As fundraisers, we’ve just concluded a period of hustling to wrap up the fiscal year: working with donors, securing final gifts, and planning for the new fiscal year. Amid all the rush of this work, it can be easy to lose sight of something key: Most donors give because they want to make a difference and effect change. They give generously, but they also give in their own timeframes. Most of our donors don’t operate their households and thus their philanthropy on a fiscal year. Why then, do we insist that they care inextricably about our fiscal year end? Why are we constantly pushing them to give at times that meet our needs and not necessarily their own? Source: 2014 Charitable Giving Report from Blackbaud. If we look at the data from this Blackbaud study and others, we know that the giving season is November and December. That is when most people make their gifts and think about planning their generosity. It’s not that no one gives in April, May or June. I’m not saying that at all. But let’s be truthful: the large majority of donors don’t care about your fiscal year. Here’s a question I can pose to […]
Tracking post-college outcomes continues to be an urgent issue as students, parents, and lawmakers press colleges to quantify the value of a college degree. Tracking results, however, is only half the battle, says Branden Grimmett, associate provost for the Office of Career and Professional Development at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Institutions that want to make a difference in their post-college outcomes need to transform their career services to better meet the changing needs of students and employers. Grimmett led the transformation of career services at St. Olaf College at the highly acclaimed Piper Center for Vocation and Career. This June he accepted a position at Loyola Marymount University, where he will re-imagine their Office of Career and Professional Development. We talked to him to learn more about why institutions need to re-envision their career services office now, what revamped programming looks like, and what steps you can take to take to move the process forward. Career Services Restructuring Needs to be Done Now Grimmett lists four reasons to reinvent campus career services: Awareness, engagement, and reputation are just as important as knowing where students land when they graduate. At St. Olaf, the economic turbulence between 2007 and 2009 […]
WHERE THIS ARTICLE BEGAN… Ashlyn Sowell was a faculty member at AI’s conference on Strengthening, Strategy and Growing Engagement for Alumni Boards. This article was sparked by conversation among schools at the event who were considering the next steps for adding a board or council to their young alumni programs. Some critical questions were raised; here, we start to answer them. Should You Start a Young Alumni Council? The Answer is Maybe Volunteer groups can be a great asset, but do require cultivation and meaningful work to engage with your institution. Here we will talk more about how Gettysburg College made its decision and what the outcome has been. Gettysburg College has a strong history with its alumni board, dating back many years. Around 2008, alumni relations staff began thinking about ways to engage young alumni who made up a large percentage of the overall alumni population and had unique ways that they wanted to interact with their alma mater. As such, a proposal was made to the Board of Trustees, and we created the BOLD Council (Burgians of the Last Decade), a young alumni council of 25 members. The council’s strategies include ways to engage alumni through communications, interaction […]
According to a January 2010 Academic Impressions survey of department chairs, 64 percent of department chairs felt that they were not adequately prepared to assume the role when they first began chairing their department. And of the various duties and responsibilities of the academic chair, 43 percent felt least prepared to address advancement and fundraising initiatives. Yet by virtue of the chair’s position, not only are there many times when a department leader will need to be involved in the conversation between a potential donor and the institution, there are also many times when the chair may need to be the only official involved in the conversation. This is because the donor may want to hear from the academic leader in his or her field of interest, rather than from a professional fundraiser. And as more institutions, both private and public, look to ramp up fundraising efforts, the role of academic leaders will become increasingly vital. We turned to Jason McNeal, Ph.D., consultant with Gonser Gerber Tinker Stuhr LLP, for his advice on what those new to the department chair position most need to know in order to take an active and effective role in fundraising. He offers these five […]
Mental Health Resources for the Campus Community Create a “network of support” on your campus by training faculty and staff to recognize and engage with students experiencing mental health challenges. Why is a cross-campus approach to mental health so critical? Watch Anne Browning from the University of Washington make the case for faculty and staff involvement in mental health prevention and promotion. [h5p id=”61″] Click for Transcript Find Your Resources Do you want to better understand the current mental health landscape in higher ed? Are you prepared to support your students in the moment? How can you proactively support the mental health of your students? Connect to Issues and Conversations Student Mental Health in Higher Education All-inclusive members have access to the Academic Impressions’ research brief that inspired this collection. After you’ve followed the link, click “View Now” to access the report. The Role of Higher Ed in Providing Mental Health Services Listen to this podcast to hear 3 expert opinions on the appropriate scope of service and legal considerations for mental health services in higher ed. Learning About Online Mental Health Tools Download this handout to learn about 3 types of online mental health tools institutions are […]
