So, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Monique Crochet. Again, Cajun. I am from Louisiana, Tivita, Louisiana, and my title is I'm an Executive Director of Advancement and Community and Government Affairs, and I'm super excited to welcome you to our District 4 Deep Dive, and it's Developing the Board Your Institution Needs. Today's session came from the excellent case conference for community college advancement last fall, which, again, I was a part of, and most of our material presenters will be discussed today can be applied for beyond community college. I promise you, what they tell you today is going to be able to go beyond just community college, whether you're a frontline fundraiser, a volunteer manager, a marketing communications professional, or anyone who works with the foundation, nonprofit, or college, professional leadership board, this session is for you. Before I introduce our two great presenters, I have just a couple of housekeeping items. First, we hope that you'll ask a lot of questions. Please do so by dropping your questions into the comment section, and we'll try to get to them as many as we can towards the end. I will be looking for those while Catherine and Gretchen speaks. Keep an eye on the comment section, because I'll be dropping additional links and information there throughout the presentation, which is going to include our next community college conference, which is going to be in New Orleans, Louisiana. Yes. Just a reminder, this presentation is being recorded, and everyone who registered will receive the link. What I found out is it's going to be the same link you received today to join this. We're hoping to post within the next 48 hours. Just as always, CASE has a learning management system, LMS, that has all the recordings in there, which is a great asset for us to have. Finally, if you experience any technical difficulty, please feel free to reach out to me directly via the chat feature. Again, my name is Monique Crochet. Now, quick introduction of our presenter today. Ms. Catherine Sawyer is the Chief Advancement Officer and AVP for Marketing Communications for Oakton College in Illinois. She is responsible for the college's marketing communications functions and serves as the Executive Director of the Oakton College Educational Foundation. Before Oakton, Catherine was the Executive Director of Elgin Community College Foundation and Associate Executive Director of the Harper College Educational Foundation, in addition to holding development and marketing roles in the corporate role. So, she brings a lot of good mixture. Ms. Gretchen Wood is Vice President of Institutional Advancement for Monroe Community College and Executive Director of the Monroe Community College Foundation in Rochester, New York, which, by the way, it is snowing there today. There, she oversees a number of departments and facilities and a comprehensive fundraising program led by a volunteer board, which I'm shocked at this, 57 business and community leaders. Gretchen is also the past Chair for the Case Mid-Atlantic District Cabinet and is a Certified Fundraising Executive, so CFRE. So, without any more introduction, I will let Catherine and Gretchen take it away. Thanks so much for joining us, too. Thank you, Anique. We really appreciate the opportunity. Catherine and I have had the chance to get to know each other through Case over the years and learn from each other. Next slide, please. And we've presented a couple of times together last fall specifically regarding how to build the board that your institution needs. So, we have a few objectives that we hope people are taking away from this conversation. We're sort of at different stages and different sizes, so I think it's a nice juxtaposition of our two institutions that people can get some nuggets that really fit their space right now. We always learn from others when we engage with these professional opportunities with Case. And we hope that you have a chance to take a couple of things away that are going to help you to strengthen your work with your board, with your governance. Catherine's been doing a great job with governance structure at her institution and really overall enhancing effectiveness in fundraising programs. So, next slide, please. Beautiful. So, we thought we'd start off by telling you a little bit about our institutions and our foundations so you have a sense for the context that we're each working in. We're similar in some ways and very different in others. So, Oakton College is 55 years old. We're in the suburbs of Chicago, so right in the Chicago land area. If you've flown into O'Hare, you've been within miles of my institution. We serve about 450,000 residents and about 25,000 businesses in our district. We have three campuses, a flagship campus on the west side of our district, a secondary campus kind of in the middle, and then we're just about to open a third location, a health careers center on the eastern shore of our district. In total, we enroll about 6,200 credit bearing students, about 14,000 in total on campus every year if you include adult basic ed all the way through continuing and lifelong learning. The foundation has been around for 48 of those 55 years, so we weren't started immediately but came on about seven years after the birth of the college. We have about $20 million in assets under management, at least the last time I was willing to check. These last few days have been a bit of a wild ride, but I hope we're still hovering in that area. About a third of our assets are endowed and this is the crazy thing, 40% of our assets are unrestricted, which is almost unheard of. So I feel very privileged to have inherited this very healthy organization. I have eight staff members, including myself, that focus on the work of