And Carrie On

I had the opportunity to attend CASE Summit this year in New York. The conference brings together senior leaders in the advancement field for several days of learning, engaging, and sharing.

After returning home, I had a few takeaways that I wanted to share that will help me in the coming year. In sharing ideas I like to work on a 2-2-1 model. It’s explained below, followed by my conference ideas.

Two Ideas Now

1. Narrative change – The first breakout session I attended was from Jason Simon from SimpsonScarborough. The session talked about the role of marketing, and how we should be change agents for our campus. In the questions, someone mentioned several of the recent studies about the drop in perception of higher education. Jason said sometimes we add to the narrative. We don’t do enough to talk about the good our university does in our community. We don’t emphasize how we’re making a difference to the business across town. We don’t highlight how we’re providing a pipeline for economic development. This message resonated with me. Moving forward, anytime I talk about the challenges, I’m also going to talk about the positive impact.

2. Change how to ask questions – In the first opening plenary session, Daniel Pink talked about strategies to build better engagement with our teams and our colleagues. He suggested when we ask questions, we should avoid asking “why” questions and instead focus on “how” and “what”. His reason is that questions that begin with “why” naturally put people on the defense, so we should instead ask questions that open the door for continued conversation. Easy adjustment to implement.

Two Ideas in 6 Weeks

1. Schedule time to casually connect – I live and die by my calendar. If it’s not on my calendar, it doesn’t happen. Period. When I met with the amazing Terry Flannery over coffee, she encouraged me to keep pushing myself to get to know my team better and make sure that was a priority. She challenged me that if it was important to me, I should put that time on my calendar to make sure I prioritized it. While not difficult, I don’t know why I’ve never thought about it before. Anyways, that’s something I’m going to tackle as the new year begins.

2. Find ways to operationalize work across all districts – While not part of Summit per se, I am on Chairs Council, and I saw all of the districts are doing incredible work. However, several of the things could be operationalized across all districts (and even globally). A new to advancement cohort that aligns with the conferences or a senior leaders that aligns with the conferences would be great places to start. Seeing the work that’s happening got me thinking there’s no reason our districts can’t collaborate on some of these projects to make them a priority for all, to ensure the programming is the same, and to incorporate the global perspective into the work.

One Big Picture Idea

1. Campus safety – I sat in on a fantastic and transparent session about campus safety. It reminded me of the value of doing this work. We are working on our campus crisis communications and revisiting those plans and processes. That work had already begun, but it this session reminded me to not let the busyness we find ourselves in distract from doing this work. It will take time to do this work and do it right, but our students and community will be grateful we’ve revisited it should we ever face some sort of crisis.