Author: 25337pwpadmin@ai_azuread

2010 census data emphasizes the plight of millennials in their 20s — recent college graduates who are struggling to find work, many of them living with their parents and struggling to launch careers as they find themselves under-employed. Given the recession’s toll on this decade of young alumni, it is especially crucial for annual giving directors to: Take stock of what motivates millennials to engage and give Be intentional in strengthening their base of millennial givers as these donors age into their early 30s To gather practical suggestions, we turned this week to Jeff Mavros, director of the Wesleyan Fund at Illinois Wesleyan University, who has led a very intentional effort to research the motivations and affinity of IWU’s alumni and to craft deliberate strategies for acquiring and stewarding millennial donors. Drivers of Millennial Giving While the characteristics of millennials are well-documented, Mavros calls attention to several key drivers at play in the ways that millennials choose to interact with their alma mater: This cadre of young alumni are more likely to place their trust in an individual they have connected with personally than in an institution, even in one whose mission they believe in While this cadre is transient […]

Once your sustainability committee has inventoried all sustainability-related educational programming that already exists on campus, you can look for opportunities to connect interested faculty with each other and to build organically on efforts already in place. The keys are to align curricular and co-curricular programming, offer structured opportunities for faculty to share resources and ideas across disciplines, and find ways to scale up efforts that see early success. Involving Students in and out of the Classroom Jack Byrne, director of the Sustainability Integration Office at Middlebury College; Angela Halfacre, director of the Shi Center for Sustainability at Furman University; and Blase Scarnati, director of the University First Year Seminar Program at Northern Arizona University, suggest the following ways of integrating sustainability efforts with student learning in ways that aren’t restricted to a classroom setting: Identify real-world issues related to sustainability in the local community, and invite a class to conduct research and make recommendations Identify opportunities on your campus, and pose questions in the classroom on how to move forward In short, set up situations in which both campus and community stakeholders act as “clients” for groups of student researchers and student consultants. This empowers your institution to both provide real-world learning […]

“Demonstrating that sustainability isn’t just a cost but also provides payback, especially financial payback, is crucial to establish early,” Dave Newport suggests. As you look to build momentum for sustainability efforts on your campus, it will be critical to identify what energy, water, and resource savings projects have already been undertaken at your institution, and then to prioritize your key projects — “low-hanging fruit” that will show rapid returns in the form of cost savings. The key is to begin a cycle of cost savings and reinvestment of savings in further sustainability efforts. “You can’t do everything. Focus on finding those early wins that allow you to generate support for more robust efforts,” Dave Newport advises. While inventorying current efforts and identifying the next several projects that will generate financial returns, make sure to integrate opportunities for student learning and student engagement into efficiency and cost control initiatives: Connect efficiency programs with faculty and student efforts (for example, invite students to take part in a lighting efficiency project, or involve an architecture or engineering course in the process of designing your next LEED facility) Prioritize tangible projects that you can show to current and prospective students as a real example […]

Telling the story of your institution’s sustainability efforts to key stakeholders is a critical step both for building momentum and support for an initiative, and for leveraging your successes to solicit both engagement and funding from your constituents. When Academic Impressions surveyed a number of the nation’s leaders in campus sustainability, we found that one of the often unrealized benefits of a comprehensive sustainability initiative is its impact on stakeholder relations. Many donors, particularly young alumni, are attracted to projects related to sustainability, and institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Notre Dame, Oregon State University, and Boston University have already launched efforts to engage alumni in campus sustainability or fund sustainability efforts through private gifts. Leveraging your early successes effectively to gather support for further efforts requires being deliberate in your outreach. Some key steps include: Develop a story about how your various efforts are integrated Brand your initiative — this can help you communicate the campus-wide nature of the effort and aid you in building credibility and constituency (for an example, see the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “We Conserve” initiative) Discuss your efforts with your institution’s development office, ask about your institution’s top fundraising priorities, and work together to identify […]

America’s higher education enterprise is facing multiple challenges — increasing demands from students and government; changing demographics; structural fiscal challenges; and technologies that are disrupting how information and education is delivered. Not to mention an aging workforce and an uneven track record for developing leaders. Without investing in identifying and developing the right talent at all levels of an institution, a college or university will be ill-prepared to thrive in an environment of increasingly complex and high-stakes challenges and rapid change. Let’s take a closer look at the challenges academic institutions face, and what’s needed to move forward. How Prepared Is Your Institution? In April 2010, Academic Impressions conducted a survey of senior and mid-level managers in higher education across an array of public and private institutions; 176 administrators responded to the survey. The findings emphasize the extent to which higher education is under-prepared for replacing a rapidly retiring leadership. Perhaps the starkest finding from our survey, 48 percent of respondents graded their institution with a C, D, or F letter grade when assessing the level of commitment they felt their institution has toward their development as a leader. We also asked respondents to identify ways that their institutions currently […]

  NOTE: For an updated and much deeper look at new leadership skills in higher education, based on years of intensive research, read this complimentary paper from Academic Impressions and Pat Sanaghan. To define the leadership skill set needed to meet adaptive challenges, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, and Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group. Having consulted for decades with institutional leadership teams, Goldstein and Sanaghan are uniquely positioned to comment on what makes academic leaders effective. Here is their take on five critical leadership skills needed to meet today’s — and especially tomorrow’s — challenges. 1. Leaders Need to be Systemic Thinkers The critical initiatives that will move your institution forward — whether improving student retention, reducing your carbon footprint, or raising money from alumni — will involve and affect multiple divisions within your institution. This makes it especially critical that not only your institution’s president but leaders within each division are able to recognize the impact of a given issue or a given effort on financial, academic, and programmatic decisions across the institution. Amit Mrig, president of Academic Impressions, notes those institutions that are most successful in responding to these common challenges are those that approach them […]

Once you have identified the skills that are essential in tomorrow’s higher ed leaders, you will need ways to identify the staff within your institution who demonstrate those skills — these are the people whose leadership development you want to invest in, and whom you want to entrust with greater responsibilities and opportunities to contribute meaningfully to your institution’s success. Larry Goldstein and Pat Sanaghan offer the following tips to guide you in identifying emerging or potential leaders at your institution. Avoid Comfortable Cloning “We tend to hire and promote people who remind us of ourselves, who think like us. The courageous and effective act is to choose people who have different background, different perspective. You learn through diversity, not through looking at yourself in the mirror all the time.” Pat Sanaghan, The Sanaghan Group The practicing of replicating the demographics (in terms of race, gender, and socioeconomic background) and the leadership philosophy of current leaders can be referred to as “comfortable cloning.” It’s comfortable, but ultimately not as effective as establishing a more diverse talent bench. “We need to look instead to people who are very different from us,” Sanaghan advises, “who can provide new, unexpected solutions to adaptive challenges.” A […]