EVALUATING AN EXTERNAL PARTNER External partners can provide boosts in quality, capacity and enrollment numbers for universities’ online programs. However, decision makers must be diligent in choosing who to partner with and examining which services are most efficiently outsourced. A lack of comprehensive preparation can lead to wasted resources, unnecessary costs and stagnant enrollments. In this article, Deb Gearhart, vice provost for e-learning and strategic partnerships at Ohio University, offers: Podcast: Rethinking Vendor Partnerships Checklist: 5 Mistakes to Avoid When developing a vendor partnership to help deliver your online program, these items are too commonly overlooked: MISTAKE #1. NOT BRINGING THE RIGHT PLAYERS TO THE PROCESS. Identify the key stakeholders early on. Ensure that all areas of the University that will touch your online program and its students are represented in both the planning and the evaluation of the partner vendor. This would include: Always work through your procurement office. MISTAKE #2. NOT CONSIDERING YOUR BUDGET. What are the costs to provide the services within your institution, compared to the expenses of bringing in a vendor partner? Online education is an upfront investment with costs recouped from enrollment. When reviewing vendors, be sure to gain a clear understanding of what […]
Have you experienced this scenario? Your faculty members attend a professional development training and return to campus excited to try new ideas. Fast-forward a few months…and little has changed because pedagogical transformation was shunted aside in favor of day-to-day teaching and research obligations. When this scenario happened at El Camino College, a group of faculty decided to change it. “Life’s very, very busy so it’s hard to take this next step,” explains Kristie Daniel-DiGregorio, Professor of Human Development. Along with her colleagues, she noticed that faculty would feel “electrified” by training, but that afterward, techniques were only implemented in an ad hoc fashion. She and a team of her colleagues wondered what would happen if the college continued to support their professional development on an ongoing basis after the training concluded. El Camino’s Faculty Inquiry Partnership Program — FIPP — was created to do just that. And they’ve been tracking the results. Student success rates in courses taught by faculty who participated in FIPP are two percent higher than rates in courses taught by faculty who had not attended. More than 90% of students reported that the strategies faculty in FIPP employed helped them better understand the material and increased their […]
Introduction Like a great many other institutions, we emerged from the pandemic knowing that the disruptions of the last few years would inevitably lead to changes in the preferences and desires of our student population around the educational model and how education gets delivered. We also knew that, to remain successful and competitive as an undergraduate program of ~2,900 students in a typical college of business at a large, public land-grant institution, we needed to keep in close touch with how those preferences were evolving. This article serves to tell that story: how we went about understanding our students’ changing attitudes about the educational model, what the data pointed to, and what changes we made in response. Students now clearly prefer to have online classes in all areas of their curricula, and they prefer asynchronous offerings over synchronous – a large change from what our data was telling us just one year ago. We hope that by telling this story, we urge and inspire other units to do the same: not only is it important to continually monitor and adjust to best meet your constituents’ needs, but those who are willing to adapt quickly have a distinct opportunity to take […]
The Changes You Face Now Are Different From the Changes in the Past We’re well-equipped, in higher education, to meet technical change head-on. We’re often less well-equipped for adaptive change. This is a distinction Ron Heifetz drew, first in his thought-provoking book Leadership without Easy Answers (1998) and later with Martin Linsky in Leadership on the Line (2002). With technical challenges, situations arise where current knowledge, expertise and resources are enough to deal effectively. A technical problem is not necessarily trivial or simple but its solution lies within the organization’s current repertoire of resources (such as updated technology, takeaways from past experience, or decisions to invest more money or people). With adaptive challenges, there are fewer clear answers. Adaptive challenges cannot be solved with current knowledge and expertise, but require experimentation, risk taking, creativity and the ability to use “failures” as learning opportunities. The problem is that we too often treat adaptive challenges as technical ones. On top of this, many people tend to resist or deny adaptive challenges (e.g., Khan Academy, MOOCs, mobile technology in the classroom) because these challenges could dramatically change the way they think and act. Often, these people expect their leaders to come up with […]
At many institutions, the limited resources for external relations have been redirected to grow the office’s fund-raising capacity. Communications professionals, with jobs lost and budgets cut, watch two dynamics: the growth of decentralized communications and the growth of a sister office, development – both occurring at their perceived expense. And yet both demand more public relations and marketing support than ever as campaigns commonly reach the hundreds of thousands to billions of dollars. When not driven by an integrated strategy, decentralized communicators often message independently and can leave the central office scrambling to provide back-up support or clean up confusion. This is not a small issue. It is monumental and a problem that can be made better, if everyone understands that they are not silos, but integral agents in making their universities more successful and their students’ experiences more valuable. The successful advancement offices that are rebuilding, refocusing and recalibrating, are following five steps to deepen the relationships between development, alumni relations, and marcom. 1. Define the mission of public relations and marketing. Marketing’s sister offices have defined missions. Alumni relations serves alumni. Development raises private funds. But what is the mission of communications? Communications offices get pulled in multiple […]