the foundation. The college pays for all of them, but we help to underwrite the equivalent of about two FTE through a grant that goes to the college. So we're all employees of Oakden. We have an MOU with the institution that talks about roles and responsibilities, but the foundation, as we've tried to build capacity, has started to underwrite part of that cost of employment. I do report to the president of the college. Our MOU has been in place for just a few years, but is working very effectively and we discuss it often. We have engaged in an active strategic planning process, not only from the college, but also a follow-on plan for the foundation so that we can lean into the college's direction and priorities. I have 24 voting directors currently and five liaisons. We divide across five working committees. As I mentioned, we're in a very strong financial position and we've been doing a lot of work in governance. Over the last seven or eight years since I've been with the foundation, we've just been building the foundation of the foundation. Previously, we were more minders of these assets, but we're starting to pivot now that we have the governance pieces in place to becoming finders. That's a whole different outlook and culture for my board as they come alongside of the professional fundraisers to participate in that process. Gretchen, I'll hand it to you. Yes. I also report directly to the president. We've had an MOU in place, as you can see, for some time. We point out that we report to the president because I don't know how many of you participate in the Voluntary Support of Education Survey, the VSE, that CASE facilitates. That's an annual survey around fundraising performance. From that data, CASE helpfully gleans some things that certainly I've found useful in my career and in my leadership of the foundation. One of those is some best practices of high-performing foundations. At the top of that list is that connection to the president and the leadership of the college in order to have a seat at the table. I'll say another aspect of the VSE that I find pretty helpful is that CASE does a nice job of connecting you with peers that you might not be aware of nationally. That's an opportunity to connect and understand, for example, their organizational structure. What are they doing? How are things working for them? We also have regular communication between our foundation directors and our college trustees. We have one social engagement a year that they're all invited to, but the foundation and in particular the chair of the foundation reports on the activities of the foundation at every trustee meeting. That's been an important connection for them to understand the importance of the work of the foundation and the role of the college. The foundation played a role, and directors and volunteers and donors played a role, in the development of the strategic plan for the college and then vice versa. When the foundation was going through that strategic planning process, it's obviously directly tied to the priorities of the college, and we're having the college's voice at the table as we're developing what's going to guide the foundation's work. This slide says 59 directors. We have 57 currently, to be accurate, but we're on our governance cycle, and we're going to talk about that a little bit. We, too, have a healthy endowment. I don't know if anybody's satisfied and says, like, that's all we need, but we have about 30 million dollars in assets. We are a semi-independent foundation. I think that, what's the phrase? You know one foundation, you know one foundation, because they can be structured so differently, but we at Monroe, the foundation reimburses the college for the salaries and benefits of all of the foundation staff. We have a team of 12, so I'm the only one whose salary is covered by the college, and so there are pros and cons to that. I think that pros being that we have some autonomy to, you know, make some decisions for the foundation, and our directors can make decisions for the foundation specific to staffing, independent of what might be happening at the college at one time, any given time, but we also have to always bear in mind that we have that obligation in terms of reimbursing the college for any staff. And yes, we have, we're starting in a silent campaign, so you know, don't tell anyone. Next slide please. Always the best kept secret. Yeah, exactly. So in terms of our foundations and sort of the governance or the expectations of board directors, Gretchen and I do a number of similar things, and we also do a few different things, and so we thought that this would be helpful, because every time she mentions the size of her board, I have to catch my breath. It just terrifies me to think about having to support a board that size. Nonetheless, my board does have three year terms, and they do have term limits, and so if a director is invited back to serve a successive term, they can serve up to three consecutive before we ask that they take a year off. And for some, that's more than enough, and they're happy to move on from there. We might consider them as a director emeritus if they've distinguished themselves during their time of service. For others, they're not done with us, and we work very hard to find meaningful work for them to do, a project to participate in, or a special activity during their gap year before they return and we invite them back for another series of terms. We do recruit year-round, so a board member can join us at any time. We don't have any one set time of year, and we have a very thoughtful process in which we do that. We call it we're dating. We want to do some matchmaking here. We really want to make sure that we're not rushing into anything, that we get to know them, that they get to know