Category: Research & Reports

Engaging Alumni on Social Media: What Works

by Timothy Ponisciak

Social media strategies for engaging alumni: Read the findings from a survey of 109 professionals at nonprofit colleges and universities who are tasked with engaging alumni on social media. Social media tools provide more opportunities to engage alumni. Yet, pressed for time, alumni relations and annual giving professionals often approach their efforts to engage alumni on social media with some basic uncertainties: In December 2015, Academic Impressions and Tim Ponisciak partnered in a survey of 109 professionals at nonprofit colleges and universities who are tasked with engaging alumni on social media. In our survey, we asked respondents about: We also collected examples of high-engagement posts and analyzed them for commonalities in topic, tone, and approach. We wanted to know what types of posts appeal the most to higher ed alumni, in order to share with you what has beenworking best for your peers. In this member exclusive paper, we want to share with you seven key findings. Read the paper. ________________________________ You can also learn more in the recorded webcast Strategizing for Social Media in Advancement or in Tim Ponisciak’s book Innovative Strategies for Annual Giving and Alumni Relations: Lessons from the Corporate World. Get Tim Ponisciak’s Book

Presidential Dialogues: Lessons on Effecting Change

by Amit Mrig

10 Lessons on Effecting Change in Higher Education Change is here to stay and it will be more complex, ambiguous, and fast paced than ever before, and presidents are feeling tremendous pressure to significantly reshape their institutions. We wanted the inside story—how do you manage the people, politics, and process of change? For our second event in our series, Presidential Dialogues: Focus on the Future, we wanted to convene a group of presidents who have achieved (but not necessarily mastered) real change efforts on their campuses. Platitudes and pontifications and pithy quotes don’t matter when attempting to achieve difficult and meaningful change, but hard-won lessons and strategies from practitioners can contribute to our knowledge and leverage our efforts. We wanted to discover what success looks like from a president’s perspective because both success and failure leave clues. A number of invaluable lessons surfaced in our conversation. In this report, we share the ten most important. We hope their advice will be useful to you. In this paper, hear from: Through this ongoing series, we will continue to convene leading minds in higher education to uncover those skill sets and ways of rethinking the president’s work that will educate boards and inform and empower aspiring presidents. Watch for future papers from this series. Read the report. _________________________________________________________ Image Credit: […]

The State of Professional Development in Higher Education: February 2016

Professional development is a strategic asset to an institution, as it is a key engine for increasing the capacity of your team and for bringing in proven strategies from other organizations—allowing you to both avoid “reinventing the wheel” and to revitalize your work with fresh ideas. In late 2015, we surveyed 971 managers and frontline faculty and staff at colleges and universities, both to score this year’s investment in professional development against last year’s, and to uncover new findings and emerging stories of what teams that are leveraging professional development (PD) to move their institutions forward are doing differently—and what you can learn from them. In this report on our second annual survey, we will present: We hope you will enjoy this report and share it with your colleagues! Read the report. See Upcoming Leadership Development Workshops Designed Specifically for Higher Ed Professionals

Creating a Faculty Leadership Development Program

by David Kiel

Effective faculty leadership development is important because faculty are the main stakeholders in the university who are committed to the core academic and democratic values that underpin higher education in the US. If faculty members are not effective leaders, then higher education at every level is ineffective and does not fully reflect these core values. While senior administrators, parents, trustees, students, and alumni are also important stakeholders, they may not be as fully committed to the core academic values as faculty, whose professional identity center on these values. Yet, few institutions offer effective support in developing faculty leaders. Offering leadership development is distinct from offering faculty development generally. In general, faculty development should be understood to include career-long support for the main activities that are required in the faculty role: teaching, research and public service. It also includes broad professional and career development services that impart the skills needed for faculty to be effective organizational actors and productive scholars. These include: managing their time effectively, working well with others, knowing how to be influential and persuasive, talking with the media, communicating with the public, presenting data, solving organizational problems and other skills. Leadership development is a specialized and crucially important […]

6 Destructive Myths About Teams in Higher Education

Higher education will face daunting and complex challenges over the next decade, and campuses will need high-performing teams, especially a high-performing senior team, in order to face those challenges. In this paper, Patrick Sanaghan and Jillian Lohndorf expose 6 potentially destructive myths — myths that get in the way of building and nurturing a great team. Come to the Conference “Leading and Motivating Teams in Higher Education

