Retaining Your Major Gift Officers—From Day One

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, […]

FT/PT Faculty Ratio: How Maricopa Plans to Improve Student Success by Increasing Full-Time Faculty

RELATED ARTICLE: How Maricopa is Improving Student Success through Comprehensive Support for Adjunct Faculty During the recent recession, the Maricopa Community College District shifted more classes to part-time adjunct faculty as a cost-cutting measure -– a trend that was mirrored nationwide. Unfortunately, that move typically has a negative effect on student retention and completion rates, according to the Center for Community College Student Engagement. Now Maricopa is working to reverse that trend and move to a 60:40 model in order to improve student success outcomes. We talked with Chancellor Rufus Glasper, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Maria Harper-Marinick, Faculty Association President Keith Heffner, and Eddie Genna, who served as Faculty Association president as the initiative was being debated, to understand how and why Maricopa is making this transformative change and what they need to prioritize to accomplish it successfully. Changing the FT/PT Faculty Ratio from 90:10 to 60:40 Maricopa originally established a 90:10 full-time/part-time faculty ratio when the community college district was created in 1962. According to the ratio, 90 percent of daytime courses would be taught by full-time professors, and the remaining 10 percent by part-time adjuncts. Evening classes would also be taught primarily by part-time adjuncts. By 2012 […]

Techniques for Assessing Prior Learning

Here’s how to do prior learning assessment (PLA) rigorously and well. The suggestions given are by the author of a landmark study of prior learning assessment portfolios. 2010. Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation for Education, has released a statement offering ideas for a national strategy to rapidly train workers for new jobs; among these, prior learning assessment (PLA) was cited as one possible game-changer. But beyond CLEP and the controversial challenge exam, how can enrollment managers and academic leaders assess prior learning effectively and with rigor? We asked Denise Hart, director of adult education and creator of the Success Program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and author of a landmark study of prior learning assessment portfolios, for techniques that institutions should be thinking about. The Prior Learning Portfolio Hart recommends starting with portfolio assessment as your core option. But for this to work, you have to: It is important to have the portfolio evaluated by faculty with specific and relevant expertise. “Don’t have a History of Civil War expert evaluating a Vietnam War portfolio,” Hart cautions. “Have someone who is au courant, who knows the material, is current with the material, and understands adult learners.” The portfolio, […]

Mental Health Resources for the Campus Community

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 promotion and crisis prevention. [h5p id=”61″] View Video Transcript Expand Why do you need to empower faculty, staff, and students in mental health care? Video Transcription Anne Browning, Ph.D. | Founding Director, UW Resilience Lab | University of Washington Anne Browning, Ph.D. (UW): This is important because we are experiencing a pretty dramatic increase in mental health concerns in our student population. Actually, that’s also mirrored among our faculty and staff as well. The World Health Organization this summer put out an article that looked at students entering higher education in 19 different universities across eight different countries and they were seeing that 35% of those students were screened positive for one of six prominent mental health disorders. So, over one third. So, it’s not just a local issue where we’re seeing counselors not being able to keep up with demand […]

FREE: Navigating the Graduate Enrollment Landscape Mid-Pandemic

FREE WEBCAST RECORDING Navigating the Graduate Enrollment Landscape Mid-Pandemic   The live webcast took place on May 6, 2020. Please register to get access to the recording. Navigating the New Normal DISCUSSION SERIES Watch a webcast recording where our experts connect with the broader higher education community to share ideas and answer questions as campuses continue to navigate the COVID-19 crisis. Graduate education leaders are managing a difficult balancing act in light of current circumstances. On one hand, there’s a real need to be proactive with yield strategy and communication with admitted students, both domestic and international. On the other, there is still a lot of uncertainty related to the trajectory of the pandemic and institutional decisions around fall semester. What are the right messages to be sending? What creative strategies are other graduate leaders exploring when it comes to yield and tuition discounting?   Watch this webcast recording as we facilitate a discussion with David Cotter, Assistant Provost for Graduate Enrollment & Master’s and Professional Support at Boston University. You’ll hear our expert and your fellow attendees share considerations and best current thinking around the following:   Yield for domestic and international graduate students  Scholarships, aid, and discount strategy    Internal and external communication: Sharing accurate, up-to-date information with faculty, staff, and students   Impacts to overall graduate enrollment plans     Who Should Attend This webcast has been primarily designed […]

