Search Results for: meeting

A Competency-Based Approach to Career Services in Higher Ed

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

We had the opportunity recently to connect with several innovators in career services whom we met through a recent CAPA conference; one of these was Dr. Audrey Murrell, the associate dean of the College of Business Administration and director of the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership at the University of Pittsburgh, School of Business. Audrey Murrell has developed a unique, competency-based career development curriculum at Pitt Business. We asked her about that program — its key components, what other institutions can learn from it, and how it is responding to critical trends in career services. Here is what she shared with us. How Career Development is Changing Academic Impressions. Audrey, thank you for this conversation. First, can you tell us a little about how you see career services changing today? What are the trends that career services professionals need to be paying the most attention to? Audrey Murrell. Previously, universities have tended to take a very centralized approach to career development, where career services functions as a one-stop shop to meet the broad needs of students on campus. What I’ve seen is the need for more specialization. Some schools of business have a separate but complimentary career services office or […]

Advancement/Academic Partnerships: Using a Team Science Model to Fund Research

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

A SERIES ON INNOVATIONS IN FUNDING ACADEMIC RESEARCH Ed Mason, president of EMNR & Associates, is writing this series to assist academic leaders in finding creative strategies to merge public/private funding for existing and new research initiatives. Mason has studied an array of collaborative partnerships between the two offices most focused on external funding (the development office and research & grants), and he will be sharing some of the models he has observed, as well as directions for the future. We hope you will join us for this innovative series: In the traditional model for funding academic research at universities, multiple offices and departments interact with faculty in the administration of grants and gifts from external donors. Commonly, these offices do not interact frequently or communicate effectively with each other, which tends to create a “silo” effect. By moving instead to a team science model for defining and funding research initiatives, you will: What is Team Science, and What Does it Mean to Researchers and Development Officers? Team science is a proven model that creates partnerships between researchers, advancement professionals, and other key stakeholders at your institution. It involves developing strong collaborative teams who will be able to compete and successfully procure funding for high-priority research […]

Retaining Your Major Gift Officers—From Day One

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

Retaining major gift officers begins on day one—with how you onboard them and connect them with key networks across the institution. A formal process for major gift officer training is one of the key factors in their success that is also within your control. In my article “Recruiting the Right Major Gift Officers,” I encouraged managers to define the specific skills they are hiring for—and seek non-traditional candidates for major gift officers. Now I would like to encourage you to rethink how you onboard and support your major gift officers in ways that encourage their success and retention from day one. Major gift officers, due to their sporadic attendance in the office, need as much clarity as possible, and this is especially true if you are hiring non-traditional candidates who are new to both the work and the institution. This means more than just ensuring that you have a formalized onboarding and training process (one that communicates the unit philosophy, establishes a common foundation of expectations, and outlines options for potential professional development) and clear performance expectations for both input metrics (e.g., contacts, substantive visits, number and value of asks made, and office attitude/collegiality) and output metrics (e.g., dollars raised, […]

Adding Gender-Neutral Housing

Posted on by Greta Bell

While most media coverage and public attention to gender-neutral housing has been positive (for example, see this article in the Washington Post), it is critical to manage communications with the local media, conservative student groups, parents, and other campus constituencies with some care. A few proactive steps early in the process can help prevent or mitigate consternation among campus groups or the wrong type of media attention. Solicit Broad Input To learn more about how colleges and universities can prepare for opening gender-neutral housing, we interviewed Peter Konwerski, dean of students at the George Washington University. GWU has just walked through the process of setting up a pilot program for gender-neutral housing. From his recent experience with the process, Konwerski offers these practical takeaways for peers at other institutions: “Spend a lot of time listening first,” Konwerski suggests. “If your community does have strong reservations about including gender-neutral housing in your residential opportunities on campus, you need to know them and address them as early as possible.”“Put the story out early in the process to alert the local community. Find out if there will be any negative outcry at that point, before the decision is made. Test the community’s response.” Peter […]

What’s Next for Data-Informed SEM?

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

More institutions are using small and big data sources across the prospective and current student lifecycle to inform key decisions related to enrollment and retention. To take a look at how Strategic Enrollment Management (SEM) is changing and to get ideas for how institutions can better leverage their data, we reached out to a panel of three prominent experts:*role=”document”, aria-multiline=”true”, aria-readonly=”false”**aria-label=”Block: Paragraph”* These three, joined by Laura Jensen (associate provost for planning and effectiveness at Colorado State University), will also be discussing this topic in more depth at our upcoming conference Effectively Leveraging Data in Enrollment Management. Here is what they shared with us today. What Advances are We Making? What are the Opportunities? Sarah Seigle. Real-time data and analytics have become more important across all stages of the student lifecycle. Looking at three of the biggest functions of a strategic enrollment management plan—student recruitment, financial aid, and retention—where have you seen many institutions make recent advances in incorporating data into their decision-making? John Dysart. I have seen more colleges bring analytics into financial aid. In recent years, financial aid leveraging has become nearly commonplace. It seems that the majority of colleges and universities are now using some type of leveraging formula, awarding […]

