Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

2024 Title IX Educational Series: Expansion of Title IX Protections and Definitions

As Title IX Coordinators, you have likely already started to brace yourself for the anticipated sweeping changes to the Title IX regulations. As the designated Title IX leader for your campus, you are responsible not only for updating your policies and procedures, but also for communicating those changes thoughtfully and effectively with students, faculty, staff, and members of your Title IX team.   Join us for an engaged discussion about the practical steps you can start implementing right away as the clock starts ticking—before you need to ensure compliance with the law. Our expert panel will share practical recommendations and their analysis of the new law, as well as how they effectively prepared their campus communities for the changes that lie ahead.

Optimize Your Fundraising Efforts Through Generative Artificial Intelligence

What would you do with an extra 4 hours in your work week?  In recent years, large for-profit businesses have been using artificial intelligence to win over consumer interest, despite a highly competitive market. Given the rise of more competitor “noise” in the eyes and ears of your alumni or donors, you may have been wondering how artificial intelligence can improve or enhance your own fundraising efforts. Or perhaps you have already experimented with artificial intelligence tools but are curious to learn about additional opportunities—or maybe you’d like to discuss and address barriers that you have faced when using these kinds of programs yourself.  Whether you are new to artificial intelligence or a seasoned user, we invite you to join us online to learn the difference between predictive versus generative artificial intelligence, and how these tools can be easily incorporated into your current fundraising strategy. You will learn the added value that these tools can bring to your daily work in advancement, including how they can help to free up your time so that you can spend it in high-quality, interactive conversations, instead. This two-hour session is intentionally designed to provide both a lecture on artificial intelligence, as well as […]

2024 Title IX Educational Series: The New Grievance Process – Part II

As Title IX Coordinators, you have likely already started to brace yourself for the anticipated sweeping changes to the Title IX regulations. As the designated Title IX leader for your campus, you are responsible not only for updating your policies and procedures, but also for communicating those changes thoughtfully and effectively with students, faculty, staff, and members of your Title IX team.   Join us for an engaged discussion about the practical steps you can start implementing right away as the clock starts ticking—before you need to ensure compliance with the law. Our expert panel will share practical recommendations and their analysis of the new law, as well as how they effectively prepared their campus communities for the changes that lie ahead.

2024 Title IX Educational Series: The New Grievance Process – Part I

As Title IX Coordinators, you have likely already started to brace yourself for the anticipated sweeping changes to the Title IX regulations. As the designated Title IX leader for your campus, you are responsible not only for updating your policies and procedures, but also for communicating those changes thoughtfully and effectively with students, faculty, staff, and members of your Title IX team.   Join us for an engaged discussion about the practical steps you can start implementing right away as the clock starts ticking—before you need to ensure compliance with the law. Our expert panel will share practical recommendations and their analysis of the new law, as well as how they effectively prepared their campus communities for the changes that lie ahead.   

Create Meaningful Volunteer Opportunities for your Major Donors

Leadership volunteers can help to advance your institutional goals not only through their major gifts, but through their ambassadorship as advocates of the mission you convey, and by opening access to opportunities as well as leveraging expertise and input that only they can provide. However, if you don’t have a defined objective on what these volunteers can help you to accomplish as part of your fundraising strategy, you won’t have the momentum required to achieve the fundraising outcomes your organization desires. Layering a leadership volunteer’s time and effort into a capital campaign or major initiative is accomplished by developing an engagement plan that aligns their core passion with your fundraising goals. Once you have them on board, creating a meaningful experience worthy of their time can then lead to lifelong engagement and sustained success. Join us at this live event and learn how to approach and manage leadership volunteer recruitment and sustainable engagement for major donors while cultivating these relationships as a central part of your fundraising strategies.

Donor-Centric Stewardship: A Partnership with Annual Giving and Donor Relations

It is no surprise that advancement shops are experiencing increasingly greater external philanthropic competition, which can lead to declining donor interest and investment in your institution over time. Therefore, it is imperative that annual giving staff consider revising or updating their donor acquisition and retention strategies to better serve the changing needs and desires of their donors. Having a well-defined stewardship plan for annual giving donors not only sustains your donor interest, it also creates an opportunity for internal collaboration that may not have existed before.  The annual giving and donor relations staff at Old Dominion University (ODU) identified and seized upon such an opportunity.  They came together to consolidate their stewardship efforts, and as a result, they have:  Join us at this online event to hear how these two teams came together and to learn how you can collaborate in similar ways on your own campus. 

Feedback as a Faculty (Re)Engagement Strategy 

Both affirmative and constructive one-on-one feedback are critical to faculty talent development.  Feedback that is appropriate for the career level (assistant, associate, professor) provides clarity, direction, goal alignment and motivation, all of which are required to successfully navigate today’s higher education landscape filled with complexity and uncertainty. Feedback, when delivered effectively, can promote creativity, productivity, learning and growth, job satisfaction, and, ultimately, retention through faculty career stages. However, with quitting (both quiet and loud) so prevalent—and current faculty morale so low—providing feedback to faculty can feel high-risk. You don’t want to alienate faculty any further.    Join us online for a two-hour workshop in which we’ll practice the art of providing feedback to faculty in an effort to both develop their talent and re-engage them. We’ll begin the workshop with a short lesson on the most critical components of effective feedback (i.e., timing and consistency, as well as delivery method, mode, and tone) and how they may be influenced by generational differences. You’ll then have time with your peers to practice giving feedback using your new skills. If you’re looking to grow your skills and comfort in giving feedback, this workshop is for you! 

Recognizing and Celebrating Faculty and Staff:  A Panel Conversation

Faculty and staff morale is at an all-time low across most institutions in higher education, and this puts your department or unit at risk of increasing levels of burnout, decreased productivity and, ultimately, higher turnover. One way you can start to make a difference is by fostering a work environment where praise, appreciation, and gratitude are front and center. Join a panel of academic leaders and discover tips, strategies, and new methods for how you can provide praise and recognition that is meaningful, authentic, and consistent. We recognize that the needs of faculty and staff vary across disciplines and career levels, and we know that your team is likely working in a hybrid environment, so we’ll make sure you walk away with a variety of ways for you to better celebrate the accomplishments, effort, and energy of your faculty and staff.

The 3 Critical Elements to Include in Department Chair Training

Chairs occupy an essential position on our campuses, sitting at the intersection point that connects our faculty to institutional strategy, context, and culture. They also make some of the most impactful decisions that shape the university, overseeing decisions related to hiring, promotion, and curriculum. Yet for most institutions, the support and training available to chairs is minimal.   Most of the training provided to chairs is limited to topics like how to work with HR, budgeting, and promotion & tenure. But what truly separates effective chairs from ineffective chairs are their leadership skills, such as:   Academic Impressions has been trusted to effectively train department chairs across the U.S. and Canada for over ten years. In this free webcast, we’ll discuss the keys to our success, what works and what doesn’t, and create a space for others to share their best practices.   If you need to start or enhance chair development at your own institution, we invite you to join us for this program.  

Actualize Your Purpose, Part 2: Everyday Strategies for Staying Connected to Your Well-Being

Working in higher education now requires navigating remote, hybrid environments and supporting overextended students and colleagues while navigating institutional complexity and resource precarity. To show up for this kind of work, you must intentionally center your well-being to thrive in this ever-changing environment.  In Part 1 of this workshop series, you assessed your well-being, identified your values, and crafted your own definition of success. In Part 2, you will spend time exploring strategies to stay connected to your larger purpose in your everyday work. Jennifer will show you time-based and mindset strategies such as: creating a model calendar, time tracking, thinking medium- and long-range, and more.