Leadership Transitions Create Opportunities in Advancement, Speakers Say

Study: Presidential Pipeline Slow to Change

Internal Campus Relationships Can Strengthen Alumni Programs

Responsiveness is Key in a Crisis

Report Shows "Strong" Relationship between Education, Economic Prosperity

Mastering Donor Stewardship in the Digital Age

Creating Memories to Engage Online Alumni

Leadership Transitions Create Opportunities in Advancement, Speakers Say

Well-managed leadership transitions can create fundraising and engagement opportunities that will position the new president for success, according to two advancement leaders speaking at the recent CASE District II conference.

Daniel Helwig, dean of college advancement for York College, and David Beidleman, vice president for institutional advancement and community relations at Elizabethtown College, shared an outline of a presidential transition plan during their presentation, "Through the Transition: Managing Advancement Efforts through a Presidential Succession."

"When a president is leaving under positive circumstances, it provides an opportunity to lift up the president and lift up the institution," Beidleman said. He noted that fundraisers could explore naming opportunities, scholarships or ways to honor the departing president with donors—including trustees—who had strong relationships with or respect for the departing leader.

"You have to take the temperature of your leader and your volunteers to decide what's appropriate," Helwig added. He also advised fundraisers to set goals for closing certain gifts with the outgoing president to maintain a sense of purpose while his or her term is winding down.

Among the other advice offered:

• During a search, "everybody wants to share, to speculate, about the type of leader" the next president should be. Engage the campus community in the conversation and communicate frequently about the status of the search, even if some of the details remain confidential.
• Every president has champions and detractors. Use the transition to re-engage those who may have felt disenfranchised during the outgoing leader's administration.
• Plan for the new leader throughout the search process. For example, plan a year of introductions, lay out options for an inaugural, create a book of profiles on top donors and key issues, draft introduction letters and build a transition budget.
• Work with newly named presidents before they start so they can step into their roles well-prepared and make decisions quickly. Don't forget to engage the presidential spouse as appropriate.
• Celebrate the arrival of the new president with a press conference, articles in the campus magazine and introductory events with faculty, staff, students, community leaders, alumni, donors and more.
• Remember that it's natural for advancement staff to be anxious about new institutional leadership; model the behaviors you want them to emulate.

Study: Presidential Pipeline Slow to Change

A new study shows slight increases in the age and gender diversity of senior administrators in positions that often lead to the presidency.

On the Pathway to the Presidency 2013 examines key demographics of the most likely replacements of today's college presidents of whom nearly 60 percent are age 61 or older and nearing retirement.

Among a sample of nearly 150 four-year institutions that answered the survey in both 2008 and 2013, the following trends emerged:

• The share of senior leaders 61 or older increased from 21 percent to 26 percent between 2008 and 2013.
• The percentage of women in senior administrative leadership positions increased from 40 to 43 percent, overall. Today, women make up 49 percent of chief diversity officers, 72 percent of chiefs of staff and 36 percent of executive vice presidents.
• Overall, racial/ethnic characteristics of senior leaders remained the same.
• Among all senior administrative positions, colleges and universities were just as likely now to hire senior leaders from within as they were in 2008.

The study was a collaboration between the American Council on Education and the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.

Internal Campus Relationships Can Strengthen Alumni Programs

Strong relationships across campus can help alumni relations leaders be more effective and build internal support for the alumni relations program, according to two University of Rochester alumni officers who spoke at the recent CASE District II conference.

Kevin Wesley, assistant vice president for advancement and alumni relations, and Jennifer Linton, senior director of alumni relations operations and events, spoke about "Making Connections: 20 Campus People Every Alumni Relations Staffer Should Know" at the March 3-5 conference in Pittsburgh.

"Relationships matter," said Wesley. "Just as we're highly dependent on our relationships with alumni and donors, internal relationships can make or break what we do."

Wesley and Linton said it's important to understand the work of colleagues within advancement, including gift officers, members of the advancement services team and others whose work intersects with alumni relations.

Equally important are relationships with those outside of advancement, especially when planning on-campus events such as the University of Rochester's Meliora Weekend, which brings up to 10,000 people to 150 events on three campuses for three days every fall. Among the key offices to engage are:

• Student affairs, to collaborate on student programming
• Career services, to help serve alumni seeking new professional opportunities
• Facilities management, on building management issues, parking and other event-related issues
• Health services, for event-related medical emergencies
• Dining services, for on-campus catering
• Libraries, especially working with librarians in special collections who manage information about the institution's history, to help engage alumni returning to campus
• Information technology, to support the use of technology for events held in classrooms

Building connections before they're needed will help events run smoothly later, the pair said.

"Ask them what they do," Wesley said. "Explain what it is that you do. And ask them what the potential is for working together. You'll be surprised at the good ideas you hear."

Added Linton: "All of this will mean that they have your back when you need them," who added that her most important advice is to say "thank you."

Responsiveness is Key in a Crisis

The most common mistake institutions make during a crisis is not responding quickly enough to the media, says a communications expert.

