Category: Blog

Chief Advancement Officers: What Do You Wish You’d Known When You Started?

by Erin Swietlik

Turnover is an issue across almost every advancement shop — and movement at the leadership level is no exception. Besides movement between institutions, every year many fundraising professionals enter their first year as vice president of advancement or chief advancement officer. As we start off a new fiscal year and prepare for the start of a new academic year, we asked the speakers at our conference, Essential Leadership Skills for VPs of Advancement, for one piece of advice for new advancement leaders. “What do you wish you had known when you first took the chief advancement officer position?” we asked. Here’s what they had to say: KELLY GAGAN, Nazareth College“When I realized that the true power of the position came from asking the right questions of your staff as well as your campus colleagues, it was a seminal moment. While the team obviously looks for visionary leadership, they are much more invested if you have asked the questions that allow them to share the vision with you when you explore answers together. The ability to ask open-ended questions is one that needs to be practiced but once perfected can yield pivotal results. The key to coaching is to stay curious […]

Donor Conversations: What’s Often Missing (and Needn’t Be)

by Kathy Drucquer Duff, CFRE

“We are responsible for building meaningful relationships and for moving those relationships towards transformative, impactful, or participatory philanthropy. Simply visiting with someone is not enough.” Here’s what we need to be doing. AN AUTHENTIC APPROACH TO DONOR CONVERSATIONSThe following article is an excerpt from Kathy Drucquer Duff’s popular new book Productive Conversations with Donors: A Handbook for Frontline Fundraisers. Watch a video interview with the author at the end of this article. You can also learn more from Kathy Drucquer Duff at our upcoming conference Frontline Fundraising: Essentials of Gift Solicitation. As fundraisers, we have many responsibilities that, when allowed, will get in the way of our primary function: building authentic relationships with an aim of enhancing philanthropic support for our organization. When staff members walk into my office and share that they are experiencing a lack of enthusiasm for our work, are burned out, or are getting caught up in the smaller details of their jobs, I always ask the same question: “When was the last time you were on a donor visit?” The answer usually lists all of the other things that they have on their desks. And yet, I know that when we are inspired by our philanthropic […]

11 Things You Can Do Right Now to Set Your Phonathon Up for Success

by Jessica Neno Cloud, CFRE

MORE RESOURCES FROM THIS AUTHOR Jessica Cloud, CFRE, is the author of Successful Fundraising Calls: A Phonathon Scripting Workshop, in which she critiques and revises 6 real phonathon scripts submitted by institutions across North America. In this book, you will learn the pillars of writing effective scripts; review sample LYBUNT, SYBUNT, young alumni, and future donor scripts; explore Cloud’s in-depth critique of the samples; and view revisions of the sample scripts. You can also read more of Cloud’s advice for phonathon managers in these complimentary articles: A Quick Assessment for Your Phonathon ScriptsHow Data Mining Can Increase Direct Mail AcquisitionHow Data Mining Can Increase Phonathon AcquisitionScripting for Acquisition Calls Here are 11 things you can do right now to set your phonathon up for success this fiscal year: 1. Cultivate your relationship with Advancement Services. The database folks are crucial allies for any fundraising professionals, but as a phonathon manager you are even more dependent than most other fundraisers upon the cooperation of this group for your success. Good data gives you a head start in phonathon. Bad data can hold you back all year. I recommend reaching out to gift processing and other advancement services staff now. Start by asking them […]

2 Ways to Move Students Out of Academic Probation

by Christine Robinson

Moving at-risk students out of academic probation quickly is a worthy challenge—and at Western Michigan University, two recent retention efforts at the Haworth College of Business (HCoB) have seen positive outcomes in this regard. Students who complete HCoB’s Phoenix Success Course as well as mandatory study hours in the University’s new award-winning Bronco Study Zone are retained at a rate of approximately 73%. Compared to students who do not participate in these two efforts, this rate represents a 32% increase in retention. HCoB is one of nine Colleges at Western Michigan University with an enrollment of approximately 3800 undergraduate students and 400 graduate students, and its success in these new initatives provides valuable clues for other institutions. Let’s take a closer look. 1. The Phoenix Student Success Program Launched in 2013, The Phoenix Program is a holistic student success and engagement program implemented to intercept a high dismissal rate for undergraduate students on academic probation, whereby approximately 59% of students on academic probation in HCoB were being dismissed at the end of their first probation semester. The program includes initiatives across several touchpoints throughout students’ academic careers. These initiatives include: One main component of the Phoenix Student Success Program is […]

Improving Student Success Can’t Be a One-Office Effort

by Paul Marthers

Managing the Whole Student Life CyclePaul Marthers is the author of Managing the Whole Student Life Cycle: A Handbook for Higher Ed. Make retention a whole-campus initiative in more than just name. From matriculation to graduation, walk through how to coordinate across enrollment management, student affairs, and academic affairs to create conditions and programs that drive student success. Find out more. Across higher education, we are seeing sweeping reorganization of student affairs, often driven by cost reduction, the need to do more with less. But the conversation we need to be having is how to structure student affairs and allocate resources in ways that help the institution manage the whole student lifecycle. Equally critical to the need to reduce costs is the need to move away from a history of one-office efforts to improve student success. These efforts are rarely successful and are often the product of a campus that is a collection of silos or what some call (with no small amount of irony) “cylinders of excellence.” And this can’t only be about getting student affairs and academic affairs talking. We need a more integrated effort than just that. In more than twenty five years working in the enrollment and student […]

