Advancement Survival Guide: Currents Nov 2015

SMALL-SHOP ADVANCEMENT

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E D I U G CEMENT OFFICE N A V D A P U T R A T S A CREATE ELL THE TALE —AND SURVIVE TO T

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By TARA LASKOWSK

Fiona McQueen knows what it feels like to

become a director of advancement at an institution that has no significant history or culture of fundraising.

When she began her tenure in May 2013 at St Andrew’s College, a residential college at the University of Sydney, no staff members were dedicated to advancement. The institution’s foundation and alumni society were run largely by volunteers who loved the college but lacked the time or expertise to manage their programs.

McQueen set a lofty goal: to improve the philanthropic culture at the Australian institution and build a consistent giving platform—in just 18 months. It would take small but significant steps to make that happen.

Institutions with large advancement teams and a rich giving culture set annual giving goals of millions of dollars. McQueen’s AU$30,000 goal her first year (a little more than $21,000 in U.S. dollars) might seem humble, but at about three times the budget for the program, it felt like the right amount. “Several members of our board wanted to reach higher—AU$50,000 or more—but they were just throwing out numbers. None of us knew,” she recalls. “The most important thing to me was for us to reach our goal, whatever it was.”

When the institution raised AU$65,000, the college’s stakeholders celebrated, and McQueen sighed in relief.

Fiona McQueen

“It gave us the confidence to continue the path,” she says.

A year and a half later, McQueen more than tripled the money raised in previous years; doubled alumni, parent, and friend engagement; created an alumni and community magazine; and is assisting with a AU$100 million master plan. She talks with CURRENTS senior editor Tara Laskowski about the strategies and tactics she used to transform the giving culture at St Andrew’s.

MCQUEEN’S SURVIVAL TIPS How to Stay Calm at a CASE Conference

How to Host a Great Event After a Red-Eye Flight

1. Take furious notes about an amazing program.

1. Clear your schedule the day before

2. Wonder, without curling up under your chair: How did the presenter develop branding, publications, events, and a

do not want to try to remember details about spouses’ names or

3. Chew on a pencil and think, “Video? How in the world can I do video?”

4. Drink a glass of wine during the cocktail hour.

3. Hydrate, caffeinate, hydrate. Repeat.

5. Realize that she has a larger staff, and you

4. Get to the airport early. Better to be sitting at the gate (with time

are not Superwoman.

for last-minute planning or phone calls) than sitting in traffic

6. Regroup, adjust, and roll out

grinding your teeth.

your program in stages.

5. Designate a special bag, folder, or pocket to stash all business

7. Realize you are, indeed,

cards and other important documents.

Superwoman.

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graduation years in the cab on the way to the venue.

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6. Wear comfortable (though stylish!) shoes.

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phone-a-thon all on her own?

the flight so you can relax and store energy—you’ll need it.

2. Do donor research before the visit, and commit it to memory. You

SMALL-SHOP ADVANCEMENT

When you arrived at St Andrew’s, you were a one-woman show. Now you have two other staff members. Why take a job with such a small shop?

My first job in advancement was serving on the research team in the advancement office at Monash University in Australia. They were preparing for a campaign and centralizing advancement at the university. It was a team of 30, and my enduring memory is of listening to a major gifts officer and an alumni relations officer discuss an alumnus they each wanted to cultivate. They’d been contacting the alumnus separately, and he was a bit confused by the different communications. It was a strange disconnect between two areas dependent on each other. I knew then that I wanted to work on a smaller team where we could better communicate and have better relationships with our alumni. I also wanted a job where I could try a bit of everything.

Why do you say philanthropy rather than fundraising?

Philanthropy focuses on the whole relationship, and fundraising is just one aspect of that. Giving in all forms is valuable and should be acknowledged and celebrated.

When you’re on a small team serving a small community, it’s difficult to separate out the different types of

giving, whether it be volunteering time, providing expertise, giving smaller gifts to the annual giving appeal, or offering a major gift.

Your 18-month goal was ambitious. How did you roll out the plan?

I based it on the program at the University of Melbourne’s Ormond College, where I used to work. Not everything translated from one college to the next, but the basics—an annual giving program, a biannual publication, alumni events, and stewardship events—were easy to replicate.

