Search Results for: meeting

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 […]

Checklist: Preparing Adjunct Faculty to Teach Online

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

Department chairs and program directors are busy people, and orienting adjunct faculty may not be top of mind. But adjuncts who are teaching online for the first time need support and information to hit the ground running. Here is a quick checklist of items to cover with first-time online instructors. by Teresa Focarile, Boise State University(who also wrote: “Adjunct Faculty: A Department Chair’s Guide to Orienting New Instructors“) Many institutions are expanding their online course offerings, and using adjunct faculty to do so. While these faculty members are often teaching from a master course and therefore are not responsible for developing the class, there is still important information about teaching online that needs to be shared with these new instructors in order for them to be effective online teachers, and to ensure they understand the expectations for teaching in your program (Larcara, 2011). Checklist Some items on this checklist might already be in place. For example, most institutions have a team that can get adjunct faculty up to speed on the functionality of the Learning Management System (LMS). In addition, many institutions have developed trainings (sometimes mandatory) for faculty who teach online. But if your institution does not have those kinds […]

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 […]

How the University of North Florida Integrated Academic and Student Affairs

Posted on by Shawn Herbert

By Daniel Moon, Associate Provost and Professor, University of North Florida Higher education institutions are facing pressure to increase student success measures and become more efficient. Each of these can present significant challenges for universities but having to solve both challenges simultaneously can be daunting. The COVID-19 pandemic has only served to add layers of complexity and urgency to this challenging puzzle. A potentially powerful mechanism for addressing this challenge is integrating Academic Affairs and Student Affairs into one cohesive unit. Doing so at the University of North Florida has contributed to all-time high retention and graduation rates, and yielded more than $2 million in savings and reallocation. The challenges we faced Higher education is focused on student success now more than ever, with unprecedented layers of accountability to students, parents, boards, and others (e.g. see Kelchen, 2018). This accountability is increasingly tied to a university’s bottom line. For example, most states have a performance-based funding mechanism that explicitly ties funding to student success measures. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the challenges that students face in pursuit of their degree, making this problem even more urgent for universities to solve. Significant shifts in improving student success measures require a more […]

What Development Teams Get Wrong about Donor Relations

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Most would agree that there is no fund development without donor relations. Consider this article a personal perspective—informed by more than a decade of donor relations and stewardship experience—about the missed collaborative opportunities between development and donor relations teams. There is no time like now to create partnerships to address the divide. As an industry, we have segmented out donor relations and stewardship as separate efforts that take place after we have established relationships with our donors. We pass new donors along with the signed buck slip to those who have been trained to maintain the warmth of the donor’s relationship with the institution until pledges have been paid or until it seems like the right time to make the next big ask. Some Crucial Rethinking I would like to challenge the development officers out there to think about the role that you play with a new prospect. You are introduced to someone who may be interested in your cause. You may request research to identify this individual’s home value, past event attendance, known associates or interests. You check into a past charitable giving history to your organization and anything else that may pop up in a Google search. In short, you put […]

This is How We Need to Rethink the Work of Student Affairs

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

The challenges facing our students and our institutions are more complex than in the past, and no single, siloed office can address these challenges adequately. That’s why some institutions have been forming student affairs innovation hubs to bring together a more diverse crew of creative minds from across campus and put them to work on improving the student experience. One of these institutions is Seattle University, and we recently interviewed Seattle U’s vice president for student development, Michele C. Murray, Ph.D., and Seattle U’s assistant vice president for student development, Monica Nixon, Ed.D. Rethinking Our Work Murray and Nixon suggest that the one-stop shop approach to serving specific student demographics (such as transfer students, for instance) has several flaws. When Seattle University set up an office to serve its transfer students, Murray notes, “the great thing was that we had one full-time staff person completely committed to those transfer students. The downside was that the transfer students felt siloed. They weren’t introduced to the fullness of the student experience, and that issue was replicated across multiple student populations.” “Another unintended consequence of the siloed way of using one-stop shop areas to serve specific student demographics — is that the students feel […]

