Encore and Live Q&A: Portfolio Prioritization: Maximizing Opportunities for Your Donor Pipeline

A portfolio is the engine that drives a gift officer’s work and sets them up for future success. However, for new or seasoned professionals alike, opportunities to look at your portfolio with a different viewpoint can be highly beneficial as you seek to understand your portfolio data and prioritize donor relationships. Additionally, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, institutions are facing a reset moment with their portfolios as they are able to travel again to meet donors in person. Join us for a re-airing of the training that took place in April 2022. You will learn how to identify key data points in your portfolio which you can then use to cultivate relationships with your donors and chart a path for success in your own portfolio management.  

Integrating Social Media into Your Solicitation Communications Plan

Now more than ever, it’s imperative to incorporate social media into your annual giving solicitation communications plans to meet donors where they are every day – online. Join us for a webcast that will walk you through how to successfully integrate social media into annual giving and curate a seamless donor experience across solicitation channels. Our expert instructor, Karalee Harhaji, will come ready to share her experiences across two institutions, Georgetown University and Catholic University, each with varying budgets and knowledge in making the move to social media. Regardless of what your current practices are, you will have the chance to visualize how you can craft an improved plan moving forward.

Starting a Women’s Leadership Mentoring Program

Co-Authored by Faculty and Staff at the University of IdahoVanessa Sielert, Professor and Director, Lionel Hampton School of MusicKatherine Himes, Director, McClure Center for Public Policy ResearchErin Chapman, Clinical Associate Professor, School of Family and Consumer SciencesKathryn Schiffelbein, Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Outreach, College of Engineering Starting a program of any type can be daunting. Doing so with little to no experience and resources may seem impossible. Yet the importance of this work and a shared vision brought us together to create a community for women to connect and thrive. We built the Athena Women’s Mentorship Program in autumn 2018 with the support of Athena, the professional women’s organization at the University of Idaho. The intent of the Athena Mentorship Program is to promote and facilitate mentorship for women and/or female-identifying staff and faculty at all University of Idaho campuses. The program graduated its second cohort in December 2020 and launched its third cohort in January 2021, fully online. The program follows a calendar year schedule, provides monthly formal gatherings and bi-weekly informal coffee chats for mentees with mentees and mentors with mentors, and requires that mentorship partners meet monthly based on their personal schedules. The year begins with […]

Student Affairs Fundraising: Building a
Sustainable Structure

Many student affairs leaders have executed small fundraising efforts; very few have a strategic plan to gain support that can sustain or grow critical initiatives. Join us online to explore a proven model for developing a systematized fundraising operation for your student affairs division. You will leave with considerations for: Identifying fundraising priorities Structuring your fundraising operation Setting achievable goals for your department Building cross-campus relationships to meet goals

Frontline Fundraising Essentials: Outreach, Qualification, Visits, and the Ask

As a fundraising professional, you may feel unsure of how to move a prospect forward. In the early stages, how can you get the prospect’s attention and ask questions that fuel your next moves? Later in the cycle, how can you assess motivations and strategize visits that will support your asks? Join us online for a 4-part online training series that will help you create rigor in each phase of your process and offer new approaches to raise more dollars. If the following statements from each phase of the donor cultivation cycle resonate, then this series is for you: Outreach – “Getting in touch with prospects and donors is so much harder than I thought it would be, especially without a mature portfolio. I need to increase my successful contact rates and secure more visits.” Prospect Qualification – “Qualification is tough. I don’t know how to do the right research or ask the best questions in order to get the best yield from a prospect. I want to know as quickly as possible if I should include this person in my portfolio or move on.” Visits – “I have plenty of wonderful meetings with donors and prospects, but they don’t […]

Partnering with Faculty in Grateful Patient Fundraising: Elements of a Training Guide

Faculty and development professionals must share a commitment to philanthropy in order for a grateful patient fundraising (GPFR) program to be successful. Building trust, respect, and rapport is best accomplished through a strategic process that involves educating and training medical faculty partners. When your medical faculty understands the “why,” the “how,” and the “what” of your GPFR program, it is often much easier to engage grateful patients and successfully close gifts. This training will discuss the essential elements of a training guide that development professionals should consider in their initial meetings with faculty as they begin a partnership in GPFR. Join us in this useful online training to deepen your capability as a gift officer in academic medicine and learn ways to successfully achieve buy-in from your medical faculty partners.

Overcoming the 5 Key Challenges to Sustaining a Positive Culture of Service Excellence

You’ve embraced the idea of enhancing customer service on your campus, you’ve provided training for your team, and now the hard part begins—maintaining momentum! This free webcast will discuss five key challenges to sustaining a culture of service and how you can overcome them. The five challenges are:  Join us for this virtual learning experience developed for higher education professionals who lead service efforts and supervise leaders on the frontline. Whether you are just beginning a customer service initiative or your efforts have lost steam, gain the insight you need to build momentum and increase customer satisfaction!  Watch our expert faculty talk about why getting customer service right is key in higher education:  

Understanding the Impact of Stress on Your Leadership Style

Academic Impressions’ Five Paths to Leadership® Assessment has been leveraged in our leadership programs for years; thousands of leaders in higher ed have benefited from this dynamic model exploring how one’s leadership styles manifest under normal circumstances and how they change under stress. Having a deeper understanding of your own leadership styles in varying situations increases your self-awareness, enhances your emotional quotient, allows you to more effectively plan, communicate, strategize, and ultimately, lead. Join us to learn what your own leadership styles are, how they might change under stress, and how this can apply to your team. Registrants will be given access to take the assessment ahead of the live workshop. During the workshop, we’ll walk through:

Evaluating Part-Time Faculty

Traditionally, most institutions have not made significant investments in either training or rigorous evaluation for contingent faculty. However, given the rising percentages of part-time instructors, it is increasingly crucial that deans and department chairs give thought to implementing evaluation methods that will encourage continued improvement of the quality of instruction in their adjunct-taught courses. For this article, we asked Richard Lyons, senior consultant with Faculty Development Associates and editor of the book Best Practices for Supporting Adjunct Faculty (2007), for advice on how to provide effective evaluation for part-time instructors. Find Effective Ways to Share Student Evaluation Feedback “First, get usable feedback in as many adjuncts’ hands as possible and as quickly as possible, preferably before the next term begins.” Richard Lyons, Faculty Development Associates Lyons stresses the importance of feedback from student evaluations speedily at the close of the term, as well as the importance of sharing them with all instructors, not just in cases in which a red flag was raised. Whether you are sharing these through a spreadsheet, through your course management system, or through some other tool, make sure that the sharing of evaluation data is systematic and that you offer guidance on how to interpret the […]

Improving Faculty Evaluations: A Training for Department Chairs

Faculty evaluations are one of the most challenging aspects of serving as a department chair. Emotions run high, performance rubrics aren’t always clear, and both parties may become defensive and react more than they listen. Still, these conversations don’t have to be difficult, and they don’t have to take a negative tone. They key is to develop an evaluation process that establishes clear goals, uses objective data to assess those goals, and allows you to treat performance-related issues before your annual meeting. Join us online to learn how to make your next faculty evaluation session easier and more productive by implementing four key steps: Goal Setting and Communication Using and Applying Evaluation Data Phrasing Comments Appropriately Delivering Feedback