Why Good is Still the Enemy of Great for Most Colleges and Universities

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Series: Costs Down, Quality Up Historically, initiatives to improve quality have also meant added cost—smaller class sizes, more faculty who conduct research, etc.—but this is no longer a sustainable model for all institutions. What are the innovations that can actually drive the cost to educate a student lower while driving critical outcomes like student success and completion higher? This series offers provocative questions that challenge the cost-quality paradigm and the old ways of managing institutional strategy and growth. Why Good is Still the Enemy of Great for Most Colleges and Universities Many small private colleges and universities knowingly or unknowingly are what could be called high-risk institutions. They lack huge endowments, a large reservoir of student demand, significant differentiation in the market, and high brand value. Many of these institutions are either implementing or contemplating a significant innovation and change strategy to address challenges related to a declining value proposition, a lack of differentiation, budgetary problems, and/or the development of new programs and markets that provide enrollment and revenue lifting power. These are the colleges and universities that most need to utilize a data-driven and evidence-based approach to culture, process and change. It is possible to turn the threats they face into […]

Can Confusion Be an Asset and a Resource for a Leader?

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

How Do Successful Higher-Ed Leaders Deal with Adaptive Change? 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 demand that we lead differently, because these challenges cannot be solved with current knowledge and expertise, but require experimentation, risk taking, creativity and the ability to use “failures” as learning opportunities. Adaptive leaders – the leaders I would follow – are those who know how to embrace confusion and ambiguity. Those are the leaders I would trust; those are the leaders who are visibly comfortable with ambiguity and who are always learning and moving forward. (I unpack this idea further in my article “Higher Ed is Facing Adaptive Changes.”) This […]

You May Be Excluding Some of Your Most Loyal Donors From Recognition

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Over the last decade, many colleges and universities have launched programs intended to encourage annual giving through the recognition of donor loyalty. In every case that I can think of, these societies are recognizing consecutive giving, which makes sense—we want people to give every year. I am a long-time fan of the loyalty society and the value it can add to a program as part of a comprehensive donor retention strategy but that’s not what this article is about. This article is about what might be missing from the equation. By defining loyalty as consecutive giving, we are in fact, excluding some of our most loyal donors from recognition. Most likely, many of your major donors have not made gifts each year, and while philosophically, we strive to create a culture that promotes annual giving among our top donors, the reality is that there will always be some who don’t give every year. I am not talking about the once-a-decade donor but about the donors that give almost every year. If someone is a seven-figure donor who occasionally misses a year between major contributions, are we serving the best interests of our institutions by not recognizing them as loyal? 3 Ways to […]

Why Honor Rolls of Donors are a Waste of Time

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

In her new book The 4 Pillars of Donor Relations, Lynne Wester of Donor Relations Guru® helps you rethink donor relations practices and offers specific tips for more powerful acknowledgements, stewardship and impact reporting, recognition, and donor engagement. Get this comprehensive guide to donor relations for your shop today, and transform the way you steward, recognize, and engage your donors. The article that follows is an excerpt from Lynne’s book. In all my time in donor relations, I have never heard of a donor who gave an organization a million dollar gift because their name was in a textual list of donors. Yet I must get asked at least once a week what I think of honor rolls and their place in donor recognition and stewardship. I think they have no useful purpose, they provide opportunities to make costly mistakes, they are a huge waste of human resources, time, money, and they are otherwise foolish. Why Honor Rolls Don’t Provide Any Benefit Time and time again, we have asked donors what they want and how they want to be recognized, and the three things that appear most often in their answers are: Donors want handwritten notes from students. They want to meet those that […]

Anticipating the Future: Following the Lead of Community Colleges

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

The world of work is changing rapidly, creating new pressures and new opportunities for higher education. It’s critical that university leaders act as conveners, assembling representatives of local industry, nonprofits, and community to do the tough work of anticipating the future for their region—both the threats and the opportunities. Some community colleges have been doing this extremely well, and other institutions can learn from their example. The Challenge Before Us The world now sits on the precipice of a fourth industrial revolution, defined by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds. Technological breakthroughs in processing power, artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, and more will fundamentally change the way in which we live, work, and interact. Such technologies are poised to destroy millions of current jobs while creating entirely new ones. The stakes are high: researchers at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute have predicted a 50% chance that machines will be capable of taking over all human jobs in 120 years. The implications for higher education are staggering. Beyond the job losses, millions of new jobs will simultaneously be created. In fact, it’s […]

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