Presidential Dialogues: The Changing Presidency in Higher Education

by Amit Mrig

College President: An Impossible Job? The president of a college or university stands in the cross-hairs, operating in an environment where the challenges are complex, there are no clear answers and decisions come in all shades of gray. All eyes are on the institution’s chief executive to navigate the strategic dilemmas facing their institutions. And as today’s presidents try to balance the competing demands of an array of stakeholders, they can’t always count on the buy-in and support of the board—leading them to spend much of their time managing the board. With all this complexity, the presidents that succeed tomorrow won’t be the same as the presidents that were successful yesterday. In the first of our Presidential Dialogues, we speak with five highly successful chief executives, asking their advice for new presidents. In this paper, hear from: This is the first of the AI Presidential Dialogues. Through this ongoing series, we will continue to convene leading minds in higher education to uncover those skill sets and ways of rethinking the president’s work that will educate boards and inform and empower aspiring presidents. Watch for future papers from this series. Read the report. Contact Me If you would like to talk with us […]

Do the USNWR Rankings Limit Innovation in Higher Education?

by Amit Mrig

Last month I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Ricardo Azziz, former president of Georgia Regents University, about the US News and World Report (USNWR) higher education rankings. The conversation is especially timely as millions of students and parents are knee deep in the college application season this fall. In our conversation we explored many inherent flaws with the rankings system – but in talking with a former college president, I was particularly interested in exploring how the importance and visibility of these rankings affect how university leaders make decisions. Do the rankings support the innovation and change needed in higher education or do they actually hinder our ability to take risks and try new things? Our conversation was wide-ranging, and we uncovered important insights for boards of trustees, policymakers, and university leaders. In the end, we concluded that the rankings do indeed inhibit innovation in higher education. This happens because the rankings: 1. Credit for Spending More, Not Doing More With Less 10% of an institution’s score in the rankings is driven directly by the amount of resources spent per student. An additional 20% of the score is driven by “faculty resources,” which includes items like the proportion […]

Improving Diversity in Higher Education: Beyond the Moral Imperative

by Amit Mrig

Seizing the Moment November 18, 2015. We witnessed a pivotal moment for higher education last week with the resignations of Tim Wolfe, President of the University of Missouri System, and R. Bowen Loftin, Chancellor of the flagship campus in Columbia. Issues of diversity and inclusion have been challenging campuses for years, but I believe we have now reached a tipping point that will place this issue front and center on leaders’ agendas today and into the future. As we think about the importance of last week’s events, one thing is clear: the efforts by the students at the University of Missouri will help fuel the much-needed nation-wide conversation on this important topic. Already, dozens of campuses are hosting diversity forums, hosting town hall meetings, and issuing statements to demonstrate the many initiatives they are investing in to create a more inclusive and diverse environment. My hope is that these conversations are sincere efforts to move the diversity agenda forward. It’s not just the right thing to do; it’s imperative for the success and sustainability of institutions. And there is no time to waste. The Business Case for Diversity The statistics are clear and sobering. Black students and Hispanic students are […]

Spotlight on Innovation: Colleges and Universities that are Making a Difference

Emerging Trends: How Colleges Can Operate as Learning Organizations In late 2014, the US Department of Education awarded $75 million in “First in the World” grants to twenty-four colleges and universities, to fund initiatives to improve college access and completion, particularly for lower-income or first-generation students. Since then, we’ve interviewed those leading the First in the World initiatives at each of the twenty-four institutions to learn how they’ve begun putting these new funds to use and to find out what other institutions can learn about the initiatives. Though the First in the World programs cover a lot of territory—from a game-based approach to moving students through the admissions process to a living-learning community designed to study the issue of first-generation student success on its own campus—we have been excited to see several common threads through most of these efforts. These emerging trends may be among the first signs of a sea-change in higher-ed leadership, as change agents at colleges and universities recognize that to address the complex problems of today and the future, colleges are going to need to take a different approach than in the past. Questions of access and completion for first-generation or academically under-prepared students can’t be addressed by a single department operating within its own […]

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 […]