Rethinking General Education: Too Many Options?

by Robert C. Dickeson

Series: Costs Down, Quality Up Historically, initiatives to improve quality have also meant added cost—smaller class sizes, more faculty who conduct research, etc.—but this is no longer a sustainable model for all institutions. What are the innovations that can actually drive the cost to educate a student lower while driving critical outcomes like student success and completion higher? This series offers provocative questions that challenge the cost-quality paradigm and the old ways of managing institutional strategy and growth. Also in this series:Why Good is Still the Enemy of Great for Most Colleges and Universities After a visit to a university campus, I received the following inquiry from one of its academic leaders: Bob, when you visited, you mentioned that we have too many GE course options. We are taking a look at this. What are the advantages of decreasing the number of options? Is this a resource question? What if the course is part of a major? Is there a problem including it as a GE distribution as well? This inquiry deserves a serious response and, as it also affects academic sensibilities on other college and university campuses, I thought I’d write a fuller response. In this article, I will speak briefly to: 1. […]

Checklist: Questions the Governing Board Must Ask Before Launching a Fundraising Campaign

by Jim M. Langley

Series: Creating the Conditions for Support Everyone is trying to raise more money. Rather than simply suggest the next tactic that can boost giving in the short-term, this series offers a more intensive look at the strategic thinking that drives philanthropic support: Why do donors give? How do institutions strengthen their core and emphasize initiatives worthy of support? How do we align strategic plans, strengths, and advancement strategy to create the conditions for ongoing and sustained support? In this series, distinguished current and past chief advancement officers apply their most innovative and creative thinking to this question. Previously in this series:Why Donors Give: It’s Not What You ThinkMore than Dollars: How Many Opportunities are You Missing with Your Alumni?Engaging Women in Philanthropy: Practical Ways to Shift Our Approach In the course of running three university campaigns, and in guiding dozens more as a consultant, I have seen virtually every college or university fall short of its full fundraising potential. This occurs both because of competing assumptions by various institutional leaders about the keys to success and therefore, the strategies and tactics that are most likely to produce it, and because institutional leaders often fail to ask the pivotal questions before […]

Feasibility Checklist: The Science of Bringing New Academic Programs to Life

by Melissa Morriss-Olson, Ph.D.

The best ideas in the world can easily fall off the radar unless you have a process in place for evaluating, vetting and bringing them to life. Also in this series: Is it Time to Launch that New Academic Program? The Art and Science of Answering that Question Financial Modeling for New Academic Programs Once you have generated an idea for a new academic program, how do you sustain and implement that idea? As Jim Collins suggests in Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, organizational ‘luck’ and success can be leveraged by cultivating a discipline around process and metrics.  Indeed, he suggests that this discipline is key for maximizing whatever ‘luck’ might naturally come one’s way. This has certainly been the case at Bay Path University, where we have developed a rigorous process and template for evaluating the feasibility of new program ideas that we use across all divisions of the University. This process has enabled us to remove some of the subjectivity that accompanies new academic program decision making, relying instead on a set of objective key elements and metrics that are applied equally to all new program possibilities. When a new program […]

Retention Strategy: What Holds Us Back?

by Elizabeth Ross Hubbell

Prevailing views on retention and student success have evolved significantly — but often, our practices lag behind. To help close the gap, we interviewed several of the foremost experts on student retention, individuals who have made a demonstrable difference at their institutions and who also facilitating our annual Developing a Comprehensive Retention Plan conference. Here is what W. Kent Barnds, vice president of enrollment, communication, and planning at Augustana College; Veronica Hipolito, dean of student services at Coconino Community College; and Margot Saltonstall, director of analytics & assessment for enrollment management & student affairs at Northern Arizona University, have to say about where institutions should be shifting their thinking — and their efforts — to support student persistence and completion. Question #1: What Holds Us Back? Elizabeth Hubbell. What do you think holds institutions back from pursuing more comprehensive retention planning? What are the missed opportunities if efforts remain siloed? W. Kent Barnds. Too many institutions are reactive rather than proactive. Too many spend most of their energy related to retention in analyzing data after the fact and asking “Why did that happen?” I also think that too many colleges don’t really understand that a comprehensive retention plan requires that they consider […]

Infographic: How to Budget for Innovation

We hope you will share this infographic with your colleagues to start some critical conversations on campus. (Click here to see a full-size version.) Learn More For more from Art Kirk and other innovators among college and university leaders, read our complimentary paper Small but Mighty: 4 Small Colleges Thriving in a Disruptive Environment! See Upcoming Events for Business Officers

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