Two years in, people are seeing the method to my madness. For the first six months, I would frequently say, “Trust me—this will work,” which was difficult for people who wanted to secure big gifts quickly.

I also had to think long term. It’s tempting to create something temporary and change it later, but sometimes you can’t unravel what has come before. So I always thought: What will this look like five years from now?

How will this work if someone needs to run a report on the data we’re collecting now? Will future directors of advancement curse the day I was hired? I didn’t have to undo much to get the program started, but I always knew that I was laying the foundation for what I hope will be a permanent program.

How to Build Support for an Official Philanthropic Culture at Your Institution

How to Survive Day-to-Day Life in a Small Office

1. Don’t assume stakeholders know what advancement is. Keep educating

1. Keep a two-column to-do list that focuses on

them about what you do. That satisfying moment will come when a

delivering the plan and enables you to say no to the

stakeholder quotes the “importance of reporting to donors to show the

ideas or suggestions that do not fit your overall goals.

impact of philanthropy and building trust” right back at you.

2. Don’t overpromise. It’s tempting to say you’ll deliver big results early to

Refer to it often.

2. Take your colleagues out to lunch—you’ll learn their

try to gain support, and to say yes to the big ideas to keep stakeholders

favorite television shows and weekend plans, which

happy. However, it’s been my experience that it’s better to have small

will help you understand how they think during

wins and build confidence in your programs.

3. Celebrate your small wins. It’ll be a long time before you have a big one. There were days when I would celebrate that I had created a new form or invitation for an alumni event.

those long strategic meetings.

3. Two words: ear buds (or a white noise machine).

4. Manage the day-to-day work while keeping an eye on next week, next month, and next year.

5. Make a pot of tea.

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What has been your biggest challenge?

What to Do When a “Dead” Alumnus Turns Up at a Reunion 1. Greet the uninvited alumnus warmly when he arrives at the reunion while trying frantically to remember why you didn’t invite him.

2. Hide growing horror behind a big smile as it dawns on you that he was on the deceased alumni list.

3. Apologize profusely for the error and laugh (in relief) when he jokes that “news of my death is greatly exaggerated.”

4. Update record in the database (wondering how many more live ones are in there).

What was your first priority?

Since the college wants to raise $100 million for a master plan, we need to communicate with alumni.

We can’t raise money if people don’t know what they’re giving to. I started to send out a rather crude e-newsletter to alumni—really just an email with updates about the college. In 2014, I received a more structured budget for my programs and with the help of a graphic designer, created an alumni eNews using the email marketing platform Campaign Monitor.

About 40 percent of alumni read our messages.

We had an event in Melbourne soon after rolling out our revamped e-newsletter, and alumni told me they were getting quality news from us and felt more connected with the college. One alumnus said it was nice to hear from the institution without being asked for money—ouch!

A biannual publication, Blue & White, highlights more of the day-to-day life of St Andrew’s—sports, academic programs, culture, and other things alumni remember from their time here. We also discuss our new strategy and how the master plan fits into it; the impact of giving; and reports from the president of the alumni society, the chair of the foundation, and our senior student (president of the Students’ Club).

We’re now talking about the need for philanthropic support, in general terms, and I think people are comfortable with that.

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About a decade ago, the foundation raised AU$1.9 million for a new 35-room building. It was the first building project undertaken by St Andrew’s since the 1960s. Unfortunately, the focus was on getting the gift, and our volunteers didn’t have the time or resources to steward donors. We’ve since rectified that with a proper donor-focused stewardship program that links donors with students and the college in a more strategic way—such as asking scholarship recipients to write thank you notes to their benefactor. Stewarding our donors is now an important part of our program.

Administratively, I identified early on that I would need a new database. The one I am currently (yes, still) using doesn’t handle events or donations properly. It is good for the immediate relationship while students are in college, and it has an alumni module, but it can’t manage long-term relationships or prospect management. Our donor and prospect lists are stored on Excel spreadsheets. Don’t get me started on how inadequate, frustrating, and inefficient this is. We aren’t able to do year-to-date comparisons of gifts, because the month that some of our gifts were received wasn’t always reported. We can’t accurately track which alumni have attended a specific event every year because that information is scattered across different versions of RSVP lists. Most embarrassingly, when I published a new philanthropy report earlier in 2015 that supposedly listed all our donors, I found that there were gifts that had never been recorded.