us, and we share expectations of what this is going to be like, feel like, look like, so that when they do become a member, they're prepared to serve in the ways that we need to and that will bring them joy. We do have an onboarding or orientation process, so for a new board member, we spend time with them before their first quarterly board meeting, giving them an overview, talking through what the work of the board will be and some of their next decisions. We also assigned every new board member a mentor, and that's someone who's been on the board usually for a second term or longer, has some experience on the board to come alongside them in their first year of service. Every two years, we do a board assessment survey, so this is really sending a survey out to the whole board to talk about how is the board functioning as a group, do we have good board hygiene, does everyone understand the mission, are they attending meetings, does the chair lead the board and the board meetings well and effectively, all of those kinds of things. Even their assessment of me, they provide feedback to the president on my performance and their experience with me as their ED, and then are they leaning into the strategic priorities the foundation has set for themselves. And then in terms of board expectations, we always set the table by saying if you love the work of higher education and you are philanthropic and you know or want to come to know us, then it's probably a good fit. What we ask of you is that we're in one of your top three philanthropic priorities during your time on the board. We do have a giving expectation annually, but we also ask board members to consider making a major and or playing gift during their terms of service, and then that they're actively participating in the work of the board. Gretchen. Okay, so we two have three-year terms, but we don't have term limits. So I have people who have been on the foundation board for decades, and that works for us because we have a strong governance process and we have conversations when it's become apparent that something has changed and somehow it's not working in someone's, you know, things change in life, right? Your job, your move, you know, family situations. So sometimes it turns out that it's not the right mix, but we've had some wonderful longevity and have found great value in that. We're always looking at having our board be, you know, reflect our population and so working on having, you know, more female members, have more diversity in general. We also are looking at the diversity of areas of expertise and fields of industry. So when it comes time for our one governance meeting a year, we come to that meeting having looked at attendance, having looked at all of those things. Where do we really, where can we see some opportunity to connect with a community that, an aspect of the community that's not yet, you know, as fully engaged, you know, do we need more people from the tech sector, for example? So I mentioned it's the one meeting because we do accept nominations year round, but we come together, our governance committee, you know, in the cone of silence for our one meeting to talk about who of the people who have been recommended we want to move forward with having conversations with. So we develop a short list and have that blast by our executive committee and then go forward and start having those conversations. We also obviously need to see who's renewing because that gives us a sense of how many seats we're going to have. 60 is really kind of our high watermark and we need to really keep an eye on the number to ensure that it is not getting unwieldy because we don't want to in any way diminish the experience of our volunteers because I think that would then start to really erode the whole culture of the foundation. You know, what's working is that our volunteers are engaged, they like to come to the meetings, they like to see each other and they like to be active and hear about what others are doing and also hear that we're sharing what they're doing. We too do an in-person orientation. We do our assessment. We're not as on top of it as Catherine. Ours is every five years. So we're in the midst of it right now. But I do meet personally with every member of the foundation board of directors so that I can have an understanding of what their experience has been, what ideas they have, what suggestions. Are they hearing enough? Are they being asked to do enough? We do make clear in our governance process what the expectations are. So they receive it orally and then also in writing. We do ask for an annual unrestricted contribution of at least a thousand dollars to support other of our events as they are able. We ask them to consider a major gift, land giving. We have a variety of committees. What we don't have is a development committee. So every, because this is a fundraising board, everybody's on the development committee. What we do is really work with them to find out where their area of comfort and strength is so that we can utilize that, have them open some doors that we're not able to open on our own. And it's, again, it's working for us. We raise about $6 million annually and it is directly attributed to the engagement of this group of volunteers. So next slide. Again, we make it very, very clear what the expectations are with regard to fundraising. And we also take the time to understand where their strengths may lie. And also this is a volunteer role. We want them to have some fun too. We don't want to assume because they're an accountant that they want to be on the finance and investment committee. We'd love for them to be on that. But I share that example because we had a volunteer that we assumed that that was the role he wanted. And then we learned that he had a