Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Identify and Actualize Your Team Values to Increase Trust and Engagement

Most leaders recognize that team values are important. They enrich collaboration and teamwork and anchor the team during periods of change and uncertainty. But the process of establishing, norming, living, and protecting team values to create meaningful impact isn’t always intuitive. Join us online to learn how to use Meg Wheatley’s “Islands of Sanity” model to articulate values and build community and trust within your team. This model says we do our best work when we evoke and rely on our best human qualities. We will give you a template for defining values with your team, and you’ll leave with tips for how to embed and bring those values to life within your day-to-day operations and culture.

Department Chairs: Maximize Your Productivity By Cultivating Your Academic Staff

As a department chair, you’re stretched between teaching, research, meetings, and overflowing inboxes. Especially if you’re newer to the role, you may feel tempted to field this day-to-day without help – because faculty members commonly work on their own. Even if you’re ready to ask your academic staff for assistance, you haven’t been trained to manage them or discuss their performance. Join us online to learn how to build the capacity of your academic staff, which will help you manage your time and workload and focus on your most important leadership responsibilities. In the session, we’ll cover: How to define staff roles and responsibilities with clear purpose and intention How to set boundaries within your own role as chair How to reinforce performance expectations with affirmation and feedback

Advance Your Career with a Personal Board of Directors

You will likely secure your next leadership role through your network, so surrounding yourself with the right people can make or break a career. How can you be more intentional in building your network to fast-track your career within senior leadership? Join us online and learn how a personal board of directors can help fuel your next career transition. A personal board of directors is a group of 5-7 people who offer advice, resources, and support over time to help you navigate challenging situations with confidence. In this webcast, you’ll learn how to create and manage your personal board of directors – including how to invite the right people and how to use your meetings productively – so that you can acquire the right skills and experience at the right time.

Managing Change as a Department Chair: 5 Traps to Avoid

As a department chair, you are responsible for leading your faculty through large-scale disruptions, such as department restructures, curricular reform, and policy changes. Even if you’re familiar with change management literature, managing the change can be especially tricky within academic departments. Your role as a “middle manager” can often be ambiguous because you lead both as a member of faculty and an administrator in a shared-governance environment. Join us online to learn how to avoid common change traps – behaviors that prevent all of us from adopting, embracing, and engaging with change. We’ll discuss how change traps often play out in academic departments, and you’ll leave with a solid understanding of how you can recognize and manage the traps in your own initiatives.

Sharing Your Story and Experience as an Underrepresented Woman

Your story as an underrepresented woman in the academy shapes your approaches to conflict, problem-solving, and decision-making. The perspective of underrepresented women is unique, and yet, too often we discount that unique position – burying it or even rejecting it. Denying our story does a huge disservice to our leadership potential and growth and to those we serve. How can you begin to articulate your story to fully express who you are as a professional and become stronger and more effective? Join us online and learn how to define and share your unique leadership strengths in an authentic and credible way. You will practice identifying, storyboarding, and communicating your past experiences, motivations, and unique perspectives so that you leave with at least one story you can share with others to help you communicate your authentic self.

Customizing Donor Communication through Smarter Segmentation

In order to appeal to alumni and donors, you need to rethink the typical segments of age, class year, academic major, or giving status. For example, class year may not define individuals’ motivations for engagement and/or giving nearly as well as their interests or career paths. But, identifying who appreciates fine art versus who appreciates athletics could help you create segments that resonate much more. Join us as Lynne Wester, the Donor Relations Guru, discusses how this mindset shift doesn’t have to require a large investment in time or money. Through sample alumni personas, she will share segmentation and communications ideas that will help you use existing data to start small. You’ll leave with at least one new segment to target in your outreach efforts.

Increasing Emotional Intelligence by Identifying Your Triggers

When we can overcome our emotional triggers, we are able to navigate a variety of situations more effectively. But when experiencing a trigger, our emotions take over. Many of us struggle to recognize and explain our reactions. How can we take a step back to respond in the moment more thoughtfully and productively? Join us online to learn a simple, yet powerful, approach to help you regain control and respond in a more intelligent way to your next triggering event. During the session, you’ll practice using a journaling tool that will increase your awareness of your emotions and how they impact others.

Establishing a Culture of Talent Development in Frontline Fundraising

Frontline fundraising is a demanding job that leaves many major gifts officers emotionally and physically drained. Dealing with rejection and adjusting to life on the road are just two of the stressors that help explain why gift officer retention is at an all-time low. By engaging fundraisers in career planning conversations early in their tenure, you can help address these root causes of gift officer churn and develop a more stable operation. Join us online to learn options for having more individualized talent development conversations with your frontline fundraisers to reinvigorate them and help them raise more money for the institution. Audra Brickner, Vice President of Advancement for Semester at Sea, will share how conversations with your fundraisers can progress from career mapping to individual needs assessment to unique job crafting.

Building a Faculty and Staff Giving Campaign

Enthusiastic partners can help you persuade faculty and staff of the value of philanthropic giving. Merrimack College was able to use giving ambassadors in a targeted campaign to increase their faculty participation rate from 20% to 59% in just one year. By recruiting the right leader to kick start the program, and by onboarding and supporting the right ambassadors, you can grow interest and convey authenticity to your institution’s ask. Join us online to learn how to create a similar movement on your campus that engages your faculty and staff in philanthropy and demonstrates the impact of their gifts. What You Will Get As part of your registration, you will receive a Campaign Ambassador Toolkit from Merrimack College that offers sample emails, meeting agendas, tracking tools, and campaign FAQs.

Using Video Effectively in Recruitment Marketing

Learn to reach prospective students more effectively by choosing the right video channel. Agenda During this webcast, we will address how to best use both live and pre-produced video that is specifically positioned for prospective and admitted students. We will explore each of the following questions as they relate to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Snapchat: How much new content should I be creating? What kinds of videos are other institutions creating and sharing with prospective students? Which channels should be prioritized for both the creation and the sharing of video? What results have other institutions seen from using video in their recruitment marketing efforts? You will also leave with brief suggestions for TikTok. Resources Presentation Materials Additional Resources

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