Category: Blog

Leveraging Early Successes to Increase Funding and Involvement

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 […]

Improving the Accessibility of Online Course Materials

July 7, 2011. In a climate of increased demand for online courses and increased federal scrutiny of regulatory compliance, it is increasingly critical that colleges and universities ensure the accessibility of their online course materials for students with disabilities — and not only for online courses, but also for classes held in the physical classroom that direct students to pursue research online or access supplemental materials via a course management system. Fortunately, significant gains in accessibility can be made with relative ease — the key is to be proactive and plan for them early rather than after an issue is noticed. To learn more about the “low-hanging fruit” for accessibility of course materials, we interviewed two leading experts on the issue from Drexel University — Dan Allen, content management specialist with Drexel’s Office of Information Resources and Technology, and Jenny Dugger, director of Drexel’s Office of Disability Services. Allen and Dugger offer the following tips for: Vetting potential vendors for accessibility Coaching your faculty in making course materials more accessible Vet Potential Vendors, Thoroughly “Where institutions often get into trouble is when they don’t vet their vendors for accessibility; by the time they realize there are issues, they have already made a long-term […]

Integrating Sustainability into Curricular and Co-curricular Programs

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 […]

Coordinating Sustainability Efforts Across Campus

If your institution’s leadership has already made a public commitment to sustainability, then it is important to educate the president, provost, and chief financial officer about the whole picture of the sustainability efforts already under way on campus, and what opportunities there may be for building further. It will be important to define, as quickly as possible, what sustainability means at your institution. Is it limited to energy efficiency? Is it broader in scope? What does your college or university want to achieve? This definition should be arrived at collaboratively, with input from students, institutional leaders, and sustainability champions at your institution. If sustainability efforts at your institution are operating at a grassroots level, then auditing and building coordination between current efforts, developing a full cost accounting tool, and marketing your successes can be key efforts in cultivating investment by both institutional leadership and the campus community. Whether you are starting with an executive commitment or with a grassroots effort, the critical early step is to audit what is already happening on campus and what resources are already available to you. Then you will be better-equipped to coordinate across departments and scale up. To move from a series of ad […]

Five Tips for Making Your Website Mobile-Friendly

June 23, 2011. Last June, Ball State University released a study showing that of college students owning phones, 49 percent owned smartphones; the number had doubled since 2009. In the year since, many colleges and universities have launched mobile marketing initiatives or mobile apps for students and alumni. Among those efforts that have seen early gains: Piloting targeted mobile apps (during the weekend of its launch, the University of Virginia’s application saw downloads from several thousand users). Inviting prospective students to opt in to text messaging or “mobile updates.” Look to St. Mary’s University for a leading-edge example; while St. Mary’s has seen few students opt in, the university has seen a high yield rate among those who do. However, very few institutions have taken smartphones into account in their Web design, which presents a significant risk as a growing number of prospective students access college websites from mobile devices. In an interview with Academic Impressions this week, Bob Johnson, president of Bob Johnson Consulting LLC, advised that the most immediate and pressing mobile marketing investment to make is to create a mobile-friendly version or section of your website. He offers the following tips. The Mobile-Friendly Website According to a 2010 survey of 1,000 college-bound high […]

Five Things Department Chairs Need to Know About Fundraising

According to a January 2010 Academic Impressions survey of department chairs, 64 percent of department chairs felt that they were not adequately prepared to assume the role when they first began chairing their department. And of the various duties and responsibilities of the academic chair, 43 percent felt least prepared to address advancement and fundraising initiatives. Yet by virtue of the chair’s position, not only are there many times when a department leader will need to be involved in the conversation between a potential donor and the institution, there are also many times when the chair may need to be the only official involved in the conversation. This is because the donor may want to hear from the academic leader in his or her field of interest, rather than from a professional fundraiser. And as more institutions, both private and public, look to ramp up fundraising efforts, the role of academic leaders will become increasingly vital. We turned to Jason McNeal, Ph.D., consultant with Gonser Gerber Tinker Stuhr LLP, for his advice on what those new to the department chair position most need to know in order to take an active and effective role in fundraising. He offers these five […]

Social Media: Targeting Your Content

June 16, 2011. In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Brad Ward, CEO of BlueFuego Inc., cited his organization’s research into the impact of university Facebook pages. After a 25-month study of nearly 400,000 Facebook updates across more than 1,200 university Facebook pages, Ward concluded that most institutions offer too much content via social media channels, leading to declines in engagement as their audiences begin to “tune them out.” Ward warns that quality is far more important than quantity, because institutions compete with family and friends for time and social media “space” — in short, for the attention of students and alumni on channels that are already overcrowded with content. It’s critical that marketing and communications and alumni relations offices invest more in listening to their audience’s social media preferences and preferred content. Effective listening can empower your office to offer highly targeted content — whether on your website, on your Facebook page, or via a mobile app. To learn more, we turned to Linda Thomas Brooks, president of Ingenuity Media, The Martin Group and past member of the board of directors for the Ohio State University Alumni Association. With considerable expertise in setting up effective social media listening posts, Brooks offers the […]

Four Tips for Managing the Brand Launch

June 9, 2011. Competition for visibility continues to pressure institutions of higher education to differentiate themselves in the marketplace. In order to stay competitive, maintain enrollment levels, and meet advancement goals, your institution needs a unique brand strategy that carefully defines who you are in the minds of stakeholders. Often, though, marketing professionals and institutional leaders have questions concerning how to effectively roll out or communicate a change to the brand. Past examples of branding efforts gone wrong have taught us that a brand campaign carries considerable public relations risk. This week, we asked Bill Faust, senior partner and chief strategy officer for Ologie, for his advice; Faust offers these four tips for success in managing your brand launch. Decide Whether You Need a Hard or Soft Launch Faust suggests that a hard launch or “roll-out party” isn’t always necessary: “some launches are very soft and are rolled out over time, applied to specific areas of the institution at a time.” If your institution has been through a tumultuous time or needs to change its public image dramatically (the public thinks of you as X, but you need them to think of you as Y), then a hard launch may be […]

Make Your Alumni Board Effective

June 9, 2011. During a series of interviews with leaders in alumni relations earlier this year, Academic Impressions found that many alumni relations offices are struggling with their alumni boards or alumni association boards. While a working board can offer institutional leaders partners to aid in achieving institutional goals for engagement and giving, most boards are not filling this role. Among the common problems: Many boards remain too focused on specific tactics — such as reunion and homecoming Other boards have grown too large and unwieldy, preventing them from “getting down to business” Boards struggle to ensure that 100 percent of their members give to the institution and that their members model supportive relationships with administration To learn more about the characteristics of an effective “working board,” we turned to Gary Olsen, associate vice president of alumni relations and executive director of the alumni association at Villanova University, and Christine Tempesta, director of strategic initiatives with the MIT Alumni Association. Olsen and Tempesta shared their advice on the qualities to look for in board members and managing the board’s scope of responsibilities. Who’s on the Working Board? Olsen and Tempesta suggest these criteria for selecting board members who will be well-positioned to […]

Identifying Leadership Potential in Your Staff

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 […]