rock band and he's on our gala committee and he brings a lot of fun to things. So I think it's really important that we're making sure that this experience is one that is, Catherine talked about being one of your top three. I think our volunteers have to really want to be part of this and wanting to be part of it is making sure that we're listening and we're working with their strengths in order to be able to move the priorities of the college. So, Gretchen talked about ways that board members want to be involved in the fundraising process. As we've been working to adjust the culture of our board to lean into this idea, you can imagine that it's been a little unsettling for some who didn't have this expectation before. And so we've tried to break that down to say, there's just like we all have different personality types, there are lots of ways that you can help us that advance our work in fundraising. All of you, in fact, are already investors this last column on the right. And so thank you for the commitment that you've already made to our institution. And we appreciate your doing that, but there are other ways. If you are a convener or a doc connector and wanted to invite guests to the college for a tour or to our donor appreciation brunch, or even a small gathering with our president to learn more about the institution, we would love to engage you in that work. If you're a facilitator where you wanna connect us with your place of business or review prospective lists of supporters or make some stewardship phone calls, how fun is that to call someone to say thank you? We would be happy to engage you in that work. And if you wanna really be behind the scenes more as a thought partner, review some of our materials for us, give us your first impression as some of our most closely held friends, that's a way you can help us too. And so we know everyone fits in at least one of these categories and many will often fit in more. And I think that this has made it a very approachable way for our board to start thinking about themselves as having a role in the fundraising process. For new board members, we talk about this matrix in our orientation meeting and make note of the things that they say that they'd be comfortable doing so that staff can engage them in those ways. Each year, we also have, like Gretchen does, we call them leadership listening meetings. So I meet along with one of our board officers with every board member to talk about their experience as a board member over the last year, things that brought them joy or filled their cup, ways that they might want to expand. Might you be a future board leader, a committee chair, et cetera. Expand their engagement with us and any changes they might wanna make as well as feedback that they have. And so this is a chance for us to talk about these four things again and just make sure that we're leveraging them in the ways that they find most meaningful. Next slide, please. So I mentioned no development committee. And that doesn't mean that we expect every volunteer to go and ask their friends for $20,000. Some wanna do that, which is great. And so we work with them on that, but there are also all these other ways. Catherine mentioned the thank you calls and notes. It's just a really fantastic way for particularly newer volunteers to be able to get comfortable with having these conversations. And obviously what we glean from those really helps us in order to consider our next steps with donors. We have events and it's another wonderful way for our directors to have a really kind of simple way to invite some friends to get more engaged by hosting tables. We have a breakfast or lunch with the president on campus twice each semester. So our volunteers, our directors can know that at any point when they meet somebody in the community and think, oh, you know what? You might wanna hear more about what's happening at Monroe. They can say, you know, I'm gonna invite you to a breakfast or lunch with the president on campus. And there's no ask there. It's usually 12 to 15 people. Sometimes it's industry specific. Like we might have everybody's involved in HVAC around the table, but oftentimes it really more reflects the breadth of the scope of a community college in a community. And it's a listening. You're getting to hear from the president what some of the top priorities and the work that's being done on campus. But it's also an opportunity for us to hear from these pockets of the community about what's important, what their needs are. And I can't recall ever hosting one of these and not having some good connections come out of them. They might be new donors, they might be new directors, but it's again, a really low stress way for our directors to invite people from their network to come and learn a little bit more. We have people host small events in their home or their office, again, a great way for them to show that they support the college. And our foundation team does the work for these things, which I think is really important. Our volunteers know that the team of the foundation is always gonna make sure that we're taking care of all the details and the speaking points and the invitations, and we always are gonna make them look good. One of the things we do is what we call fill the pipeline breakfast once a semester. And this is just an opportunity for our directors to come together and brainstorm some people that we might wanna get engaged in some way. Our foundation team will come with some names of people that we would like to get closer to, get to know, have some sort of connection to be able to invite them to engage in some way. So it might be that a director says, oh, yeah, I know Sue, I could invite her, or I know Sue, but I also know Bill, and I think he would really enjoy this. So