Author: Kenneth Soldink

End of Fiscal Year: Donors Don’t Care

by Lynne Wester

As fundraisers, we’ve just concluded a period of hustling to wrap up the fiscal year: working with donors, securing final gifts, and planning for the new fiscal year. Amid all the rush of this work, it can be easy to lose sight of something key: Most donors give because they want to make a difference and effect change. They give generously, but they also give in their own timeframes. Most of our donors don’t operate their households and thus their philanthropy on a fiscal year. Why then, do we insist that they care inextricably about our fiscal year end? Why are we constantly pushing them to give at times that meet our needs and not necessarily their own? Source: 2014 Charitable Giving Report from Blackbaud. If we look at the data from this Blackbaud study and others, we know that the giving season is November and December. That is when most people make their gifts and think about planning their generosity. It’s not that no one gives in April, May or June. I’m not saying that at all. But let’s be truthful: the large majority of donors don’t care about your fiscal year. Here’s a question I can pose to […]

Beyond Workshops: How RIT Incentivizes Faculty Development

by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions Competing demands on faculty time is frequently an obstacle to designing successful faculty development programs. “Events are not always successful because of people’s schedules,” explains Lynn Wild, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and The Wallace Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. That’s why it is critical that faculty development move beyond just offering occasional workshops. To empower more consistent and integrated faculty development, RIT’s approach is to offer: Faculty development grants (through partnership with academic departments) Grants for faculty mentoring A series of faculty talks showcasing faculty work, modeled after the Ted Talks These may be options that you can adapt for your own institution. We talked recently with Wild to learn more about RIT’s approach and what has made it effective. 1. Faculty Development Grants “We’ve found that when you partner with an individual or department or college, you have a built-in audience and interest, and you can expand from there.” Lynn Wild, RIT RIT partners with faculty in providing a wide range of grants to support faculty development. Grant support is available for tenure-track faculty to pursue individual faculty development goals, and that support was recently expanded to add a […]

A Conversation in Fundraising We Need to Have

We asked Jason McNeal to share the philosophy behind his unique handbook and why he feels that training on effective contact reports can be – in the long term – a game-changer for development shops. An interview with Jason McNeal (Gonser Gerber LLP), author of  Writing Meaningful Contact Reports: A Handbook for Fundraisers. AI.Jason, thanks for this conversation. To get started, why do you think this handbook is especially needed?Jason McNeal.Every higher-ed institution is looking for the advancement part of the enterprise to be as effective as it can possibly be. Part of that effectiveness relies on how well we know our donors. And the mechanism for showing evidence that we know our donors well is the recording of our business with them. Contact reports do that for us. They capture the most important aspects of a donor’s contact with the institution and hopefully provide permanently records that so that the advancement shop can build a body of knowledge about that donor and their relationship to the institution. But how effective are we, actually, at doing that? AI.Could you say more about that, Jason?Jason McNeal.Well, here we have this very important component of our work — that is key to becoming more effective […]

Disintermediation: The Changing Demands of Alumni Relations

by Christine Tempesta

When I hear an alumni relations professional say that alumni relations programs have been disintermediated from their alumni, more often than not, I cringe. The theme of disintermediation, or the thought that social media and other technologies have decreased the alumni’s “need” for their alma mater, crops up often, and while it should signal a change to which we as alumni relations professionals must adapt, it is often misused as an excuse for why our programs are dying. The Challenges We’re All Facing It’s no wonder that the alumni relations profession is facing dynamic change. Since the founding of the oldest alumni association at Williams College in 1821, the profession of alumni relations has been built on traditions of the alma mater. Looking back instead of looking forward, alumni associations love to celebrate long-held traditions, and prefer to stick with existing programs, services and people because “we’ve always done it that way.” For many institutions, the typical set of activities includes a homecoming, reunions, alumni directory. Historically, these have been possible primarily because the alumni association was the glue that connected long lost friends to one another and to the institution. But, with the advent of the internet, even prospective […]

Creating a Culture of Advisement: Engaging Faculty in Advising

by Christopher Romano, Joseph Connell

Sometimes you don’t just need to change advising procedures; you need to change the culture of academic advising on campus. A few years ago at Ramapo College of New Jersey, our enrollment management division surveyed faculty, first-year students, and upper-class students to learn where students turned for help in making academic decisions as they progressed through the curriculum. What we learned was striking: Further, over 57% of first-year and 47% of upper-class students did not even know who their academic advisor was. What this survey told us was that we didn’t just need to improve our advising procedures; we needed to create a culture of advisement on campus. 3 Keys to Changing the Culture Knowing that a culture of advisement is as dependent (if not more so) on buy-in and commitment from faculty than buy-in from administrative units, we embarked on the creation of an overall academic advisement plan for our campus, which included a series of action plans that hinged on three key change management strategies: Engaging faculty in academic advisement is essential to advancing Ramapo’s work — or any college’s work — in student success. Here’s what we did to engage our faculty: 1. Modeling the Change We […]

