Identifying and Communicating the ROI of External Partnerships

External partners like local businesses or corporate sponsors can make a significant impact on your college or department’s financial management strategy and long-term sustainability. Partnerships can help you to create new revenue streams, promote cost savings, and/or provide resources and unique experiences for your students and faculty that your department or college may be lacking. But how do you as an academic leader identify the right partnership that meets both institutions’ needs, and—more importantly—how do you communicate your vision for the partnership in a way that reflects mutual benefit? Join us for an online workshop that will help you to strategize ways to effectively cultivate and communicate the value of external partnerships for your college or department. You’ll be introduced to a variety of successful external partnerships as inspiration for what’s possible, and will practice strategizing, crafting and communicating a compelling value proposition for various types of partnerships.  

Keys to a Successful Relationship Between Deans and Development Officers

Philanthropy is critical to helping institutions meet their academic missions, and at its core, it is all about building and maintaining relationships. Although fundraising is just one of the myriad responsibilities overseen by an academic dean, the development officer is a key partner in assisting the dean in achieving those fundraising goals. To find success in academic fundraising, the relationship between an academic dean and a development officer must be one built on mutual respect, trust, and clear communication. Successful fundraising teams develop complementary skills that, when combined, are more effective than the skills of one individual. Through this three-hour virtual training, you will be able to better prioritize fundraising goals as a dean and development officer team. You will learn how to build trust and set expectations with mutual fundraising goals in mind, establish a process to effectively move donors through your pipeline, and practice essential skills such as making an ask.

Finding the Leaders We Don’t Know We Have

To meet the challenges facing higher education, we need to start finding leaders who don’t fit the charismatic stereotype. A recent program developed in the for-profit sector may provide a model for finding our colleagues who have enormous potential for leadership but who frequently remain invisible to us. Patrick Sanaghan explains. Several years ago, a corporate client with whom I had a long working relationship contacted me with an unusual request. He said, “I want you to find the leaders in my organization that we don’t know we have.” I was immediately drawn in by this counter-intuitive notion. This leader had built a robust and successful organization over twenty years and was smart enough to know that leadership didn’t reside only at the senior levels of his company. He had invested his money, time, and attention to developing distributed leadership throughout the organization, but he wanted to dig deeper. He told me, “I know we have really good leaders here, but they aren’t enough. We need more and better ones if we are going to stay competitive. I want you to help me find those leaders who are hidden from us.” Finding the “Stylistic Invisibles” I agreed to help with […]

Portfolio Prioritization: Maximizing Opportunities for Your Donor Pipeline

A portfolio is the engine that drives a gift officer’s work and sets them up for future success. However, for new or seasoned professionals alike, opportunities to look at your portfolio with a different viewpoint can be highly beneficial as you seek to understand your portfolio data and prioritize donor relationships. Additionally, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions are facing a reset moment with their portfolios as they are able to travel again to meet donors in person. Join us for this webcast to learn how to identify key data points in your portfolio which you can then use to cultivate relationships with your donors and chart a path for success in your own portfolio management.

Reflections on Inclusive Supervision as an Assistant Dean of Students

Leading from the middle of an institution is a tough role. Managing both up and down while completing student-centered work requires self-reflection, empathy, and intention. Yet it can be accomplished in a transformative way that both honors the individual identities of your team and advances the goals and mission of your institution.  Join us for a discussion with Dr. Jenn Duffield as she reflects on how she navigated her role as Assistant Dean of Students & Title IX Coordinator leading a team of eight. Jenn will share how her role evolved over time, as well as the challenges and successes she experienced leading a team. She’ll also highlight the personal work she accomplished that informed her approach to inclusive supervision. We invite you to participate in conversation and share how you are working to develop your own sense of self as a leader and supervisor. We’ll discuss such aspects of leadership as:  You’ll walk away from this discussion with an opportunity to reflect upon how you can lead more inclusively, as well as with resources to help you to do so. 

