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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.  

Encore: Recruiting, Training, and Engaging Alumni Volunteers in a Digital Environment

Alumni volunteers are immensely valuable to institutions in both their service and giving power— they tend to give 10 times more than non-volunteers. However, since the pandemic, the script has flipped on how we recruit and engage alumni volunteers through digital channels. In-person volunteer opportunities continue to foster alumni engagement, but with digital opportunities growing increasingly common as well, we must continue to learn best practices from one another to remain successful. In this virtual training, our expert panelists will guide you as you share your own lessons when digitally engaging your alumni volunteers. Together, we will identify emerging best practices regarding volunteer recruitment, training, and engagement that lead to the retention of your most dedicated alumni. You will leave this training with the best current practices to engage your volunteers — during this pandemic, and beyond. In this updated edition, a Q&A with the speakers, Clarybel Peguero and Parks Smith, has been added to the recording. How It Works: If you missed the event when it took place in March of 2023 or you have been meaning to engage with the on-demand training, this is your chance to watch it together with higher ed colleagues from across the country. […]

Essential Leadership Skills for Department Chairs

Leading as an academic department chair is difficult under the best of circumstances. You must balance the competing interests of faculty and administration and stretch limited resources, all while maintaining your own scholarship and teaching loads. Add to this the uncertainty and complexity of leading through an ever-changing higher ed landscape, and it becomes clear that the current environment can test even the most seasoned leaders.  Join us in person for this essential two-day conference designed specifically to help academic department chairs discover or reconnect with the most effective ways to lead in a variety of situations and circumstances. These are the themes for each day of the conference:   Day One: You’ll begin by reflecting on your approach to leadership, where you’ll explore ways to enhance your overall leadership effectiveness. You’ll also examine how your position of influence can support and enable the engagement, collaboration, and, ultimately, the success of your faculty and staff.   Day Two: You will be asked to explore one of the trickiest topics a leader must face—conflict— and you’ll practice tools and strategies that will allow you to navigate that conflict with greater confidence and ease.  We’ve trained thousands of department chairs over the last […]

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

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: 

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. 

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.  

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