Tips for Engaging Campus Partners in Recruitment Activities

Engaging Campus Partners in Recruitment Activities You can’t expect people to participate in something they don’t understand. Be strategic in how you communicate with stakeholders so they have a clear image of what you’re trying to achieve and how they can help.   As an admissions professional, it can be tough to get academic leaders, faculty, and other campus partners to readily participate in key recruitment touch points with prospective students and families. They might not think it’s their job, they might perceive recruitment activities like sales, or they may simply feel too busy. In this lesson, we’ll spotlight how 3 large public institutions have found creative solutions for bringing campus partners into the fold while generating meaningful participation for their recruitment events. Kennesaw State University [h5p id=”52″] University of North Georgia [h5p id=”55″] University of Texas at Arlington [h5p id=”58″] 5 Tips for Engaging Campus Partners in Recruitment Activities 1. Make Participation Easy Expand   Make participation easy to get more involvement from your campus partners. Examples for making participation easy include: Providing campus partners with simple strategies for participating like waving and saying hi to visiting students. Sending departments the contact information of perspective students so they can […]

7 Ways Advisors Can More Effectively Engage Online Students

Posted on by Kenneth Soldink

Online students are at significant risk for attrition as they experience isolation and a sense of disconnect from the institution, as well as find themselves lacking resources and information. Advisors can greatly impact students’ perceptions of their online experience by providing ongoing support and information to students. Advising online students can be challenging, however, as academic advisors are responsible for providing quality advising to students they may never meet, relying on phone and electronic communication as an alternative to face-to-face advising. Advisors who have traditionally worked with students in a face-to-face environment may experience frustration, dissatisfaction, and a lack of connection with the students with whom they work. Advisors run the risk of eliminating critical, comprehensive developmental advising strategies as they attempt to manage a seemingly unmanageable amount of emails and phone calls. It’s important for advisors to remember that online is not a type of student, rather, it is a mode of delivery for academic coursework. Students study online for a variety of reasons, including geographical limitations, learning style, work, and personal commitments. The needs of these students are no different from those of any other students, although students in an online environment often perceive a sense of isolation, […]

Preparing Students to Lose Their Jobs (And Faculty To Keep Theirs)

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

also by Alan Ritacco (Learn more in the recorded webcast: The Future of Work and the Academy) Abstract: A recent study reveals that young people today could have as many as 16-17 different jobs in 5 industries. As the rate of technological change becomes exponential, the future of work requires adapting to change, recognizing job failure as a norm, and (since we are living longer) a longer career arc in which to experience many different and uniquely distinct careers. Are most institutions of higher education preparing students for this reality? According to the recent report by the Foundation for Young Australians, The New Work Mindset (a study built upon the Future of Work research studies of both the McKinsey Global Institute and the World Economic Forum), young people today could have as many as 16-17 different jobs in 5 industries: And considering that the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that there are more than 1.5 million involuntary and 3 million voluntary separations per month, the fact is: job loss and job change are a norm. Job change, whether voluntary or involuntary, is part of having a professional career. As higher education professionals, we prepare students for their first professional jobs. We, […]

Higher Education: Your Life May Depend Upon It

Posted on by Daniel Fusch

also by Robert E. Johnson, Ph.D. (Learn more in the recorded webcast: The Future of Work and the Academy) Higher education and the coveted bachelor’s degree was once the essential launch pad to economic stability. Now, it seems it is something more. In to a new report published by Brookings, “Mortality and morbidity in the 21st century,” Princeton professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton explore the patterns and trends that have led to a decline in the life expectancy of middle-aged white people without college degrees since the late 1990s. Spoiler alert: education is the key distinction, and differences in life expectancy do not appear due simply to an economic division. In this paper, we will take a look at the changing landscape of work and what this means for higher education. We’ll look particularly at manufacturing. Note: All segments of our economy are in some form of disruption. Manufacturing is an obvious and easy industry to use as an example as the devastation can be seen and understood. Rising automation and machine intelligence will creep into and replace the knowledge workers with the same voracity with which the physical workers have been supplanted: How We Got Here We lost a […]

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