, you will begin to design a longer-term plan for maximizing your future efforts.
Before forming his own comprehensive advancement consulting firm, Jim served as vice president for advancement at Georgetown University. At Georgetown, he led the institution’s offices of alumni affairs, strategic communications and marketing, development, medical center development, and advancement services. During his tenure, he produced record numbers in new commitments and dollars despite a difficult economy and launched a number of innovative programs, including the acclaimed Student Discovery Initiative.
Jim arrived at Georgetown after spending eight years as the vice president for advancement at the University of California, San Diego. At UCSD, he led the planning and execution of the institution’s seven-year $1 billion campaign, then raised almost half the target amount in three years, despite a weak economy. Jim also previously served as vice president for external affairs at Georgia Institute of Technology, increasing annual gift income from $26 million to $76 million and more than tripling the institution’s endowment to well over $500 million. Operations under his management have won awards in virtually every area of university advancement.
Appointed dean in April 2009, Chet previously served Georgetown as chair of the Department of Theology, then as interim dean. He is an expert on the U.S. Catholic Church, the history of Catholicism, the papacy, interfaith dialogue, and religious pluralism. Chet received the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Liberal Studies Program in 2005, and, as a member of the American Theological Society, he served on the Academic Relations Task Force of the American Academy of Religion.
Chet previously chaired the Arts and Humanities Committee for the Heinz Awards and the national Teaching Award Committee for the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies. He is co-editor of the Columbia University series Religion and Politics and past editorial board member of Confluence: Journal of Graduate Liberal Studies. Frequently consulted by the media about contemporary issues in religion, Chet has appeared on Face the Nation, Meet the Press, The News Hour, Good Morning America, Nightline, and National Public Radio, among other outlets. He is also a contributor to the Washington Post/Newsweek website On Faith.
An expert in entrepreneurship, management, and information systems, Len arrived at Eller from Washington State University. At WSU, he was the director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and Markin Endowed Chair in Business Leadership within the university’s College of Business. Len previously served as the institution’s vice president for university development and foundation president for three years. In these roles, he led a transformation of WSU’s fundraising operation to reach record levels in fundraising, donor participation, board member giving, and endowment size.
Len was previously the dean of the College of Business at WSU and the Philip L. Kays Distinguished Professor in Management Information Systems. As dean, he led a complete reengineering of the business program, resulting in the successful AACSB reaccreditation of the college. Len also helped lead an institution-wide innovation initiative driven by the College of Business and its nationally recognized entrepreneurship program. He came to WSU from Indiana University, where he served as coordinator of the MIS program at IU’s Kelley School of Business. Len is a past member of the Academy of Management, and the editorial board for the journal Small Group Research.
Omni Houston Hotel Four RiverwayHouston, TX 77056
To reserve your room, please call 713-871-8181. Please indicate that you are with the Academic Impressions group to receive the group rate.
The rate is $179 for single or double occupancy, plus applicable tax.
A room block has been reserved for the nights of March 25 - 26, 2012
Make your reservations prior to March 11, 2012. There are a limited number of rooms available at the conference rate. Please make your reservations early.
The Omni Houston Hotel is centrally located in the prestigious Uptown Post Oak/Galleria area and is just minutes from all of the excitement that Houston has to offer. You will be just 10 minutes by car from the central business district and 30 minutes from George Bush Intercontinental Airport or 25 minutes from William P. Hobby Airport.
Full access to all conference sessions and materials, access to the networking reception on Monday, breakfast and lunch on Monday and Tuesday, as well as refreshments and snacks throughout the conference.
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