Learn fresh ideas for how you can communicate with deposited students to prevent summer melt and increase yield at your institution. During the webcast, you will learn how to: Make your yield communications more successful Use print, digital, and social media channels as tools to prevent summer melt Educate and mobilize cross-campus partners to create a more seamless strategy Throughout this training, you will see numerous examples of effective yield communications. These examples, combined with a practically-focused presentation, will help you apply what you learn to your own institutional context.
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Higher ed is full of people who never had to learn leadership before they were suddenly doing it. You became department chair because your scholarship was strong. You moved into a VP role because you understood the budget model better than anyone in the room. Then, almost overnight, you were responsible for leading people, and the skills that got you promoted were not the skills the job actually required. That gap is not a personal failing. It is a structural one. Higher education trains people deeply in their discipline and rarely in leading other people. The good news is that leadership is learnable, the same way any complex skill is: through a framework you can build on, and a method you can practice. A Framework That Scaffolds Leadership At Academic Impressions, we organize leadership into four levels, each one building on the one below it. Systems Mastery Teams Mastery Interpersonal Mastery Personal Mastery Personal mastery: self-awareness, knowing your strengths and gaps, and defining what leadership means to you. Interpersonal mastery: communication, collaboration, and working through conflict, the level most people picture when they hear the word “leadership.” Teams mastery: psychological safety and the kind of trust that makes a group […]
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Learn to meet your philanthropic goals by partnering effectively with purpose-driven donors.
We have all been to meetings where there is uneven participation among attendees. More vocal participants tend to dominate, while others can all but disappear. This is a substantial problem for meeting leaders and facilitators as it results in fewer ideas and perspectives being considered. Group activities can be a productive way to overcome this issue. We have compiled the following group activity designs to help meeting leaders and facilitators spark meaningful engagement among all meeting participants.
Happy New Year! As we saw in the first installment in my series on international advancement efforts, it is critical to know key international holidays to best inform staff or a delegation about when (and when not to travel). Once you understand those parameters, the planning must begin and adequate time is necessary to create a successful advancement initiative based on strategic outcomes. I suggest working from nine months out. This advance planning with the academic year is necessary and intentional for several reasons: Advancement officers are not holding the responsibility alone for reaching out to constituents abroad. It is critical to keep the institution’s entire international agenda in mind and that requires a coordinated effort from alumni, development, special events, communications and marketing, and other departments such as admissions and graduate schools’ external relations offices. Advancement officers will also need to communicate with campus leadership and with volunteers abroad on a regular basis to best manage the expectations for everyone’s participation and support. Everyone involved is a “brand manager” and will have a piece of the promotional timeline. TWO DETAILED SCENARIOS I want to offer two scenarios — one in this article (below), and one in a follow-up article. […]
A presidential transition can be a challenging time, and those critical first conversations will set the tone for the partnership ahead. by Sasha Egorova, Academic ImpressionsInterviewing Jake Heuser, Bradley University Welcoming a new president can be an unnerving event for the whole campus. It can particularly be a challenging time for the vice president of advancement and the advancement team. Those critical conversations in the first few weeks of a new presidency can set the tone for the partnership between the president and the chief advancement officers in the months ahead–a partnership that will be critical to the health of the institution. We recently spoke with Jake Heuser, VP of Advancement at Bradley University, about what it takes to ensure a smooth transition. Heuser has been at Bradley for over 10 years, having raised over $100 million dollars while working with two presidents during his tenure. A couple of years ago, Bradley went through a presidential transition. Reflecting back on that experience, Heuser offered some key insights on how to establish a productive VP/President relationship during a presidential transition – and three steps to engage your new president effectively in fundraising. 1. The First Meeting: Overprepare, Have a Plan, But Stay […]
Bogged down in implementing your strategic plan? Try this creative meeting design to get things moving. Successful execution of a strategic plan separates the excellent from the “pretty good.” Creating great “visions” and ennobling pictures of the future for a campus is not difficult. There are many smart, dedicated and hardworking faculty, staff and administrators throughout every campus and they have powerful aspirations. The really hard part is the implementation part, and too few institutions are good at it. Problems are inevitable during an implementation process, but they are often covered up because people are reluctant to ask for help, don’t want to appear inadequate, or are “stuck” with what they are doing and lack good solutions. Having worked on strategic planning with hundreds of campuses over the last 25+ years, I have created the following meeting design. The Strategic Planning Implementation Clinic creates the opportunity to surface the real problems and pressing challenges that campus stakeholders are facing in implementing strategic priorities, and allows leaders to tap the thinking & resources of participants to generate constructive and realistic solutions to tough problems. This meeting design: One caution: This design will only work if the campus climate feels safe enough for participants to share real organizational problems. If failure […]
