Category: Blog

The Strategic Planning Implementation Clinic

by Patrick Sanaghan

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 […]

Bootcamp for Academic Advisors: The New Skillsets

When training academic advisors at your institution, don’t overlook the relational and interpersonal skills that make great advisors. by Benjamin Forche, Academic Advisor, Patton College of Education, Ohio University, Joe Murray, MSHR, Director of University Advising Services, Florida Atlantic University, and Karen Thurmond, Director of Academic Advising and Degree Planning Resources, The University of Memphis with Daniel Fusch, Director of Research & Publications, Academic Impressions While many institutions provide technical and university-specific advisor training, the relational and interpersonal skills that make great advisors are often overlooked. After research in current theory on advisor skillsets for the twenty-first century, we reached out to three expert academic advising directors who bring both a deep knowledge of theory and a “from the trenches” perspective to the table. We asked them for this interview. Q. How is the 21st century academic advisor skillset changing? Karen Thurmond. This question may best be answered by defining 21st century academic advising. I have used the phrase to describe academic advising that contributes to student success by employing all the resources at our disposal. These resources include preparation in the form of advanced degrees that focus on academic advising as an academic and professional discipline (not available until this century), enhanced research activity in academic advising, […]

5 Reports Every Enrollment Manager Should Read

by Daniel Fusch, Sarah Seigle Peatman

by Daniel Fusch and Sarah Seigle, Academic Impressions As we start the new calendar year, it’s an excellent time to step back and read ahead. What is the newest data on college enrollment and student demographic trends? On financial aid? On retention? On international students? Because we know you’re busy, we’ve taken a moment to curate a quick list of five of the most impactful reports we’ve seen recently. If you only have time to glance at a few, we recommend these: 1. Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates WICHE The sharp decline in births during the great recession will result in a fall-off in the number of students graduating from U.S. high schools starting around 2024, and the percentage of lower-income and nonwhite students will increase. This report, published in December 2016, provides a 47-page executive summary of findings followed by a series of highly useful high school graduation projection tables—broken down by region, state, and ethnicity–through the year 2032. 2. Yield Rates are Declining–Why? Academic Impressions Colleges nationwide are suffering from declining yield rates, and everyone wants to know why. Here, Jon Boeckenstedt provides an interactive dashboard that gives a different and deeper view […]

5 Articles Everyone in Your Annual Giving Office Should Read

by Gwen Doyle Herbert, Daniel Fusch

As we start a new year, and as many shops are starting planning for the next fiscal year, there continues to be a pressing need to strengthen the donor pipeline, and often annual giving is under increased pressure to build this sustainable pipeline for future philanthropic efforts. Consider the example of Michael Bloomberg, who gave just $5 his first year after college graduation, and gave $300 million this year to Johns Hopkins. From an analysis of major gifts across hundreds of institutions, Langley Innovations found that the average time between a donor’s first gift of any amount and their first major gift is 25 years. Major gifts are most often the culmination of years of consistent philanthropy. Yet many shops continue to pursue the same techniques year after year, with lackluster success. The five articles below challenge that habitual thinking and invite a closer look at different aspects of successful annual giving efforts. We invite you to read these articles and use them as discussion starters with your colleagues as you open the new year. 1. Looking at 2017: How Annual Giving is Changing As we contend with “dollars up, donors down,” it is time to go beyond the basics of annual […]

Best of AI: 11 Recorded Webinars

  Here are a few samples from our digital library of hundreds of higher-ed professional development webinars and recorded online trainings. You might know Academic Impressions from our comprehensive library of complimentary articles, papers, and reports or from our higher education professional development conferences and workshops. What you may not know is that our small program development team of less than ten researchers and program managers also provides 200 online trainings each year: webinars designed to tackle specific problems facing higher-ed professionals and delivered by hand-selected experts with a track record of having confronted these challenges. We wanted to highlight some of our most popular recorded trainings for you, and provide four complimentary samples for you to peruse and learn from. All of the webcasts below are available for purchase in full as digital recordings. Below, you’ll find information about — and free samples from — popular online trainings in: Academic affairs Advancement Enrollment management Finance & facilities Higher-ed leadership Student affairs You can also review our full library of digital recordings here – or find out how staff across your institution can get unlimited access to the library with an annual membership. ACADEMIC AFFAIRS 1. Faculty Civility and Academic […]

