4 Things Academic Deans Can Do to Help Students Succeed after Graduation

Why, you might ask, should academic deans add this concern about students’ career preparation to their already unmanageably long list of responsibilities? As leaders of the faculty, deans need to serve as the programmatic agents of implementing a holistic undergraduate education. And deans provide the essential perspective of someone who observes the connections on a daily basis between […]

End of Fiscal Year: Donors Don’t Care

As fundraisers, we’ve just concluded a period of hustling to wrap up the fiscal year: working with donors, securing final gifts, and planning for the new fiscal year. Amid all the rush of this work, it can be easy to lose sight of something key: Most donors give because they want to make a difference […]

Beyond Workshops: How RIT Incentivizes Faculty Development

by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions Competing demands on faculty time is frequently an obstacle to designing successful faculty development programs. “Events are not always successful because of people’s schedules,” explains Lynn Wild, Associate Provost for Faculty Development and The Wallace Center at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY. That’s why it is critical that […]

A Conversation in Fundraising We Need to Have

We asked Jason McNeal to share the philosophy behind his unique handbook and why he feels that training on effective contact reports can be – in the long term – a game-changer for development shops. An interview with Jason McNeal (Gonser Gerber LLP), author of  Writing Meaningful Contact Reports: A Handbook for Fundraisers. AI.Jason, thanks for this […]

Disintermediation: The Changing Demands of Alumni Relations

When I hear an alumni relations professional say that alumni relations programs have been disintermediated from their alumni, more often than not, I cringe. The theme of disintermediation, or the thought that social media and other technologies have decreased the alumni’s “need” for their alma mater, crops up often, and while it should signal a […]

Creating a Culture of Advisement: Engaging Faculty in Advising

Sometimes you don’t just need to change advising procedures; you need to change the culture of academic advising on campus. A few years ago at Ramapo College of New Jersey, our enrollment management division surveyed faculty, first-year students, and upper-class students to learn where students turned for help in making academic decisions as they progressed […]

Investing in Donor Relations for Athletics

As our colleges and universities venture to fundraise even more and more dollars, we must not overlook an area of support that brings many donors in our doors early on in their experience with us: athletics. At some institutions, athletic success can equate directly to donors and dollars, and at others it is part of […]

3 Ways You Are Mishandling Involuntary Leaves

Interview originally conducted in October 2014. Addressing issues of self-harm can be tricky and complicated for institutions. The complexities lie in the conundrum between providing appropriate support to students who engage in self-harming behaviors and complying with regulatory action propagated by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). To help your […]

Fundraising for Presidents, Deans, and Boards

An interview with James Langley (Langley Innovations) Recently, we reached out to Jim Langley, founder of Langley Innovations and the author of three bestselling Academic Impressions guides for institutional advancement: We asked Jim to share the philosophy behind these four unique books and what he hopes development officers and their partners on campus will learn […]