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Encore and Live Q&A: 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.

Encore: Securing the Gift: Making the Ask with Confidence

Gift officers can sometimes feel uncomfortable making the ask for a variety of reasons, and the anxiety they can produce may be felt and mirrored by donors, leading to a “no.” However, not making the ask can lead to missed opportunities and a loss of momentum with key prospects. A successful ask comes down to the relationship you’ve built with the donor, being clear about your role and intent, and a strong solicitation strategy that leads up to this moment. This approach requires knowing your prospect well: understanding their giving history, what motivates them to give, and the relationships they’ve built with the different stakeholders at your institution. Join this session to gain insights on how to strategically approach a prospect you have in mind to make the ask. When done right, this moment in a donor relationship should come organically with the assurance that the answer will be a yes—and if it is not, that the relationship will remain on solid ground, and you will get another opportunity to make an ask in the future. How It Works: If you missed the event when it took place in June of 2023 or you have been meaning to engage with […]

Executive-Level Leadership: An Institute for Advanced Women Leaders in Higher Education

Join our intensive institute to co-create knowledge and deepen your leadership skillset. This institute will combine tangible takeaways with Academic Impressions’ leadership model, a holistic approach to leadership across four key dimensions: self-awareness and personal development, interpersonal leadership skills, team development, and leading at the organizational level.     Highlights of the program include:  To preserve an intimate and productive experience, this workshop is capped at 30 attendees. 

Executive-Level Leadership: An Institute for Advanced Women Leaders in Higher Education

While women make up nearly half of the higher education workforce, they continue to be underrepresented in organizational leadership roles. The goal of this program is to bring current and aspiring executive leaders in higher education together to co-create knowledge and deepen your leadership skillset. This program is intentionally built upon Academic Impressions’ leadership model, which takes a holistic approach to leadership across four key dimensions: self-awareness and personal development, interpersonal leadership skills, team development, and leading at the organizational level.    If you identify as a woman, are leading at a strategic level in higher education, and you are looking to deepen your leadership skillset in community with other women leaders, this experience is for you.   Highlights of the program include: 

Encore and Live Q&A: Developing a Principal Gifts Program that Supports Transformational Priorities

Principal gifts, defined differently at different institutions, can bring high-level success to your institutional priorities—especially those advocated by your president and academic leaders. By building out a disciplined principal gifts program, regardless of its current maturity, you can bring clarity to how your team and institutional stakeholders advance transformational ideas in partnership with your top donors. Challenges to this endeavor, however, can prevent teams from building out the program they want. Whether it’s lack of confidence speaking to and managing prospect relationships, managing donor fatigue, or having budget shortfalls with capital projects without donors in your pipeline to finish the job, developing an effective principal gifts program can help you prepare viable prospects who are poised and ready to give when the moment is right. Join us for this conversation on developing a disciplined principal gifts program, and preparing your institution for sustained success both now and into the future.

Creating a Sustainable Culture of Service Excellence (Cancelled)

Many institutions seek to enhance service excellence on campus as a means of improving student and employee retention, however creating a sustained culture change in any setting can be challenging. This conference is designed to review the principles of service excellence and provide you with tools and strategies for making lasting long-term change on your campus or in your unit. You will also spend time individually with subject matter experts to discuss and strategize your specific needs, and to plan for implementation. 

Where Two or Three Gather Together: A New Perspective on Effective Team Collaboration

Team, committee, and group-based work abounds in higher education. But many struggle to collaborate effectively in these settings because not everyone comes to the table with the same understanding, expectation, and collaboration style. While teams are often designed to bring together different voices and perspectives, most leaders default to a singular approach to teamwork that works well for some, but that also causes frustration, withdrawal, or conflict for others.   In this event, we’ll use the Five Paths to Leadership℠ as a framework to introduce the four different collaboration styles that are at play within any given team. We’ll walk you through a detailed explanation of each path and provide tactics that leaders and team members alike can use to approach collaboration and group-based work more effectively. You will leave with a more nuanced understanding of the collaboration types that yield the best results based on the outcomes you are trying to achieve, rather than defaulting to one style based on comfort or personal preference.  

Respectfully and Confidently Engage in Difficult Conversations: A Dialogue Workshop Series for Advancement Professionals  

As an advancement professional, you engage with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues from different backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives. At times, you may receive unsolicited or angry opinions about institutional decisions, or inquiries about national and global news or events as they unfold. These comments or questions can sometimes be polarizing and catch you off guard. For some of us, our natural tendency in these situations is to shut down, disengage, and become defensive. However, a critical requirement of the relationship cultivation process with internal and external constituents is staying present in these challenging moments and allowing the conversation to continue despite political, religious, or social differences. It is also just as critical to know when to exit these conversations safely and professionally, depending on the intensity of the situation and/or other factors.  Join us for this four-part online workshop series, where you’ll learn how to respond professionally to difficult conversations with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues. In community with other Advancement professionals across the nation, you will learn simple yet powerful techniques and practices to help you to stay present in difficult dialogues. The workshop series will also give you an opportunity to practice having difficult conversations through a variety of […]

Building a Culture of Mentoring at Your Institution

Increasingly, higher ed understands the institutional benefits of mentoring to students, staff, and faculty, but creating the conditions for mentoring to flourish remains challenging. Join us for a unique in-person experience where you will learn:   Whether attending individually or as a team, you will have the opportunity to directly engage with our experts, connect with higher education professionals across the country doing similar work, and apply your learning to kickstart your work after the conference.  

Advanced Leadership Development in Higher Education

Leading in higher education is a difficult task under the best of circumstances. Shared governance, structural barriers to change, and limited discretionary funding are just a few of the many reasons why making a meaningful impact can be hard to do. But it can be done, and the current and future challenges faced by the industry demand that we have leaders who can make substantive—and not just incremental—change.   Join us for a one-of-a-kind program that will help you to lead for the impact you desire. We’ll examine your leadership at a personal level with our Five Paths to Leadership℠ Assessment, and we’ll also share strategies for building high-performing teams with the hands-on, simulated activities to equip you with the tools that you can use to align large groups around a new direction or vision. You’ll also receive integrated coaching and industry feedback from peers in attendance, to help you to further refine and improve your leadership skills. Thanks to this valuable feedback, attendees will leave the event armed with a curated action plan to help them to thrive in their own programs, and with a wider potential pool of future accountability partners from fellow attendees and network contacts to help […]