it's, again, a really low-key way for people to be engaged in the advancement process. We are always looking for opportunities to have personalization. I think we know that peer-to-peer connections are really help in terms of how we're developing relationships with our donors. I think that's a really, actually, that's a good point that I should have mentioned earlier. In our governance process, it's always peer-to-peer engaging with prospective new directors. It's not me as the executive director calling up and say, hey, your name's been mentioned, and I think you would be great. We work to find who's the right person to reach out, somebody they respect, somebody in the community that has had some experience with the director, so that when the director says, this is a meaningful opportunity that I think you might be interested in learning more about, I think that carries a lot of weight and helps us to be more of the destination board that we've become because of these peer interactions. And then we look for opportunities to be able to offer some little things for some of our higher level donors to be able to have some connections with students or experience locally. We don't have a lot of that, but it's certainly something that we keep our eye on. I will just mention before you continue that the idea of this president's breakfast, I've heard Gretchen talk about before, and I'm totally stealing that. It's copy and share everything. So as we start our fall semester, we are already planning in our calendar a fall and spring president's breakfast. So it is copy and share, and thank you Gretchen for sharing your good idea. We also at every board meeting share our dashboard and our executive committee meeting. So we have budget goals for the year and we think it's really important to keep that very specifically in front of our directors so that they can see where we are because this is all reflective of their good work. And I think an important part on here is we always have 100% board giving to our annual fund. And so this is a good tool to be able to have, director might see that they're like, oh, there's 14 people that haven't yet done like, oh, I wonder if that's me and offer the opportunity to follow up and make sure that we continue that streak of 100% board giving. We also like to have that board total. So there's the annual fund total, but there's also that bigger total about all projects that board members have directly impacted that fiscal year. So this is something that they can expect. They know every single, every meeting that this is something they're gonna see and be able to track our progress or times when we're a little bit stuck. Next slide. And so I'm also working, we have a report that we share with our board, but right now it is an eye chart and I think it's more meaningful to staff than it is to the board. So I'm working on a visualization of the key points of that data so that the board can better keep track of where we are and how they're contributing to success. So another good takeaway. As we think about recording and reporting engagement, we're asking our board members to do all these things, attend committee meetings, attend board meetings, invite people to the donor brunch, participate in our annual appeal asks. One of the things that we wanna do is be able to record that collective participation and report it back out. And so we do report the participation and the total giving to the leadership giving campaign each year. We also report total board giving. So we have a campaign in which they're asked to make an unrestricted gift, but we also know that many of our board members are extremely generous through their own resources to other things that are meaningful to them. Starting a scholarship, growing a scholarship, supporting a particular student success fund. So we give them a sense of that. We also share attendance. What does the average attendance look like for a committee compared to their own attendance, which might give them a sense for, am I leading the pack? Am I pulling the average down? Am I engaged in the way that I promised that I would be? And we're starting also now to look at activity reports. We're a Razor's Edge house. And so we do a lot of call reporting through activity reports and Razor's Edge. We've now put on all of our board members as fundraisers. They will never see Razor's Edge and then they'll never be in Razor's Edge. But if they come along to a meeting with us, if they introduce us to a new prospect, we want to, in our own call report, give them credit for that so that the end of the year or the end of the quarter, we can show not only our activity as a leading indicator based on call reporting, but also the level of engagement where board members have been participating in those things with us. Okay, so how are we helping our volunteers to develop in terms of becoming the ambassadors that we know they can be? We always have a student speaker at our board meetings and at each of our, we have three major events in each of our events. And I 100% sure that's why they come to the meetings because they're each, you all have these outstanding students. I mean, no story, no two stories are the same. It's such a remarkable, they can see the impact of their dollars on these students and walk away every time just, I can't believe if this person hadn't had this opportunity, what a waste that would be. So that's really important for us. We also, at the beginning of our board meetings, we have four a year, we always start with some kudos about any recognition that our board members have gotten in their field. So the Rochester Business Journal has named the top power 100 and we list those board members there. So we're really working to develop that community too amongst our directors so that