"Often interviewees [from an institution in crisis] will miss a deadline either deliberately or unintentionally," says Tina Altieri, media specialist at Media Australasia Xchange. "It's important to act fast. The first 24 hours of a crisis is when people are looking to each other for answers, and at this point, you must be ready to respond."

Altieri notes that communications professionals don't need to have complete information about the crisis at hand before they speak to the media—they can simply talk about what they do know. This ensures that the institution will have a voice in the story, she says.

Viswa Sadasivan, chief executive of Strategic Moves, says there are three elements that are critical to crisis communications:

• Promptness. "Undue delay in communicating with the public could not only risk allegations of a 'cover up,' but it also denies you the opportunity to frame the issue in a manner that is more favorable to you," Sadasivan says.
• Sensibility. "Especially in a crisis, the communication needs to go beyond logic and rationality and address emotional needs such as empathy, vulnerability, anxiety and anger," he says.
• Ethics. This is "oftentimes the factor that tips the balance, so to speak, in crisis management," he says. "It deals with issues such as whether you are seen as doing the 'right thing,' having integrity, apologizing or pushing blame or accepting moral responsibility and doing it sincerely."

Sadasivan and Altieri will discuss planning for a crisis at the CASE Asia-Pacific Conference 2013, taking place this week in Singapore.

Report Shows "Strong" Relationship between Education, Economic Prosperity

Results from a recent research report reveal a strong relationship between education and a region's economic prosperity, providing a "compelling argument for strategic investments in higher education."

The report, A Matter of Degrees: the Effect of Educational Attainment on Regional Economic Prosperity, offers key policy recommendations for governments, educational institutions and businesses. These include: make higher education more affordable and accessible, increase higher education graduation rates and strengthen coordination between industries and higher education institutions.

 Key findings of the study include:

• Education increases regional prosperity. Adding one year to the average years of schooling among the employed in a metropolitan area is associated with an increase of real gross domestic product per capita of more than 10 percent and an increase in real wages per worker of more than 8 percent.
• Better educated workers equals bigger benefits. The better educated the worker, the greater the benefit of additional schooling to both the worker and the region. Add one year of college to a region's workforce, for example, and GDP per capita jumps 17.4 percent.
• Clusters count. In metros with clusters of high-skilled occupations, the share of workers holding at least a master's degree is much higher than in metros without significant clusters because of the intense competition for employment.

"Our research makes a compelling case that for America's communities, the returns to investment from higher education have never been greater," says Ross DeVol, chief research officer and one of the report's authors. "We pinpoint the value regional economies gain by adding better-educated workers and show that, as those around you obtain more education, their wages rise—and yours do, too."

Mastering Donor Stewardship in the Digital Age

Advancement professionals must determine their donors' wants and needs before using the latest digital communications tools in stewardship activities, says a CASE faculty member.

"I'm a huge advocate for surveying donors and talking to donors and asking them what it is they want and need," says Angela Joens, executive director of development outreach at the University of California, Davis. "I don't think in today's society we should guess... I think we can make generalizations, but to really be effective in our field, we have to know our donors."

Joens, who chairs the upcoming Annual Conference for Donor Relations Professionals, adds that institutions should carefully plan before using more direct email and social media tools to steward donors.

"The most important thing if you're going to grow your [digital stewardship] program or add new things is figure out how you're going to systematically do this and make sure you can manage it," she says. "Instead of saying we're going to send this [communication] out to everyone and we're going to do this every week, [you need to] really figure out if you can manage it at a small level."

Joens offers in-depth advice on using digital communications in stewardship activities—including several examples of successful efforts—in this month's episode of Advancement Talk, available to those with CASE premier membership.

Creating Memories to Engage Online Alumni

As online degrees become more prevalent, colleges and universities are engaging a new and rapidly growing pool of alumni. But how do you engage graduates who haven't created memories by experiencing campus life?

Andrew Morrison, alumni relations manager-networks and volunteers at the University of Liverpool in the U.K., is increasingly reaching out to this new breed of alumni. Liverpool enrolls 10,000 students from 153 countries in one of 23 online master's and doctoral programs. The university has more than 4,000 alumni from these programs, and that number is projected to triple by 2016.

For the majority of the university's online graduates, engagement begins with commencement. All online students are invited to the University of Liverpool to graduate alongside their campus counterparts, and between 50 and 60 percent of them participate in the ceremony.

Following commencement, numerous global alumni networking events—such as career-related webinars delivered via the online-learning platform used by online graduates—allow campus-based and online graduates to meet and join a diverse community. Morrison says that online graduates from countries in the Middle East, Europe and North America have assumed leadership positions in the university's various regional alumni associations and networks. An online graduate also sits on the university's alumni board.

Liverpool does not separate its alumni into campus- or online-exclusive associations, networks or chapters, says Morrison. "We believe inclusivity boosts engagement," he explains.

Read more about Liverpool's strategies for engaging online alumni in "Making Their Presence Felt" in the March issue of CURRENTS.