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July 28, 2011. According to a national survey of higher education alumni conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving and presented to the Annual Giving Directors Consortium (April 2010), only 52 percent of alumni at those institutions with the highest alumni participation rates believe their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. At the same time, institutions are trying to meet fundraising goals by calling on fewer and fewer donors. Now is the time for your institution to stop this unsustainable advancement strategy. We turned this week to Jim Langley, president of Langley Innovations, for his advice on how institutions need to rethink their strategy for engaging future donors. A Diagnosis: How Institutions and Alumni Misconnect “The underlying malady,” Langley remarks, “is a loss of emotional engagement with the institution. Alumni remain appreciative of their degree and of their time at the institution, but feel emotionally detached from the alma mater after graduation.” This disaffection can take different forms for different generations of alumni: Young alumni are likely to have graduated with a significant load of student debt and are now facing the challenges of building a career amid a sluggish economic recovery; when […]

July 28, 2011. As advancement shops in higher education struggle with a slow economic recovery, it is increasingly important to build staff metrics that encourage effective work. Tracking meaningful metrics beyond dollars raised can empower you to: Reward high performers, making it easier to retain your best officers Identify training needs Incentivize cross-boundary work toward shared goals For advice on taking fundraising metrics beyond dollars raised, we turned this week to Rick Dupree, assistant dean of development and alumni relations for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and D. Scott Peters, director of annual giving at the University of Richmond. A Culture of Incentives “A good metrics system means that development officers know what’s expected, they know what will happen if they meet and exceed goals. It takes away the guessing game. Development officers are entrepreneurs at heart — they have egos, they’re creative, they want to do excellent work and be recognized for it.” Rick Dupree, Indiana U Dupree adds that the 100-point metrics program he put in place a decade ago at Indiana University allowed him to do “two atypical things” — offer bonuses and terminate low performers. He assigned points for achieving specific goals. “If a staff […]

Telling the story of your institution’s sustainability efforts to key stakeholders is a critical step both for building momentum and support for an initiative, and for leveraging your successes to solicit both engagement and funding from your constituents. When Academic Impressions surveyed a number of the nation’s leaders in campus sustainability, we found that one of the often unrealized benefits of a comprehensive sustainability initiative is its impact on stakeholder relations. Many donors, particularly young alumni, are attracted to projects related to sustainability, and institutions such as the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Notre Dame, Oregon State University, and Boston University have already launched efforts to engage alumni in campus sustainability or fund sustainability efforts through private gifts. Leveraging your early successes effectively to gather support for further efforts requires being deliberate in your outreach. Some key steps include: Develop a story about how your various efforts are integrated Brand your initiative — this can help you communicate the campus-wide nature of the effort and aid you in building credibility and constituency (for an example, see the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s “We Conserve” initiative) Discuss your efforts with your institution’s development office, ask about your institution’s top fundraising priorities, and work together to identify […]

Once your sustainability committee has inventoried all sustainability-related educational programming that already exists on campus, you can look for opportunities to connect interested faculty with each other and to build organically on efforts already in place. The keys are to align curricular and co-curricular programming, offer structured opportunities for faculty to share resources and ideas across disciplines, and find ways to scale up efforts that see early success. Involving Students in and out of the Classroom Jack Byrne, director of the Sustainability Integration Office at Middlebury College; Angela Halfacre, director of the Shi Center for Sustainability at Furman University; and Blase Scarnati, director of the University First Year Seminar Program at Northern Arizona University, suggest the following ways of integrating sustainability efforts with student learning in ways that aren’t restricted to a classroom setting: Identify real-world issues related to sustainability in the local community, and invite a class to conduct research and make recommendations Identify opportunities on your campus, and pose questions in the classroom on how to move forward In short, set up situations in which both campus and community stakeholders act as “clients” for groups of student researchers and student consultants. This empowers your institution to both provide real-world learning […]

If your institution’s leadership has already made a public commitment to sustainability, then it is important to educate the president, provost, and chief financial officer about the whole picture of the sustainability efforts already under way on campus, and what opportunities there may be for building further. It will be important to define, as quickly as possible, what sustainability means at your institution. Is it limited to energy efficiency? Is it broader in scope? What does your college or university want to achieve? This definition should be arrived at collaboratively, with input from students, institutional leaders, and sustainability champions at your institution. If sustainability efforts at your institution are operating at a grassroots level, then auditing and building coordination between current efforts, developing a full cost accounting tool, and marketing your successes can be key efforts in cultivating investment by both institutional leadership and the campus community. Whether you are starting with an executive commitment or with a grassroots effort, the critical early step is to audit what is already happening on campus and what resources are already available to you. Then you will be better-equipped to coordinate across departments and scale up. To move from a series of ad […]

“Demonstrating that sustainability isn’t just a cost but also provides payback, especially financial payback, is crucial to establish early,” Dave Newport suggests. As you look to build momentum for sustainability efforts on your campus, it will be critical to identify what energy, water, and resource savings projects have already been undertaken at your institution, and then to prioritize your key projects — “low-hanging fruit” that will show rapid returns in the form of cost savings. The key is to begin a cycle of cost savings and reinvestment of savings in further sustainability efforts. “You can’t do everything. Focus on finding those early wins that allow you to generate support for more robust efforts,” Dave Newport advises. While inventorying current efforts and identifying the next several projects that will generate financial returns, make sure to integrate opportunities for student learning and student engagement into efficiency and cost control initiatives: Connect efficiency programs with faculty and student efforts (for example, invite students to take part in a lighting efficiency project, or involve an architecture or engineering course in the process of designing your next LEED facility) Prioritize tangible projects that you can show to current and prospective students as a real example […]