Investing in Donor Relations for Athletics

by Lynne Wester

As our colleges and universities venture to fundraise even more and more dollars, we must not overlook an area of support that brings many donors in our doors early on in their experience with us: athletics. At some institutions, athletic success can equate directly to donors and dollars, and at others it is part of the natural fundraising ebb and flow. With this said, what role does donor relations play in athletics? Now more than ever, athletics fundraisers need to focus on donor relations. Here are four reasons why: Focusing on the donor and their generosity, not on the gift and its amount is central to these efforts. Donor relations can often help bridge the gaps and transition donors from transaction to behavior. Great donor relations can provide meaningful reminders of what motivates our donor base and can incite passion among our fans and supporters. For that reason, coordinating athletics fundraising and central university advancement is crucial to the overall fundraising success of an institution. The key in both areas is the donor. If we keep our focus on donor relations, then the core becomes centralized in a more cohesive fashion. Rather than an “athletics” donor or an “institution” donor, these […]

3 Ways You Are Mishandling Involuntary Leaves

by Gregory T. Eells, Ph.D.

Interview originally conducted in October 2014. Addressing issues of self-harm can be tricky and complicated for institutions. The complexities lie in the conundrum between providing appropriate support to students who engage in self-harming behaviors and complying with regulatory action propagated by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). To help your institution enhance support for students while remaining in compliance with the law, we interviewed an expert on student mental health: Greg Eells, Associate Director of Gannett Health Services and Director of Counseling & Psychological Services at Cornell University. Dr. Eells is the chair-elect of the mental health section of the American College Health Association (ACHA) and a past president of the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors (AUCCCD). Interview with Greg Eells Lisa LaPoint: Greg, thank you for this conversation. What are three potential ways that colleges and universities mishandle involuntary leaves? Greg Eells: There are three that are especially common. The first is applying policies in a way that only apply to students with known disabilities. This issue was at the heart of the original OCR letter to Spring Arbor University, where the university established a different criteria for readmission (after the student had […]

Fundraising for Presidents, Deans, and Boards

An interview with James Langley (Langley Innovations) Recently, we reached out to Jim Langley, founder of Langley Innovations and the author of three bestselling Academic Impressions guides for institutional advancement: We asked Jim to share the philosophy behind these four unique books and what he hopes development officers and their partners on campus will learn as they look to create a more sustainable future for their institutions. AI.Why these books? Why are these books so needed? Why are they especially important now? Jim Langley.What these books bring to the market is a sense of the new realities in which philanthropy operates. They are very different realities than those in which philanthropy operated even a decade ago; they are very different from several decades ago. When you look at the market, there are a number of fine books out there about the tactics and techniques of fundraising, but they are ‘of a time.’ These books start to address what we can do to create the conditions for sustainable fundraising in the present and going forward. I think it is fair to say that in the past 10-15 years, there was a widely held assumption within higher education that a great deal of […]

Advising Students in Crisis: 7 Approaches to Maximize Advisors’ Effectiveness

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

This article is an excerpt from Sue Ohrablo’s acclaimed book High-Impact Advising: A Guide for Academic Advisors, which you can find here. Over the past few days, three different students have made comments to the effect of, “I am so glad I called. I almost didn’t. Honestly, before I called I had pretty much decided to withdraw from the program.” By the end of my discussion with each of these students, the student decided to persist and agreed to continue a dialogue that would help them to succeed. When students are in crisis, they are most vulnerable. They are apt to make rash decisions if they feel isolated and unsupported. If they have even one person within the institution on whom they know they can rely, it may make all the difference in retaining them. Being able to have that conversation effectively with an at-risk student at the most critical moment is key. I want to share seven approaches that advisors can use to maximize their effectiveness and establish a reputation as someone to whom a student can turn. 1. Be Reliable and Available Advisors can establish themselves as reliable advocates by consistently providing comprehensive advising and by making time for students, […]

Executive Summary: The Changing Shape of Student Life Facilities

by Patrick Cain, Daniel Fusch

READ THE FULL SERIES 1. Executive Summary: The Changing Shape of Student Life Facilities (this article)2. Financing and Planning Student Life Facilities 3. Best Practices in Student Housing Design Earlier this year, we conducted a study of how institutions are planning for the design and placement of student life facilities over the next 12 months. Our study included: We want to take this moment to share our findings with you. They’re intriguing: Finding 1: Student Life Facilities are Being Planned in Tandem We were fascinated to learn that institutions are now thinking about core student facilities in conjunction with one another in ways that we haven’t seen in the past. These are no longer isolated projects. In fact, 40% of institutions are planning all of these facilities in the next two years, and 50% are planning more than one. FROM OUR INTERVIEWS “Recreational facilities, residence halls, the student center: we used to think about these facilities independently, but student needs have forced us to think about them collectively. How can we think creatively about maximizing finite space in conjunction with student improvement goals? How can we create spaces for spontaneous student interaction and organic student programming?”Respondent from a small women’s college in the West Finding […]