Collaborative Programs

2010 Circle of Excellence Awards
Judges Report

The new category of collaborative programs received 34 entries focused on a broad range of activities, from fundraising to alumni engagement to increasing visibility to event planning. The category is designed to highlight creative partnerships across the advancement disciplines or between advancement offices and other campus offices.

Most entries didn't make the cut for one or more of these reasons:

• The projects they described weren't truly "collaborative partnerships across two or more institutional departments" as described in the entry requirements; instead, they reflected one department working across campus or with multiple audiences toward a departmental goal
• The collaboration was simply a group of individuals from various departments doing their day-to-day jobs, conducting business as usual on routine projects or programs that would normally require them to work across departmental lines
• There was limited evidence of results, and the judges wanted to know more (although, in one case, a promising program was undermined by a massive entry with so much minutia that it became difficult to find and focus on the substance of the program)

The entries that stood out were truly collaborative and creative in nature, connected to institutional mission, and effective in the engagement of target audiences. Judges were especially impressed with entries that engaged advancement offices with academic units. The two gold winning entries reflected very different programs, one new and one recurring. All three of the winners, including silver winner Tufts University, focused on alumni engagement in very different ways.

Gold: Drexel University for the Community Alumni Network (CAN DU). Judges were impressed by a cross-campus partnership that involved organizing volunteer alumni, students and friends in the revitalization of a public, inner-city elementary school. The volunteers turned an overgrown courtyard into a teachers' garden and a non-working library into usable library space. The project was driven by the university's government and community relations office in collaboration with the alumni association, athletics, and academic and other departments. The CAN DU program, which takes on a different community project each Earth Day, is an excellent collaborative model connecting an institution, its graduates and its community.

Gold: Villanova University for the Villanova University Summit on Leadership. Villanova's first two-day summit on leadership brought together a select group of 100 alumni thought leaders with university administrators, faculty and students to discuss the "DNA of Tomorrow's Leader." The event attracted, engaged and brought visibility to high-profile graduates who might become further engaged with the institution as it plans an ambitious capital campaign. Judges note that the program provides an excellent example of integrated advancement at its best: all of the advancement units contributed to the development and delivery of the program, and the initiative further connected the work of advancement to the academic leaders and mission of the institution.

Silver: Tufts University for Tufts' Online Seminars. Judges felt that Tufts' new webinar series, designed to provide a cost-effective and simple method of stewarding leadership annual fund donors to four of the university's schools, was an excellent way to connect with alumni in their own homes or offices, allow them to interact with top faculty, and see how their philanthropy is making a difference. Alumni could participate in faculty-led webinars on topics related to nutrition, international law and even "Law & Order: What Really Goes on at Crime Scenes, Police Stations, and Courthouses." The connection of donors to the academic mission of the institution was effective, with 100 percent of respondents indicating that they are likely or very likely to participate in future webinars.