they know we see them and recognize them as leaders and appreciate their work that they're doing really throughout the community helping us to link to it. Because of the size of our board, the bulk of our sort of discussions, anything that's a little bit meatier really happens at the executive committee level and we do an executive committee retreat in the summer where we're gonna offer a deeper dive into topics that are pertinent. We're starting to think about this summer's, there's many, many ideas about what might be of interest as a deeper topic. But that's how we approach a retreat. What we balance that by for the larger board having at least one of our board meetings a year have a good data focus so they can hear exactly what, who are the students, what are the students needs and the most important part, how is their work impacting student success? And finally, what does the college need from us in order to continue to move that needle? Because it's really rewarding when we say, oh, so we awarded $1.6 million in scholarships last year and what a difference that made 70% are needs-based but we still were only able to award a third of the applicants who are eligible for the scholarship. So we know that as a foundation, we've got work to do. Catherine, you have things you wanna add here? Yeah, I would just say, I would echo all of these things that Gretchen has mentioned. I do think we have a mission moment at the top of every one of our board meetings where we have a student come and share who they are, what they're studying at the college and what their aspirations are and how their scholarship support has helped them along the way. And indeed, really, really impactful moments. And I think that the board members then take those stories with them out into the community. Every week, I also send my board members at one o'clock every Thursday, an update on what's happening. Things for their calendar to make sure that they're keeping track of or actions that we're asking of them. I'll highlight a few of the top gifts that we've received in case they know any of these community members or organizations and can express their own. Thanks on behalf of the board. And then we also share another student's story with a picture. And so they go into their weekend armed with some good information to be good ambassadors. Like Gretchen, we have an annual retreat for our board. We usually do that in the fall. And the topic is driven off of what's next on our strategic plan and what is it that we want to accomplish together. It's usually a four hour session on a Friday morning. But the other way that I work to develop my board leaders is by taking them to the AGB Foundation Leadership Forum. So I love, love CASE. I feel like I owe my career to CASE and I take my own team members to CASE conferences regularly to develop their own expertise and advancement and fundraising. But I feel like the AGB piece is really board development for my board. And I attend with them because there are a lot of four years there. So I have to work to translate. Here's what you're hearing, but it has helped me move the needle so much. And so the board out of their own resources sends three people every year along with myself. My president attends most years as well and it becomes a really valuable strategic time for us. So I've talked with you about this move that we're making from minders, this cultural shift to finders. Our retreat last fall was about storytelling. And so we had a wonderful facilitator come in from the Chicago land area who really walked the board through a conversation about their role in storytelling. This is more than an elevator pitch. Please don't memorize and regurgitate our mission at a cocktail party. What we want you to do is take the things that have touched your heart, your reason, your why for being involved with us, and then be great ambassadors about that in your circles in the community. Become advocates for the college and for our students. And if you're comfortable where you're comfortable, become askers alongside us. Please don't run out there with your handout and ask someone for money. We are here to support that work with you. But our goal is to become a triple A board. And so we also then had a joint retreat with the college governing board and talked about this idea of storytelling and looked at we're all, both the foundation board and the college trustees, are ambassadors and advocates for the institution. And then the foundation board, here's where some of the difference in the role comes. Although we're happy if they want to help us in this work as well, our askers can help us grow financial support for the institution. I really like this also because I think as foundation leaders, we always have to be thinking, what does a foundation board need to hear, to know about what's happening at the college? We each have our lane, our foundation board's not making decisions about the operations of the college. But I try to always think, if I was at a cocktail party and somebody said, oh, I heard Monroe's enrollment's gone down. That's the kind of thing I want my directors to have just those basic things. So we have this challenge with enrollment, here's what's happening, or we are building this new facility or whatever it might be. So it's really high level because we don't want to take up the precious time we have with our foundation directors to be all about the activities of the college because there's a lot that happens at the college. But I do try to think about what are those high level things that I would want to know about if I was a volunteer at an organization. And so other ways that we engage our board, again, when Catherine and I did this in person, it was a little bit more interactive. So it's a little different when