Archives: Courses

Integrating Guided Pathways and Learning Communities to Enhance Student Retention

Many institutions have turned to guided pathways to increase retention and generate momentum for a degree path among their students. Other institutions, meanwhile, have offered learning communities (LCs) for years, in the form of residential LCs, linked-course communities, residential colleges or coordinated studies programs, as a way to develop a sense of community and foster collaboration between faculty and students. However, few institutions truly integrate the two to create a degree path that intersects learning community coursework with core and major curriculum while extending learning beyond the classroom. As students increasingly question the value of a college degree, using both strategies in tandem can show students how their entire college journey contributes to their future goals. Join us for an interactive two-hour virtual training on integrating guided pathways and learning communities as a way to boost student engagement and retention. Our accomplished speakers, Dr. Richie Gebauer and Dr. Michelle Filling-Brown from Cabrini University, will guide you through establishing a shared purpose that drives the integration of guided pathways and learning community efforts while also addressing challenges that may arise in the marriage of these initiatives. You will further learn why integrating the two can work in your institution’s favor and […]

Positioning Your Leadership Annual Giving Program for Continued Success

As you work to strengthen your leadership annual giving program, it is imperative to build internal partnerships that will support and complement your work. These sessions will therefore focus on building relationships with internal partners and enhancing connections between your leadership annual giving efforts and your entire advancement team. You will learn how to quantify and present your program to upper-level management in a way that best positions your program for additional investments and support. Our expert instructor will help you to prioritize your efforts and design a long-term plan for maximizing your program’s effectiveness.

Considering Communication and Stewardship in Leadership Annual Giving

Communicating the purpose of your leadership annual giving program should be a thoughtful and strategic process to build both donor loyalty as well as your donor pipeline. This session will help you to define specific communications and stewardship strategies for your leadership annual donors. Our expert instructor will also offer ways to build effective communication strategies that outline and emphasize the importance of leadership giving. Particular attention will be paid to young alumni, social media, and making a compelling case for support. You will also learn how to build an impactful stewardship program to ensure that you not only retain your leadership donors, but also retain and upgrade them successfully.

Developing Essential Fundraising Skills for Leadership Annual Giving

To be an effective leadership annual giving officer, you must gain the skills for achieving and managing personal visits. First, you’ll learn how to set goals and metrics, then you’ll learn to identify the necessary legwork to cultivate donors for this type of solicitation. Our expert instructor will focus on teaching the fundraising skills necessary for obtaining donor visits, ensuring that visits are productive, and creating a culture that promotes buy-in from those future major donors. There will also be roleplay opportunities to help you put the content into practice.

Identifying Your Leadership Annual Giving Goals and Pipeline

A leadership annual giving program will not succeed unless it is strategically aligned with your overall annual giving program. Having a clear vision and plan for optimizing your leadership giving program is essential, and this training will help you to understand how leadership giving can—and should—work to deepen donor relationships and help you to exceed your annual giving goals. In this training, you will explore different leadership annual giving recognition clubs and society models, and also learn about the methodology of giving structures and how to determine alternate models of recognition. You will identify the individuals you should be soliciting as leadership annual donors and learn how to manage each donor effectively in order to match their interests to their highest potential.

Strategies to Strengthen Transfer Student Enrollment and Success

Strategies to Strengthen Transfer Student Enrollment and Success November 1-3, 2022 Learn the immediate steps you can take to improve your transfer student pathways and retention. EVENT INFORMATION ENSURE YOUR TECHNOLOGY IS READY This workshop is intentionally designed to allow for maximum learning, connections, and engagement. We advise the following in order to participate fully: Audio & Visual Needs