The Small College Turnaround: Counter-Intuitive Lessons from the Success of Anoka Tech

by Donald Lewis, Julie Myers

with Daniel Fusch and Amit Mrig contributing (Academic Impressions) The Story: A Remarkable Turnaround Anoka Technical College recently instated an annual collaborative budgeting process that took the college from a projected $1.4 million operating budget deficit over two years to a $500,000 (and growing) operating surplus. The process by which we did this was counter-intuitive and unusually inclusive. There are some key takeaways for other institutions. The Context: What Anoka Tech’s Budget Looked Like in FY2013 Prior to the arrival of the current president and chief financial officer, Anoka Tech’s executive leadership had a long history of managing the college’s finances with limited transparency. The operating budget was managed by the president and the CFO with occasional input from a few deans. Few stakeholders were invited to the table, and there was little communication about how decisions were being made or how the budget was handled. Upon arrival at the college in 2013, President Kent Hanson and CFO Don Lewis recognized that Anoka Tech had an acute need for a more sustainable financial model, namely: On top of this, we inherited an approved $17.5 million operating budget for Anoka Tech with an end-of-the-year projected $400,000 deficit. To turn this situation […]

Leveraging a Donor Network to Fund Innovation: Lessons Learned from the Success of the Jefferson Trust

by Daniel Fusch

University budgets are tight, so how do you set aside funding for innovation? Here’s one strategy from the University of Virginia, which has issued 141 grants in a little over a decade to fund strategic projects at the institution. In an earlier paper, we highlighted several distinct approaches institutions had taken to setting aside funds to pursue innovative, growth-minded strategies. Some advocated the rigorous discipline of setting aside a percentage of operational budget each year to allow the institution to take calculated risks on new projects (this infographic summarizes the approach); others suggested the power of a president’s network of donors who give specifically to an innovation fund. One well-known variation on this second approach is the University of Virginia’s Jefferson Trust, which has issued 141 grants in a little over a decade to fund initiatives and programs of strategic interest to the institution. Though unique in its structure, much of UVA’s model is replicable for other institutions. To learn more, we reached out to Wayne Cozart, the executive director of the Jefferson Trust, in the following interview. An Interview with Wayne Cozart Daniel Fusch (Academic Impressions). Wayne, it’s wonderful to talk with you again. Can you tell me a […]

3 Ways to Rethink Career Services and Post-College Outcomes

by Lisa Cook

Tracking post-college outcomes continues to be an urgent issue as students, parents, and lawmakers press colleges to quantify the value of a college degree. Tracking results, however, is only half the battle, says Branden Grimmett, associate provost for the Office of Career and Professional Development at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.  Institutions that want to make a difference in their post-college outcomes need to transform their career services to better meet the changing needs of students and employers. Grimmett led the transformation of career services at St. Olaf College at the highly acclaimed Piper Center for Vocation and Career. This June he accepted a position at Loyola Marymount University, where he will re-imagine their Office of Career and Professional Development. We talked to him to learn more about why institutions need to re-envision their career services office now, what revamped programming looks like, and what steps you can take to take to move the process forward. Career Services Restructuring Needs to be Done Now Grimmett lists four reasons to reinvent campus career services: Awareness, engagement, and reputation are just as important as knowing where students land when they graduate. At St. Olaf, the economic turbulence between 2007 and 2009 […]

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

by Patrick Sanaghan

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 […]

Checklist: Regulatory Compliance for Your Advancement Shop

RECORDED TRAININGS ON REGULATORY COMPLIANCE FOR ADVANCEMENT PROFESSIONALS Academic Impressions and Alan Hejnal are offering these online trainings on for advancement officers: U.S. News: Accurately Calculating and Reporting Your Alumni Participation Numbers FERPA for Advancement: Train Your Whole Shop   Today’s challenging fundraising climate is requiring development officers to interact with more professionals across the institution — often with departments and staff members who have not worked with development before. As the number of individuals involved in fundraising activities increases, it is critical to ensure that your shop has clear policies and practices in place for ensuring regulatory compliance in a variety of areas. Advancement services consultant Alan Hejnal offers as an example: “If an academic unit that has never worked with development before now decided to put on a charity golf tournament, it’s important to ensure they understand the policies for providing goods and benefits, and how these are valued.” As you plan and review for the next year, this is a good time for your shop to update policies and practices that can help ensure tax code and FERPA compliance. We asked Alan Hejnal, who has more than 20 years of experience in advancement, to offer his updated checklist for […]