Have you ever opened your email inbox the day after an assignment is due and received an email with the subject line entitled “request for extension of time”? My first thought is “Here we go,” but then I immediately switch my thought process to: “Be objective; my students are adults completing their doctoral degree.” I work with online doctoral students in the school of education for a not-for-profit private university. The average age of our doctoral students is 47 years. These students are adults working in their specialized fields completing their terminal degree to further their professional endeavors. For the most part, they are professionals working full-time, and are married with children ranging from infants to college students to college graduates with families of their own. These individuals are not students in an undergraduate program, fresh out of high school and still deciding “what they want to be when they grow up.” Adult students have many issues in their lives other than completing their doctoral degree. They deal with work deadlines, mortgages and bills, aging parents, sick children, divorces and child custody, to name a few examples. When a doctoral student reaches out to me for help or for a little […]
Leadership is hard Let’s face it, leadership is hard and exhausting. Leadership was hard before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the additional complexities that leaders have been facing over the past year have been significant. Leaders at all levels are increasingly finding themselves making more decisions more quickly, with more significance, and with less information. The risks we are managing have increased. Our teams are looking to us for vision and guidance while we manage all of this new complexity and challenge. And we are doing all of this while working at our kitchen tables and in virtual meetings. We have had to acquire a whole new set of skills to lead in a remote or hybrid environment literally overnight. Leading teams and managing ourselves during these conditions is not for the faint hearted and it necessitates that we build our toolkit to tackle leadership in new ways. Now we are starting to look to the future with hope and optimism, knowing that some things will never return to the way they were before the pandemic. They can’t, and in many ways, they shouldn’t. Acknowledging and validating that the work of leading is hard right now (and really always was) is […]
A SERIES ON INNOVATIONS IN FUNDING ACADEMIC RESEARCH We hope you will join us for this innovative series: The “3C” Strategy for More Effective Fundraising Advancement and research offices can optimize their strategies to compete successfully for external funds by utilizing the “3C” approach. The “3C” approach is: Strategies for Enhanced Communication Over several decades, advancement and research offices have developed distinctly different approaches for fundraising. Advancement’s role is to procure gifts from donors who have very specific interests in funding priorities. Research works with faculty to compete for grants for specific scientific, outreach and training programs. Also, there are distinct “global” perspectives on each office role in working with their constituencies. Planning, facilitation and open discussions are vital to creating enhanced communication between the two offices. This is a new endeavor for many institutions, so take the time — whether it is 3 months or 1 year — to develop good rapport between your offices. To bridge this gap: Effective Collaboration Strategies Improved communication between advancement and research offices creates opportunities to pursue new funding sources. An effective collaborative model is composed of: Coordination Strategies for Advancement and Research The goal of successfully coordinating grants and gifts is to […]
Because the marketplace for public arenas and sports stadiums is now saturated with corporate namings and sponsorships, many corporations are turning increasingly to the higher education sector for naming opportunities. At the same time, many athletics departments in higher education are striving to become more entrepreneurial, particularly at institutions that have recently cut athletics budgets to preserve funding for academic programs. Yet often athletics directors focus almost solely on fundraising, neglecting the growing marketplace for athletics sponsorships. Though sponsorships are usually far smaller in dollar amount than philanthropic naming gifts, it’s important to realize that: “More corporations are seeing the value of aligning themselves with like institutions to build awareness of their brand. These opportunities deserve more than a cursory glance.”Vincent Duckworth, ViTreo We turned to Vincent Duckworth, partner and chief marketing officer at Vitreo, to learn more about how institutions can take advantage of this changing marketplace. Duckworth offers these four tips. Tip 1: Do You Have a Naming Policy for Your Athletics Naming Opportunities? Duckworth advises that your naming policy needs to provide guidelines around: This policy needs to be transparent and publically available. This ensures both that corporate sponsors can find you — and that you can […]
Sydney AndringaExecutive Assistant to the Vice President of Institutional Advancement, College of Saint Benedict Valerie JonesExecutive Director of Alumnae Relations, College of Saint Benedict Heather Pieper-OlsonAssociate Vice President of Institutional Advancement, College of Saint Benedict Julie ReitmeierExecutive Director of Advancement Systems, College of Saint Benedict In January of 2014, the Institutional Advancement Team at the College of Saint Benedict, a Catholic, Benedictine, liberal arts college for women in central Minnesota, faced a unique and complex set of circumstances. A brand new, first time, president was six months into her tenure; the vice president of institutional advancement (IA) had resigned and announced plans for a pair of interim vice presidents to lead the department; the college had just announced a $100 million comprehensive campaign; and the IA department had recently hired or was in the process of hiring four new staff members on a 24-person team. The president gave us, the senior leadership team in IA, a directive: create stability for the department and focus on retention of the current team. To create that stability and retain our workforce, we focused on creating a sense of belonging for all current and future staff members by creating an extended onboarding process. Not only would the […]
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 […]
Supporting mid-level and senior leaders as they prepare for the future of higher education and the next steps in their careers. Jennifer is an executive coach and trusted advisor who helps higher education leaders and their teams cultivate the mindset and skill set needed to thrive in an ever-changing world. Drawing from nearly 20 years of progressive leadership experience in higher education, she brings deep institutional knowledge to her coaching practice, specializing in cultivating the critical competencies that enable leaders to break down institutional silos, forge powerful collaborations, and create flourishing organizational cultures. Jennifer has held a variety of leadership positions in academic and student affairs throughout her career, including program director, department chair, and assistant dean. She currently serves as a director of strategic initiatives where she works closely with the provost on developing and coordinating high-priority strategic planning initiatives. Her coaching practice focuses primarily on chairs, deans, provosts, and vice presidents who are leading institutional change while advancing their own career trajectories. Jennifer’s approach combines evidence-based frameworks with practical communication strategies, ensuring leaders can effectively navigate complex challenges while building sustainable success. Jennifer has coached hundreds of leaders across institutional types, from R1 universities to community colleges, including […]
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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 […]