Managing Difficult Faculty and Staff: A Bootcamp for Leaders

Managing Difficult Faculty and Staff April 5 – 26, 2023 Individual Sessions Dates: April 5, 12, 19, 26, 2023 Important Links Contact Moira Killoran to learn more. Welcome! This bootcamp will teach you how to intervene and correct problematic performance and behavior within your team. Over the course of four weeks, our expert instructor will walk you through a four step, increasingly authoritative model that is intended to engage, set expectations, communicate consequences, and minimize the ill effect of bad behaviors on others. You will also be able to workshop strategies with your peers and discuss real challenges that you are facing. If you have any questions, please contact Sarah Adams, Learning and Development Manager at AI. Mark Your Calendars Session 1 | Engagement  April 5, 2023 | 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET  Session 2 | Management  April 12, 2023 | 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET  Session 3 | Enforcement  April 19, 2023 | 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET  Session 4 | Marginalization  April 26, 2023 | 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. ET  Ensure Your Technology is Ready This workshop is intentionally designed to allow for maximum learning, connections, and engagement. We advise the following in order to participate fully: Audio & Visual Needs

Using Neuroscience to Engage Your Team Through Change: A Training for Supervisors

Currently within higher ed, we are experiencing significant, rapid and frequent changes. “Change” is no longer a temporary state of being — it’s become a continuous part of our everyday operations. It should be no surprise these days, therefore, that we may often experience our teams resisting or burning out from constant change. As a supervisor, this can be especially challenging since your role is to motivate, empower, and retain your talent. The bad news is that we’re all hard-wired to resist change at a neurological level because our brains subconsciously perceive any change as threatening. The good news is that, with new insight, you can leverage change as an opportunity to engage or re-engage your team. Join us online to learn how neuroscience — specifically, the SCARF model — can improve the way you communicate and engage with your team during changes big and small. You’ll learn how to recognize behaviors that signal that your direct reports are feeling threatened by change, and we’ll also discuss why that happens. More importantly, we’ll examine ways you can respond and modify your own behaviors to create a psychologically safe environment — one where you minimize perceived danger and maximize reward.

Create Meaningful Volunteer Opportunities for your Major Donors

Leadership volunteers can help to advance your institutional goals not only through their major gifts, but through their ambassadorship as advocates of the mission you convey, and by opening access to opportunities as well as leveraging expertise and input that only they can provide. However, if you don’t have a defined objective on what these volunteers can help you to accomplish as part of your fundraising strategy, you won’t have the momentum required to achieve the fundraising outcomes your organization desires. Layering a leadership volunteer’s time and effort into a capital campaign or major initiative is accomplished by developing an engagement plan that aligns their core passion with your fundraising goals. Once you have them on board, creating a meaningful experience worthy of their time can then lead to lifelong engagement and sustained success. Join us at this live event and learn how to approach and manage leadership volunteer recruitment and sustainable engagement for major donors while cultivating these relationships as a central part of your fundraising strategies.

Key Considerations for Strengthening Prospect Management and Gift Officer Collaboration

The relationship between prospect managers and gift officers is critical for portfolio optimization in advancement shops. It is the responsibility of advancement leaders to assess and strengthen collaboration between these roles in order to have a high-performance team that is able to strategically engage with donors. Join us as Cheryl Cerny, Associate Vice President for Advancement Operations and Campaign Director at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, discusses how empowering prospect management and fundraising staff and using strategic questioning throughout the donor cycle can have a positive impact on your donor relations experience. By reflecting on relevant examples and engaging in small-group discussion, you will walk away from this training with useful ideas and strategies for strengthening this important collaborative relationship in your shop.   Who Should Attend This training is designed for advancement staff who directly or indirectly supervise gift officers and/or prospect management staff, or those with direct supervision of a donor relations team. If you are an advancement leader who is hoping to empower gift officers and prospect managers to help them achieve the best in their work, this training is for you.

