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By admin on
7/31/2006
For many months, over 2 dozen of your colleagues in the field of advancement and development services have been working diligently to form a new professional association that specifically focuses on who we are and what we do.
A mission statement has been drafted as well as an outline of goals. Several committees have been working on bylaws, marketing and branding, and various other issues. We've had initial discussions with existing professional organizations and have already approached CASE which yielded a very positive response. A second meeting with CASE leadership is scheduled for this October in Washington, DC. Some working committee members are involved with APRA and, in addition, we recently had a preliminary conversation with a member of ADRP.
But our efforts are just beginning and we now need your help.
A survey has been developed that we hope will tell us if we're on the right track and can continue to lay the ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
To a large part, the use of students for all sorts of data entry tasks can be substantially driven by budgetary resources and to some extent the political realities of an organization's budget process.
Many of us have worked/work in environments where there are simply not have enough staff to enter gifts and we are not able to increase the number of full time positions. Using students may be the only way we can manage. Alternatives might be to distribute bio and gift entry all over campus which would be more difficult to control.
With the proper training, student employees can easily achieve the same levels of accuracy as full time staff. You can also split the levels of donations into tiers and have stronger and compensating control mechanisms for major gifts or special donors. The same can be said for managing volunteers for these types of tasks, but volunteer management often takes more time in terms of recruitment an ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
Reponse to a FundSvcs listserv posting on some of the changing nature of Advancement Services roles and responsibilities.
If you haven't already done so I would recommend you take a look at the org charts available in the CASE Information Center; they have done a great job of collecting good examples and continue to hope more institutions will add to the pool. Some of what you are seeing - or hope to see - is reflected in many of the job opportunities now being posted for those in the area of advancement services. Most of the positions posted in the past month for AVP or Executive Director of Advancement Services at a number of institutions now reflect responsibilities which incorporate oversight beyond the gift and data processing, prospect research and even information systems which have been the more traditional domains of responsibility. Just a few examples:
Executive Director, Development and Alumni Relations Services; Universit ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
Very few organizations have an overall integrated approach to information technology, and this is particularly true of higher education. Even though the split between academic and administrative computing is less pronounce than it was in the past, we have evolved from the first users of computing technology to in a lot of cases, in terms of efficient and integrated approaches, among the last.
Most of us still don’t distinguish between student, faculty and administrative needs, and apply a global approach to all, rather than standardized systems using components depending on the target audience. While systems need to touch all areas, like an email system, they don’t necessarily need to touch all areas equally. The calendaring for administrative needs may be quite different in fact than the calendaring needs for students.
Advancement touches everyone in the organization at some point. Faculty staff, student giving, alumni relatio ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
Query or Question - give us everyone within (x) distance so we can plan an event.
1. Visit a web site and input zip codes to get back the distance:
http://www.simplyzipcodes.com/zipcodesbydistance.php
2. Use latitude and longtitude and a formula:
x := 69.1 * (lat2 - lat1);
y := 53 * (long2 - long1);
distance in miles = sqrt(x*x+y*y);
Where lat1 & long1 is one point say the event location and lat2 & long2 are those of an address.
3. For an even greater degree of accuracy, a stored procedure (Microsoft SQL server), that also considers the radius of the eart ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
Education, the Concepts of Transformation, and What is Community?
Thoughts about some of our common words ….
- Course – Continuous learning for everyone from anywhere in the world, anytime, anyplace. Through web technology, we can offer hundreds of thousands of courses. Lifetime classes without borders as an alumni benefit.
- Credit – History of online behavior and rewards systems for “good behavior.” Attendance and participation in class using an instant messenger program. Alumni rewards system for initiating and forwarding class notes in our online community.
- Curriculum – Training in philanthropy. Systems that initiate the communication between students and donors when students need to send a thank you letter for a scholarship.
- Colleague – Someone anywher ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
There are a few different approaches to video production and the subsequent deployment through a web site:
- Talking heads
- Interview and Response
- Video as a window within a screen, (screen captures with voiceover), and at the same time, so you can re-arrange the elements on the screen to present different points of information. This third approach is a hybrid, and is obviously a way to be more successful on the web.
Successful video casting combines interactive elements along with other screen elements to try and get the participant to interact. This is a step beyond a “traditional” approach to video, which is normally highly passive.
Production and post production needs to consider the workflow of the particular activity. i. ...
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By admin on
7/31/2006
Take a look at Boldly Brown, the campaign site for Brown University.
http://boldly.brown.edu/index_wmv.html
Good campaign site, with videos, podcasts, headlines and more provides an engaging page for understanding the campaign, the goal, and serving up interactive updates that help to entice the visitor to click and find out more.
The video on the opening page is a good example of a video piece inserted into a page in order to provide an instructional message that can be played while you’re reading some of the other materials. Also some good photo galleries of various events.
A good approach to what is convention (a campaign) for our industry, and our visitors. Something we readily understand and just need a little more information on. However conventional the topic though, the approach is quite modern. The Pod ...
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