Giving you the tools for sustainable fundraising

Reinvigorate Results Within Your Advancement Team

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Develop greater leadership capacity and fundraising skill among Advancement leaders, Deans, and MGOs.

In the face of declining donor participation rates and an increasingly competitive philanthropic market, a growing number of institutions struggle to achieve consistent fundraising results. This reality is often accompanied by challenges within the internal team: a critical lack of partnership between gift officers and academic leaders, managers who are stretched thin and in need of greater support and training, and a short-term focus among major and principal gift officers that may sacrifice longer-term fundraising results.

Academic Impressions partners with Advancement teams to take a more sustainable and consistently successful approach to development and alumni relations by:

  • Standing up internal talent and leadership development programs.
  • Training managers and supervisors.
  • Equipping major and principal gift officers with both the skillsets and mindsets to be successful.
  • Engaging Deans in the fundraising process and forging stronger partnerships between the development team and the academic side of the house.

Our differentiators include:

A unique combination of strategy, leadership, and skill development.

Academic Impressions’ 20+ years of expertise in leadership and skill development across higher education positions us uniquely to partner with Advancement teams to build a culture that can sustain high performance at all levels of the advancement shop.

Building capacity, not dependency.

Whether we’re training managers or working hand-in-hand with academic leaders on fundraising skills, our goal is to build the capacity of your internal team to do the work yourselves rather than breeding dependency on an external consultant for the long-term.

A customized approach.

Each engagement is carefully tailored to the unique context of the shop and the goals of its leaders. Whereas external partners commonly use the same playbook over and over, our approach starts with your people and culture so our solutions are tailored to your needs and goals.

How We Help

Work with Deans to build stronger partnerships with gift officers and generate and articulate big ideas that are compelling to donors.

Inspire a culture of leadership and high performance throughout your advancement shop.

Enhance cohesion and leadership capacity among your senior Advancement team to drive stronger, more consistent results.

Training for gift officers that enables authentic, meaningful connection with donors and discourages a transactional mindset.

Training for advancement supervisors to help them support, manage and retain staff more effectively.

Get your team working holistically to fill their pipelines and generate gifts on a consistent basis.

Fundraising Skills for Academic Leaders

We work with Deans and academic leaders to meaningfully engage them in the fundraising process. We can provide training on how to align the strengths and goals of your academic unit with purpose-driven donors. Training will provide time to:

Reflect on your leadership and vision.

Discuss the fundraising challenges you face in your unit and identify how to overcome existing barriers to advance the culture of philanthropy in your school or college.

Practice essential fundraising skills, such as donor cultivation and solicitation.

Gain valuable insight from your peers to further inform your fundraising approach.

Developing Staff and Shaping Team Culture

Create a roadmap tailored to your needs and actionable steps to propel your staff forward and foster a thriving team culture. We can help you create a plan that gets your shop working differently to generate better campaign results. Most campaign consultants focus only on metrics and tactics and ignore the impact that leadership and culture have on performance. We can help drive more consistent results by:

Helping build positive cultures that can help recruit and retain the right team.

Shift meetings from simply providing updates (where bad news is rarely shared) to true learning environments that drive improved results.

Facilitating greater collaboration both across the advancement division and also across campus.

Ensuring productive responses to the pressure placed by boards and presidents.

Finding the right balance between achieving short-term needs and longer-term outcomes.

Build Senior Advancement Teams

The performance of the senior team will drive the division’s results. Is it safe to challenge the leader or ask for help in your executive team? Do leaders have each other’s backs or is there a lot of finger pointing when things don’t go well?

We offer a highly experiential and customized approach to boost team performance, equipping leaders with the language and skills to navigate complex group dynamics and engage in critical, yet constructive conversations. By using targeted assessments and diagnostics, we pinpoint core issues and guide your team toward a unified path forward. With a focus on enhancing strategic alignment, fostering interdependence, and tackling challenges innovatively, our workshops transform how senior teams collaborate and drive success.

Training for Major and Principal Gift Officers

Learn strategies for cultivating and soliciting one of your top donors in a way that can alter the future of your institution. Understanding what motivates and compels donors to make a transformational gift is a key aspect that is missing in many shops. Set your team up for success by training major and principal gift officers to:

Inspire donors to make a transformational gift.

Develop a successful proposal.

Cultivate and solicit donors with transformational capacity.

Implement a stewardship plan for transformational donors.

Support for Supervisors

Too often successful fundraisers are promoted into management positions without the requisite skills to be successful. We partner with institutions to provide both basic management and supervision training and also to build the leadership skills necessary to build high performing teams.

Campaign Planning and Support

Our focus on leadership and building capacity are all in service of helping your shop get better campaign results. These efforts will help your shop work in new ways to help your team get out of their silos and work holistically to fill their pipelines and generate gifts consistently.

Develop greater leadership capacity and fundraising skill among Advancement leaders, Deans, and MGOs.