What Establishing Alumni X-Teams Can Achieve

We need to reshape a 19th-century alumni office to meet the demands of a 21st-century audience. “Alumni associations were rendered obsolete by Facebook and have since been dying a slow death.” “Why get off my couch on a weeknight to connect with fellow alumni from college, one of a dozen institutions to which I have some faint sense of allegiance? “Given the amount of virtual networking to be done, why connect IRL (in real life) at all?” The answer to these loaded questions is the reason my job in alumni relations still exists. We still crave a live networking event, seminar, or raucous public debate. Alumni associations, for hundreds of years the conveners of such events, aren’t going anywhere. But I don’t rest easy, nor should my peers in alumni associations the world round, even those of us at the most elite institutions of higher learning. To meet these demands, we must form “x-teams” – cross-functional teams from various verticals in an organization who share a common goal. X-teams in advancement shops must be students of the marketplace, audience, and the whimsical trends among students, alumni, faculty, and the public. Taking a page from the best tech companies out there, […]

Shining a Light on Diversity & Inclusion Lessons from a small, residential, liberal arts college striving for big change

Jennifer Bonds-RaackeProvost & Vice President of Academic Affairs, St. Norbert College Billy Korinko(Content Expert), Director of Cassandra Voss Center, St. Norbert College Introduction The need to reevaluate our Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging (DEIB) work at St. Norbert College came into focus as systemic racism, violence and outrage led to devastated cities, communities, families and lives all around us in 2020. For some, these events were an overwhelming representation of their lived experiences while for others, headline after tragic headline revealed our collective failure to advance equitable opportunities for all people. In response—just as many organizations and communities have done over the past year—we at St. Norbert have begun to take an honest look within and around these issues. In partnership with our newly formed Faculty and Staff Coalition of Color (FSCC), we are asking ourselves tough questions and engaging in dialogue in new ways. We’re challenging our current programs and practices and putting new cultural, strategic, operational, and educational practices in place to help redefine the future of DEIB for our students, faculty, and staff. As we’re actively exploring these questions, it occurs to us that the answers we’re finding may be all too common in higher education. While […]

Checklist: Preparing Adjunct Faculty to Teach Online

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 […]

Foundations of Customer Service Video Course

MEMBER-EXCLUSIVE COURSE Foundations of Customer Service Video Course Gain the knowledge and skills you need to provide high quality customer service in the higher education environment. Overview As competition in higher education intensifies, so do prospective students’ appetites for institutions that provide the best education and experience for their tuition dollars. Instilling a culture of service excellence at all levels of an institution can directly enhance enrollment and improve student retention by providing consistency across branding and the student experience. This video course will introduce you to the foundations of customer service in higher education. Our experts have taken best practices from service excellent experts and applied those strategies to the higher education environment. Part 1 of this course focuses on what customer service looks like in the higher education environment and how service excellence connects to student belonging and retention. Part 2 covers five steps of service that you can adopt into your operations and immediately implement at your institution.   Who Should Watch This video course will help managers and frontline staff across enrollment and student services build their higher education customer service knowledge and skills. This course will especially benefit you if you are a: Frontline service […]

4 Strategies for Closing the Coaching Gap for Mid-Level Academic Leaders

While executive and administrative leaders have had a longer history of working with coaches, there is growing awareness of the benefit to middle managers in higher education, as well. Mid-level academic leaders are often promoted to leadership positions with limited management experience and without the benefit of training and professional leadership development. Yet mid-level leaders face significant barriers to the use of coaching. To build leadership capacity at the mid level, it’s critical that senior leaders take action to address this coaching gap. To learn more, we turned to David Kiel, who worked for 15 years as a faculty leadership developer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is now a consultant to leadership development programs in higher education. Dr. Kiel has conducted extensive research on coaching in higher education, and the article that follows adapts and reworks material from an article the author published in the Journal of Excellence in College Teaching’s special issue “Coaching and Leadership in Academia,” James Sibley and Susan Robison, Editors, that came out in February 2018. The title of the original article is “In Search of Good Coaching for Mid-Level Faculty Leaders” (The full citation can be found in the reference section at the end of […]