Using Storytelling to Bolster Unrestricted Giving

Unrestricted funds are an asset to meeting institutional needs, but they are not always easy to acquire based on donor understanding or personal interests. Successfully soliciting unrestricted gifts requires advancement professionals to know how these funds will positively impact the university experience for a variety of constituents and how to tell those stories in ways that will inspire donors to give. Join us for this interactive virtual training to learn how Kim Bowden, Vice President of Annual Giving at Georgia Tech, leads the Roll Call team in using storytelling to meet fundraising goals for their unrestricted annual fund. You will identify campus relationships that can help you to better understand how unrestricted gifts are used, consider your donor audience and what types of stories may resonate within it, and leave with storytelling ideas that will bolster your unrestricted giving.

Taking a Student-Centered Approach to the Probation Process

One of the biggest potential roadblocks in a student’s college career is being put on academic probation. The probation process can feel defeating and overwhelming to students, and when it happens, they may choose to leave the institution altogether rather than navigating the challenge. However, the probation process does not have to seem punitive, and it can ultimately lead to students feeling more empowered to succeed as long as they feel they are supported and given the tools to navigate the process. Join us for a 90-minute virtual training on reimagining the academic probation process in order to take a more student-centered approach. Our expert speakers, Laura Donaldson and Samantha Nielsen, will walk you through the creation and implementation of a probation process program in Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. This voluntary process centers the student experience by allowing advisors and students to create individualized plans to help the student get off probation successfully, while also addressing the non-academic barriers students encounter that may have contributed to their academic struggles. Laura and Samantha will share several valuable resources and considerations to keep in mind when starting a program of your own, as well as […]

Engaging Meaningfully with First-Generation Graduate Students to Increase Retention

While institutions today are getting better at recognizing that first-generation undergraduate students face additional barriers in navigating college, they still often expect first-generation graduate students to know how to overcome those barriers. Yet first-gen graduate students can still experience a variety of unique challenges – both personal and academic – that create additional roadblocks to their success. For instance, many first-gen graduate students may face a lack of understanding from family members while also having to navigate building social capital with faculty in an entirely different way. As graduate enrollment increases, faculty and staff working with graduate students can best support those students by understanding the additional challenges first-gen graduate students face. Join us for a 90-minute virtual training on what to consider in working with and mentoring first-generation graduate students. Our expert, Dr. Zaragosa “Mito” Diaz-Espinoza, will help you to recognize the struggles faced by first-gen graduate students in navigating such hurdles as a changing family life, the transition to graduate school, resource constraints at institutions, and making academic and professional decisions. You will have time to share what you yourself found challenging during graduate school and reflect on how that might be compounded for first-gen students. You will […]

A Cohort-Based Series for Academic Leaders: Faculty Affairs Roundtable

A Cohort-Based Series for Academic Leaders: Faculty Affairs Roundtable In-Person and Virtual Sessions To facilitate community and trust-building among the cohort from the get-go, the roundtable will kick off with a half-day in-person strategy session in Denver, Colorado on Monday, October 24. Six weekly, hour-long virtual sessions will follow, running from October to December. Session 1 (In-person): Monday, October 24 2022 12:00 – 5:00 p.m. MT (local time in Denver, CO) Virtual Sessions | 12:00 – 1:00 p.m. ET. October 31, November 14, 21, 28, December 5, 12, 2022 Login Starting On: October 31, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. ET JOIN ZOOM MEETING Full Event Information VIEW EVENT PAGE Including: Agenda Overview Speaker Bios Prepare for the Workshop This workshop is intentionally designed to allow for maximum learning, connections, and engagement. We advise the following in order to participate fully:

Culturally Responsive Customer Service: A Holistic Approach to Student Retention

Service excellence requires an ethic of care and cultural sensitivity that recognizes students’ strengths and unique backgrounds to allow you to meet them where they are. Combining these two approaches into a culturally responsive customer service initiative allows an institution to provide holistic support throughout students’ academic journey, which in turn has a direct impact on retention, persistence, and overall student success. Leading this training are our subject matter experts, Dr. Jessica Lauritsen from Hennepin Technical College and Ivan Lui from The Brooklyn Bridge Alliance for Youth (BBA), who are experienced in successfully implementing a culturally responsive customer service initiative to increase student completion and persistence. Here, they will share their learnings and practical tips for how you can get started with: Understanding initial research on your institution’s student persistence and completion. Assessing the readiness of your institution and its leadership capacity for such an initiative. Using a “serving students” lens to reframe the conversation around intercultural development and cultural competency. Building a sustainable service excellence and retention initiative.