it's on the screen. But at Monroe, we have the salute to excellence in which we give our salute to excellence, which is our philanthropy award to an outstanding philanthropist, whether it be a foundation, individual, business, we also induct four alumni into our MCC Alumni Hall of Fame. And this is a heavily director engaged event so that they're on the stage, they're introducing, they're hosting tables, again, a way for our directors to really be able to be hooking into their networks in the community and be able to help to highlight again, the wide role of our college in the community and be proud of their role in it. So I think we're at the end here and we can go to the very exciting thank you slide, but we offer the opportunity if there are questions or ideas that you wanna share, because again, we're always trying to learn here too. There are some questions in the stream. They are, I have them. Yeah, I have them written down. So I'll go ahead. Again, thank you. I know we're not wrapping up. We have a couple more minutes, a few more minutes left, but let me go ahead. I wrote the questions down. And so let me just find my little page and get there. The first question that was asked, and I think that this was even asked at the, because I saw these two lovely ladies in the fall last year Gretchen, someone asked kind of like what I thought of is without term limits, do you ever run into issues with working to address or adjust board composition to reflect population? Because you don't have term limits. So I think that's more geared towards, yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, it's a good question because it's not, this particular year, I mean, I think we all, with the nonprofit revitalization activity, we have to have equal board terms, right? So each year we're gonna have like 17 or 18 directors that are up for renewal. And this year they all renewed, which I think is fantastic in terms of their commitment and our engagement with them. But that does mean we only have a couple of seats. So then we're really judicious when we're saying, again, well, because the tech sector is a real, I could keep using that example because that's a real example. So we really need to concentrate, who are some leaders in the tech sector that I think we want to, when we're putting together our shortlist, that we're gonna want it to have be on there. So it's a very good question. And I think, again, the flip side of that is that we can't have people stay on if they aren't actually engaged. So then we have conversations, whether it's gonna be a governance chair or a board chair, to make sure that we are opening up a seat if someone's really not able to fulfill in the way that they imagined they were going to when they originally got engaged. Thank you. Honestly, I think that this is a great, Gretchen's approach to this is a really great example of a mature board with excellent board hygiene. We did not have term limits when I came to Oakton seven years ago, we were 40 years old. And I think what occurred is we did not have a very engaged board and no one really understood the expectations. And we also didn't have a good succession planning. So the board chair had been the board chair for 15 years and no one else dared to step in that role. And so we had to do a lot of work to get there. One of the things we did as a starting point as we began to mature was convince the board that term limits were a good idea. At some point, as we continue our path towards excellent governance and then become more outward facing, I hope that we'll be in a position where we can remove that. That makes sense. It makes sense. I appreciate the answers to that question and the person who asked, thanks again. Another question when you talk about summer retreats, what are some of those topics that you dive deep into when you talk about those summer retreats? And I think you kind of touched a little bit, but what are some of the, when you do your retreat in the summer, some of those topics, are they gathered throughout the semester or do you keep a little notebook and say, okay, I'm gonna, this is something we talk about or do you ask your board, this is what we wanna cover? What are your thoughts on that? I'm happy to start, Gretchen, if you want. So one of the very first board retreat topics we had when I joined was, what is our mission? Why are we here? Why do we exist? And what's the difference between the foundation board and the college board? And so we had a facilitator come in and help us answer those good questions. We had a mission statement that was three sentences long that no one could remember. And most people did not know. Our mission statement through their thoughtful work together is now four words, to enable student success. And so I think each of them answered that, that call in a different way, depending on their why, what speaks to them. So that was one of the topics. We also then followed on with a topic between the joint boards about why do we both exist? What value do we bring to one another as we work to advance the work of the college? And that was the groundwork for our very first MOU. So that was a huge topic and about a year's work, a year's worth of effort. And then more recently, I mentioned the storytelling topic. Now that we feel like we've got some of that foundation in place, that storytelling topic was important. We've also had retreats talking about our strategic plan. And so let's look at the college's strategic plan. And we don't participate in all of those things, but where can our work in resource development and provision for direct student aid and the programs and support of the college in general help the college achieve its strategic goals? And what work do we need to do from our lens in order to help advance that