News

Setting and Funding Priorities for Your Division: Making the Tough Decisions

In this Report: As institutions face increasing financial constraints, they frequently ramp up fundraising efforts in order to secure new funds –- rather than asking the tough questions about how to spend existing funds more wisely. Oftentimes, guidance from an institution-wide plan is vague or missing altogether. But because the majority of decisions that impact how an institution’s resources are expended are made at the division or college level, vice presidents, deans, and department heads have tremendous influence for ensuring maximum value from every dollar and person. It’s critical to establish a credible process for setting and funding several key priorities for your division, in order to gain your team’s commitment and ensure successful execution. Doing so can build trust — internally and externally — as resources are used more effectively to serve the institution. This edition will walk you through such a process, with input from past institutional presidents, provosts, chief financial officers, and division heads. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Read this report

Transitioning International Students into Your Donor Pipeline

With the balance of wealth shifting overseas — and with more colleges and universities increasing their international enrollment — international fundraising is likely to play an increasingly larger role in development at North American institutions. To learn how institutions can get started in such an effort, we interviewed Gretchen Dobson, the senior associate director for alumni relations at Tufts University and the principal and founder of Gretchen Dobson Go Global, a consulting firm focused on helping educational institutions, non-profit member organizations, and consulate/embassy education officers facilitate alumni engagement and advance international programs. Dobson has also authored the book Being Global: Making the Case for International Alumni Relations (CASE, 2011). A TWO-PART LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES After speaking with Dobson, we’re offering these two articles to help you think through some initial steps for getting started with international fundraising: Reaching Them While They’re Students Dobson notes that international alumni are “hard enough just to find”; if you are serious about cultivating lifetime relationships with this growing body of alumni, the key is to begin building the relationship while they are still students. STUDENT PHILANTHROPY The article you’re reading covers some of the opportunities for international students specifically, but the first step […]

Engaging International Alumni

With the balance of wealth shifting overseas — and with more colleges and universities increasing their international enrollment — international fundraising is likely to play an increasingly larger role in development at North American institutions. To learn how institutions can get started in such an effort, we interviewed Gretchen Dobson, the past senior associate director for alumni relations at Tufts University and the principal and founder of Gretchen Dobson Consulting, LLC, a consulting firm focused on helping educational institutions, nonprofit member organizations, and consulate/embassy education officers facilitate alumni engagement and advance international programs. Dobson has also authored the book Being Global: Making the Case for International Alumni Relations (CASE, 2011). A TWO-PART LOOK AT THE CHALLENGES After speaking with Dobson, we’re offering these two articles to help you think through some initial steps for getting started with international fundraising: Dobson recommends several steps that make all the difference in launching an effective effort: Telling the Story As with any fundraising effort, the key to being effective is to tell a story about what your institution can help potential donors achieve with their time and money — not just a story about how they can help you with their time and […]

Tips for Establishing Paid Peer Mentor Positions

by Sue Ohrablo, Ed.D.

The 2009 Peer Leadership Survey sponsored by the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition found that 65 percent of peer mentor positions receive some financial compensation. Today, the nature of the compensation (paid/unpaid, type of pay, and expectations for the position) varies widely between institutions and often varies widely even across a single campus. We spoke this week with Jimmie Gahagan, director for student engagement at the University of South Carolina, an institution with a well-established track record in developing strong and innovative student leadership programs. USC does offer paid peer mentor positions, and we were interested to hear Gahagan’s advice on the questions and issues other institutions will need to address in order to set up these positions effectively. “Paid positions can definitely provide a financial incentive to the students and can provide supervisors with the ability to more specifically direct their work through performance review and supervision. The risk is that in hiring you may lose some of the intrinsic volunteer motivation that you often see in peer leaders who have taken unpaid positions.”Jimmie Gahagan, University of South Carolina To make sure that you are using paid peer mentor positions to the maximum […]

Four Tips for Training Annual Fund Phonathon Callers

by Jessica Neno Cloud, CFRE

Despite how critical the phonathon can be to the annual fund, student callers are often given minimum training — or training that doesn’t set them up well to succeed in soliciting donor support for the institution. To learn some tips from past and present managers of highly effective phonathon programs, we turned this week to Jessica Cloud, who administers a comprehensive annual giving program for the University of Southern Mississippi Foundation, and Albert Melfo, director of annual giving at Kent State University. Cloud and Melfo suggest these four tips for training callers: Cultivate the Larger Perspective “Focus on the process, focus on the technique,” Melfo advises. “Don’t get hung up on the details; talk about the big picture. Devote training time to discussing what philanthropy is, its role within the organization, what it means to be nonprofit — why we need to raise money. Give the students the big picture case for giving. Help them understand why we do this and why they should feel okay talking with others about why we need their support.” “Help your callers understand the real case for support, the reason we ask. The more we can help our student ambassadors internalize that and speak […]