Intentionally Build Your Executive Presence

Executive presence is an amalgamation of your emotional, aesthetic, and communication behaviors, and it influences your ability to successfully grow as a leader. While your accomplishments, expertise, and experience are the bedrock of your career, building skills to enhance your executive presence can further support your professional reputation and growth. This workshop will help you to identify strategies to enhance three facets of your executive presence and build them into your daily routine. Through a mix of reflection, discussion, and content delivery, we’ll explore questions like: How do you navigate challenging situations, considering your internal emotional response as well as how you express those emotions outwardly? Does your communication style—both verbal and written—convey both your expertise and your emotional intelligence? Do your actions align with the leadership qualities you wish others to experience when working with you?

Writing Workshop for Advancement

Writing Workshop for Advancement November 1 – November 2, 2022 Strengthen the voice and consistency of your communications to donors and alumni. EVENT INFORMATION ENSURE YOUR TECHNOLOGY IS READY This workshop is intentionally designed to allow for maximum learning, connections, and engagement. We advise the following in order to participate fully: Audio & Visual Needs

5 Principles of Effective Leadership: A Bootcamp for Leaders at All Levels

5 Principles of Effective Leadership: A Bootcamp for Leaders at All Levels April 5 – May 3, 2023 Individual Dates: April 5, 12, 19, 26, and May 3, 2023 Welcome to the course page for your bootcamp! More information will be added as we get closer to your event, so please check back soon. Important Links Contact Moira Killoran to learn more. Welcome! Thank you so much for joining us on your leadership development learning journey! Over the course of these five weeks, you will learn from our expert instructor as well as from your peers and be given the valuable opportunity to apply what you are learning in real time. The bootcamp provides a rich variety of opportunities for you to connect with a small cohort of attendees as you work through the various exercises. Our hope is that you will walk away having thoroughly explored and developed your leadership skills through reflection, discussion, and application. Pre-event assignment For our first session, please be prepared to share your favorite leadership quote during introductions. If you have any questions, please contact me: Katie Ribas, Program Operations Manager at Academic Impressions Mark Your Calendars Module 1: April 5, 2023 | 11:00 […]

A Masterclass in Discovery Work

Discovery work is an essential part of the fundraising process because it’s your first access point to learning how to optimize a potential donor’s philanthropic interest. Refining your approach and strategy is a great way to continue gaining confidence in your ability to be conversational as a fundraiser. The ability to ask insightful questions that keep prospects and donors talking and sharing will ultimately lead you to align your donor with the best possible opportunity for their philanthropy goals. Join us in this online training to deepen your skillset around discovery work and improve upon your first impression as a representative of your organization. Go into donor conversations equipped with the right questions to ask that will build trust and enable you get to know your donors more intimately.

Advancing Your DEI Strategy Across Viewpoints

Leaders of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are continually charged with spearheading initiatives that require them to navigate critical conversations with stakeholders who may have divergent or even radically different views and opinions than their own. In some cases, these views can run counter to the goals of the initiative at hand. In these possibly contentious spaces of dialogue, you might wonder how you can: Employ effective communication strategies to maximize participation from all parties involved; Model the process of becoming partners and encourage open and honest dialogue; or Work to flip the lens by engaging key supporters and minimizing negative voices. This one-day virtual training is designed to help leaders who are advancing equity and inclusion efforts on their campus to better identify and apply effective communication strategies to move conversations forward. The workshop will help you to keep your work “values-focused” by avoiding pitfalls and demonstrating how to lead openly and courageously.

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