work? So those are some of the topics that we've really taken that four-hour chunk to do a deeper dive on and then come back to to advance during the course of our quarterly cycle. So yeah, strategic plan, that was a recent one. For this summer, what I'm thinking about really, we have updated information on our students' needs. So we participate in the HOPE survey. And so I think that that's really helpful for our executive committee to get to spend a little bit more time asking questions of college staff that work directly with students because I think that helps them to inform their conversations when they're understanding and they're talking to peers who might want to get more engaged. So I think sharing updated data that we have on our students' needs and how the impact that scholarship support has, the impact that our emergency support has, so that they really understand again what their impact is, right? That this is their dollars or the dollars they help raise are doing this for our students. And then ultimately helping to build an educated workforce in our community, which also why we're here. Absolutely, I agree. I do believe, I agree with both of you on the student being present in the meeting. That does have a big impact on our board members. We just did that. So I appreciate that. And then we have one more final question. If there's any more, please y'all put it in the chat and I'm reading, but I have one more. And I think this is interesting too. When telling your board about recent gifts, in case they want to thank the donor or donors, how do you manage the donor confidentiality? If someone gives something, how do you manage that? What is that expectation? We all know that confidentiality means a lot, especially on the board, but how do you manage those expectations for your board members? Yeah, I mean, so when we are accepting the gift, we're always going to want to understand that. We have our own internal matrix in terms of level of gift, certain level of gifts. Our board chair sends letters to, certain letter, well, our president, obviously they're going to get them from the foundation, but we do make sure that we really understand what the donor's comfort level is, because we do often announce them at our board meetings. If they're comfortable with it, we like to do social media. Obviously, if it's a really big gift, we're going to want to have an event and a press release and all of that good stuff. So I think it's really about understanding what the donor's comfort is, because yes, I mean, you certainly wouldn't want to set up one of our directors to have some sort of awkward phone call to call and thank them. And they say, what, who told you about that? Yeah, and we also, for board members who say that they're willing to participate in that way, to make thank you calls for us, we provide them with a script that they can use or not, but at least it's a starting point to think about how they might put it in their own words. And then we provide enough information, but not too much. And so they might not know the level of the gift, the exact amount of the gift, but they're calling to say, hi, I'm a board member from the Oakton College Educational Foundation, and I'm just calling to say thank you. I understand you made a recent gift to the Student Success Fund, and I give to that fund myself. I know how incredibly impactful this is. And so many times they'll leave a message, because not many people pick up their phone these days if they don't know who is calling. It's not uncommon for the board member to get a phone call back as soon as someone listens to that message and realizes that they're not calling to solicit them. And in cases where they do get a call back or they get someone live, the prompts that they usually have are, can you help me understand why or how you started giving to Oakton? And what's important to you? They learn so much about our donors that we don't always know or hear in our own conversations with them. And so we found that to be really fulfilling and it's great stewardship for our board members too. I agree with y'all. Well, we have five minutes left. I don't have any more questions. I think Casey put some links in there. If you have questions, you can email directly. And I know that Gretchen and Catherine, they gave you their email. They'll be more than happy to pick the phone up or have a phone call with you or an email if you have any questions, because they did a really good job. So I appreciate you, Catherine and Gretchen for joining this case deep dive and sharing your expertise with District 4. And all of our case members here today, thank you for joining us. A lot of you may have just attended the District 4 conference in Dallas, where I hoped you learned a lot of great things and made some meaningful connections. We'll be back to another to gather soon, but for right now, please check out your case online learning site link and to chat to find out about some more free sessions. We'll have some more. Remember this is being recorded. So two things here, within 48 hours, the link will be up, will be sent to you, all the participants. You'll better hear and see the recording again. And Catherine and Gretchen have both agreed that they'll send the slides. I'll reach out to you after this. We'll get the slides. We'll give them to Case. And Case will probably put that in that link with the recording. They have some really good information in those slides too. So I appreciate it. And from all of us at D4, thank you again for joining us. And I hope to see you next time. Y'all have a great afternoon. Thank you.

board development

educational institutions

governance best practices

board engagement

philanthropy

strategic planning

donor interactions

confidentiality

institutional advocacy