An Innovative Model for Adult Student Orientation

Adult students have different experiences, expectations, and educational goals than traditional-age students, and they approach their transition to college with different questions and challenges. As nontraditional and working students occupy an ever larger percentage of the student demographic, adult student retention is rapidly becoming a priority at many postsecondary institutions. To gather a few tips for setting adult students up for success from the outset, we reached out to Janet Daniel, director of the office of adult students and evening services at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Daniel has recently piloted a new model for adult student orientation, and we wanted to learn more about the model, the guiding principles underlying it, and initial steps for other institutions that may want to attempt a similar approach. Read this earlier report for a review of key elements that, when present at your institution, make a significant difference in adult student success and retention. One of the four factors is an intentional approach to adult student orientation. The Model at UNC Charlotte The main orientation for adult students at UNC Charlotte focuses on: Beyond this “traditional orientation for nontraditional students,” however, Janet Daniel has recently piloted two additional programs that […]

Defining What Activities Are Truly Critical

Staff metrics and evaluation can be used to incentivize both superior staff performance (by giving managers the rationale and flexibility to reward high performers) and meaningful progress toward the strategic goals of your unit –- if you approach staff metrics in a thoughtful, credible way. This entails: Defining what activities are truly critical to measure Establishing criteria or rubrics for various levels of performance Designing and rolling out metrics through a fully participatory process Ensuring that the metrics inform effective supervision and staff development There is often need for greater intentionality in deploying staff metrics across both the administrative and academic divisions of an institution. In this edition, we’ll address examples from both sides of the organization. Focus on Results, not Tasks First, just because something is easy to measure doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to measure. It may be easy to track the number of service requests responded to by facilities management staff or the number of events organized by alumni relations staff, but these measure tasks completed, not necessarily progress toward that unit’s strategic outcomes. To take a more intentional approach to measuring performance, identify the outcomes that truly matter to the division (whether these are learning […]

Deploying Intentional Staff Performance Metrics in Higher Education

Included in this Report: Establishing a culture of performance at colleges and universities is rapidly becoming a necessity as increased competition and an unsustainable cost structure drives institutions to rethink how they do business. To remain competitive and respond to increased calls for accountability, institutions need to grapple with the critical question of how best to balance building a high-performance culture while honoring the ideals, traditions, and fundamental purpose of higher education. These two goals can’t be viewed as mutually exclusive. As an initial step, managers in higher education need to define staff performance metrics that are results-focused while not unnecessarily reductive. In this edition, we’ve sought the advice of highly successful managers, both at academic institutions and in the corporate sector, to gather key considerations for deploying staff metrics in a thoughtful and credible way within the unique context of higher education. We hope their advice will be useful to you. Read the report. See Upcoming Leadership Workshops

Using Performance Measures to Drive Faculty and Staff Development

When performance metrics are developed in collaboration with staff and treated as a basis for incentivizing and rewarding superior performance, this entails a rethinking of the role and process of supervision. Check-ins between managers and staff, or between department chairs and faculty, can become a structured dialogue centered on the key performance measures and the resources needed to support faculty and staff in achieving success. We turned to Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group, and Mike Theall, an associate professor at Youngstown State University and a leading thinker on faculty evaluation, to learn more about what more effective supervision for faculty and staff would look like. Here is their advice. Effective Supervisory Dialogue Sanaghan, who is publishing a chapter on structured supervisory dialogue in his forthcoming book, How to Actually Build an Exceptional Team, suggests the guiding principle that the focus of supervision has to be the success of the team member in contributing to the unit’s goals. “The dialogue between supervisor is not meant to be critical,” he cautions. “Supervisors need to be asking themselves not how they can correct problems, but how they can incentivize, promote, and reward superior performance.” To facilitate a productive dialogue with that […]

Rollout and Buy-in: Handling the Transition to More Effective Staff Metrics

Few changes offer as much opportunity for resistance and tension within a unit as changes to the method of evaluating performance. It’s critical that not only the decisions around identifying the key metrics themselves but also the decision-making process, communication of the decisions made, and the steps for rolling out the new system are equally intentional. We’ve identified three key principles of an effective transition to a new system for evaluating faculty or staff: The metrics are developed as a collaborative effort between staff and supervisors The goals of moving to a more sophisticated system of performance metrics are clear, and it’s communicated that the metrics will be used as the basis for incentives and rewards for superior performance The process for rolling out the metrics is phased and deliberate Develop the Metrics in Dialogue with Your Staff Rick Dupree, assistant dean of development and alumni relations for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, emphasizes the importance of not just dictating goals but of developing metrics in partnership with your staff. “Chat with them about what they’re sensing about the economy, about donor perceptions. Find out what challenges they’re facing. Let your officers play a role in determining […]