How to Use an Inclusive ROI Approach for Program Prioritization

Currently, academic leaders are rethinking their programs to meet the realities of student demands in a post-Covid environment. Some universities have sunset entire departments and programs, while others have taken programs hybrid or fully online. What is right for your division? And how do you gain faculty buy-in for the tough decisions you need to make? It is important to remember that programs are not solely measured by their monetary value; this makes program prioritization a challenging task that requires an inclusive, holistic approach tailored to the realities of each institution. Join us online to learn how to standardize the process of assessing the return on investment (ROI) of your programs across your division. Hear from our expert, Kelly Ball, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, as she demonstrates how to develop an inclusive ROI approach that accounts for mission, margin, and market. Participants will learn how to lead faculty and other stakeholders through this complex and necessary process, resulting in academic prioritization plans that create a resilient curriculum.

Strategies to Create More Engaging Online Courses (Virtual Workshop)

As we move our instruction online in response to the COVID-19 crisis, we feel immense pressure to create quality learning experiences. We find ourselves grasping for strategies to engage our students in our new online environment. “Engaging” is a buzzword that appears in our faculty meetings, higher ed articles, and social media posts, but many of us are still seeking practical examples. What does it mean to teach an engaging online course? We can break down such an online learning experience into three core components: an engaging instructor, an engaged community of peers, and engaging course materials. Our goal in quality online education is to build and foster a collaborative knowledge-building and knowledge-sharing community of learners. Join us for a workshop in which you will learn and practice strategies in all three components of engagement: Strategies to become a more engaging online instructor How to foster a knowledge-building and knowledge-sharing community How to develop and leverage engaging course materials

Ideas from the For-Profit Sector on Making Your Program More Competitive

Can you describe your institution as nimble? Do you offer programs that meet the needs of adult learners? Does your institution effectively use online education to reach non-traditional learners? Do you offer practitioner-oriented programs? Proprietary institutions have successes we can learn from. Use the insights from an instructor that has experienced both sides of the fence. Take lessons learned from the for-profit sector to enhance your program’s competitiveness, student success, and persistence. J. Joseph Hoey will share best practices and case studies to illustrate innovations often used by the proprietary marketplace that are directly applicable to traditional institutions. Join us to learn models that you can incorporate into the way education is delivered at your institution. We will examine: Building education around the student Learning outcomes that connect learners and the workplace Flexible course and program offerings Steps to support students towards matriculation The role of prior learning assessment

Managing Difficult Faculty

If you are in an academic leadership position, you’ve encountered challenging faculty who exhibit unprofessional, unproductive, and even destructive behavior. When faculty decline in productivity, stop attending meetings, or criticize their junior colleagues, how can you deal with these inevitable and uncomfortable situations? In this two-part webcast series, our expert instructor will guide you through a four-stage process for dealing with difficult faculty personalities. You will learn to: Identify and address problematic behaviors early Use appropriate strategies for different behavior types Learn how and when to escalate your intervention Create written agreements that establish conduct expectations and consequences Minimize the impact of problematic behavior in your department

Athletic Department Strategic Planning: The Power of Defining Objectives, Not Just Tactics

At Winthrop, we had never undertaken true, multi-year athletic department strategic planning. Here’s what we learned when we transitioned from annual work plans to defining annual objectives. by Ken Halpin and L. Jeffrey Perez, Winthrop University Those of us in higher education are sick and tired of hearing we face an unprecedented set of challenges: fiscal restraints, demography, technology, and heightened competition, to name a few.  Constantly confronted by these daunting circumstances we may be tempted to just get by – to manage for the next department review or board meeting. But institutions that don’t plan strategically over a number of years and instead adopt a hand-to-mouth approach to planning will face failure in its harshest terms. This is true not only for institutions as a whole but for divisions within the college or university — not the least of which are athletics departments, which face the same set of imperatives as the instiution itself. Athletic departments must maintain academic standards and provide life preparation to the student athletes, who are recruited as aggressively as any other prospects.  They must provide for efficient and cost-effective operations, which are often dependent on fundraising and other sources of revenue. Athletic departments must maintain […]