Social Media and Student Recruitment

In student recruitment, social media tools present opportunities to extend your reach, but you’ll see the best results when you use these channels in ways that are both targeted and closely aligned with your communications in other media, with very specific outcomes in mind. Jason Simon, director of marketing and communications services for the University […]

Managing Your Institution’s Social Media Channels

Many of the institutions seeing the greatest success in leveraging social media communications to help boost strategic efforts in marketing and communications, student recruitment, and alumni engagement have actually invested relatively little budget and few staff to the effort. Instead, these institutions’ marketing and communications offices have focused on identifying and leveraging those social media […]

Course Materials for Mobile Devices: Key Considerations

In the past term, Duke University piloted a course in introductory chemistry that replaced the standard textbook and course materials with online, multimedia content collected by the instructor from open repositories, as well as materials developed by the instructor under creative commons. The content included video clips from recorded lectures, ePUB texts and PDF files, […]

Checking for Policies and Procedures that Impede Student Success

Last July, we interviewed a past college president, a current college president, and a vice president of student affairs, about the need to review and audit institutional policies and procedures that delay students in progressing toward their degree — and they had specific tips on where to start looking for “bottlenecks.” This week, we decided […]

Changing the Culture of Space Allocation

As more postsecondary institutions undertake space management initiatives, those tasked with such initiatives are finding that they face challenges not just in inventorying and benchmarking space utilization, but in grappling with a siloed campus culture and attitudes of ownership toward space. Yet if institutions are going to meet increasing and competing demands for more space […]

Strategies for Supporting a Diverse Faculty

While the diversity of undergraduate student populations is steadily increasing, faculty diversity continues to lag, especially in fields such as engineering and science. To see what could be learned from institutions that have made real strides in this area, we reached out to Wanda Mitchell, vice provost for faculty development and inclusive excellence at the […]

The Changing Shape of Title IX Compliance: Update

(A less detailed version of this article appeared in Higher Ed Impact in May 2011. This week, we returned to Title IX compliance experts Betsy Alden and Jeff Orleans to dig deeper into additional tips and strategies for Title IX compliance. At the end of this article, Betsy Alden also offers a Title IX primer […]

Proactive Approaches to Deferred Maintenance

YOU’LL ALSO WANT TO READ: Benchmarking Deferred Maintenance: A Recent Survey (May 2012)How Do You Make the Case for Funding Maintenance and Renewal for Campus Facilities? (May 2012) Many institutions of higher education are being squeezed between two pressures: a growing deferred maintenance backlog and increasing needs for capital expansion as they compete for students, […]

Engaging Future Donors While They Are Still Students

Amid the decline of state support for public institutions and a less forgiving fundraising climate, establishing a more reliable pipeline of invested donors is critical — and to develop a stronger donor pipeline, the key is to start earlier. Yet institutions attempting to raise giving rates for young alumni are often rebuffed. In a study […]

Reconnecting and Re-engaging Your Alumni

According to a national survey of higher education alumni conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving and presented to the Annual Giving Directors Consortium (April 2010), only 52 percent of alumni believe their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. This lack of engagement represents a significant impediment to […]