A new database is a big spend for us, though, and it has taken 18 months to get the funding. My whole team is looking forward to getting a new database called Synergetic in January.

How do you host effective events on a small budget?

Existing donors are most likely to give again. So I used already-established events to invite donors back, like our Founders and Benefactors’ Chapel Service and Dinner where we publicly thank donors, focusing on a specific benefactor each year. We also had a AU$2 million bequest from a donor, and I organized an event to name a new building after him, inviting all the building’s donors to the unveiling. One donor said he’d been invited back to campus more times in one year than he had in the previous 20 and was really enjoying it.

SMALL-SHOP ADVANCEMENT

I also combine programs whenever I can. Our institution’s leader, Principal Wayne Erickson, travels to rural and regional government schools to boost applications, and I’ve booked alumni events in those same areas. I also try to run an alumni event whenever I travel interstate or overseas.

BIG ADVICE FROM OTHER SMALL SHOPS

What are some unique challenges about higher education advancement in Australia?

USE THE MANTRA “NICE, NEEDS, NUTS”

Many alumni, particularly from the 1960s and 1970s, went to university for free (or cheaply) because of generous Commonwealth scholarships. That’s not the case now, and those alumni don’t always understand how expensive it is to go to university or that we need funding to support our projects and programs.

A small staff means everyone has to do everything, right? Rank the menial (but essential) tasks in order of your most to least hated. Go.

I wouldn’t say hate! But I’ve done more than my fair share over the years of: Name tags, data entry, name tags, stuffing envelopes, name tags …

I believe you do what you need to do to get the job done. Unfortunately, not everyone has that mindset.

I went through two advancement officers in six months—one lasted two weeks. Even though they said they didn’t mind doing administrative jobs in the interview (and I was clear about how little structure our program had) and that they could cope without a database, it turned out to be difficult for them. I heard “But that’s not my job” more than once. They had come from larger organizations with more structure and defined roles.

I got creative and created two roles—without any more funding. I established one junior role and one part-time senior role so I could afford both staff on what was effectively one salary.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

I’m getting to know some of our alumni. It’s nice not to be introducing myself for the first time, all the time. I love meeting so many interesting people who share a passion for St Andrew’s and higher education.

It’s always a pleasure to hear their stories (and antics) from their time at the college. C

Prioritizing is a must for Tisha Bruemmer, alumni advancement coordinator at Good Samaritan College of Nursing and Health Science. When deciding to do an event, Bruemmer and her other two team members at the Ohio institution determine if the program would be pretty cool to implement if they had the budget (nice), if it is essential to their goals (needs), or if it would just cost too much money, time, and manpower (nuts).

ASK STUDENTS TO ASSIST Alumni volunteers are useful, but students can help keep donors happy and coming back. Bruemmer’s office invites students who have won scholarships to call alumni at a thank-a-thon program.

They do not ask for gifts during the calls but offer a quick thanks for the alumni support and a story about how the scholarship helped them. “It has been tremendously successful and helps bring donors back again and again,” Bruemmer says.

DOUBLE-DIP To get the biggest and best events, combine resources with other departments. Danielle LaPointe, director of advancement services at National Louis University in Illinois, hosted an MBA networking program that served both enrollment and alumni relations. At Good Samaritan, Bruemmer checks the closets of other departments (with permission, of course) to see if she can repurpose any centerpieces, tablecloths, or other decorations.

EMBRACE THE UPSIDES OF TINY It’s easier to communicate and gather together to work on a project when fewer people are involved, Bruemmer says. LaPointe agrees. “We do not work in the silos that tend to occur in larger advancement shops. Important projects quickly become ‘all hands on deck’ endeavors.

It can be stressful at times, but we have all

Tara Laskowski is a senior editor for CURRENTS.

grown to be well-rounded professionals.”

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