And you just let me know when you're ready, please. Welcome everyone. We're just going to give a few seconds for people to trickle in from the waiting room. And as people are coming in, I did send an email out this morning with some guided notes that you guys can use for during this. So if you haven't checked that, look for it in your email. It came from learnatcase.org. And you can download that or print it off so you can follow along. All right. I think everyone is in and we do have a really full schedule of content for today. So I'm going to hand it off to John and Diana. As you guys are coming in, you probably noticed this is meeting style. So we will be taking questions throughout. You can ask those verbally or you can go ahead and use the chat box and I will ask them on your behalf. So with that, I will go ahead and hand it over to John and Diana. Welcome everyone. Let me get the screen share going here and get the slide deck up. All right. We are so thrilled to have you here. And again, yes, we really encourage questions throughout. We will have some Q&A time at the very end, likely, but definitely we'd rather use that Q&A time throughout. So please jump in. Just don't jump over, folks. Raise your hand and we'll make sure that with Christie's help, we'll be calling on you. But welcome to From Rubber Stamp to Advancement, Deepening Board Engagement to Achieve Greater Impact. I am John Wolfkill with the Community College of Aurora Foundation. And you can see here kind of my life mission statement is to invest myself intentionally, generously. I think you have the wrong screen you're sharing because it shows the whole slide presentation. The opposite way. All right. Let me run into the slideshow. No, I know why. When you have multiple screens, it was working earlier, but I thought it would be easier to move it. I should not have. OK, so we'll reshare. Take two. When you're working with your boards, right, there's I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned. Let's try again and hit. Nope. Hold on just a second. There you go. There we go. All right. Just had to move it to a different screen. Well, again, so you've got my path. I grew up in Oklahoma and spent some time in grad school and after out in Los Angeles. So a nice picture of L.A. love climbing 14 years was a college mascot. Some pictures of my family, our team and some of our board members. That's a little bit about me. We're going to give you a quick overview. Just so you kind of know sort of where we're coming from, the size of our organization. You can see that our college serve a little over eleven thousand students a year. We've got about we have four full time staff members as part of our foundation. It was two when I started here about nine years ago. We've got an annual revenue. You can see those things we award about eight to nine hundred thousand dollars in scholarships a year. We will receive next year a thirty thousand dollars part. So a little bit of a hybrid. So we are independent. I report to the board of directors, not to the president, though I do serve on our college cabinet leadership team. But they provide a sponsorship for us during the year that helps offset some of our operational cost. So that's me. I'm going to turn it over to Diana. Great. So this is me, Diana Pollard. I grew up here in Dutchess County in New York. I've been here my whole life. I love the Hudson Valley. It's one of my favorite places. My family in Virginia and Kansas. So I spent a lot of time traveling. I've been here at Dutchess Community College for 20 years. I started in the foundation as the coordinator of annual giving and special events, went to assistant director, then to executive director and now currently the AVP of institutional advancement and also the executive director of the foundation. So that's kind of me in a nutshell. And here's our foundation at this point. As of this morning, we're actually at seventeen point eight million dollars in our foundation assets, which went down significantly over the last few months and now has come back. We were at eighteen point one prior to all the market fluctuations this past year. But I report 50 percent to my board and 50 percent to my college presidents, which I'm sure you can assume causes some challenges from time to time. And we will talk about that structure later. My board is is an amazing board. I have a very active board. It's taken me a long time to get here. So board engagement and and really focusing on your matrix and commitment board commitment is important, as we'll talk about later in our session as well today. And so that's pretty much it. We were founded the colleges in 1957, the foundation 1976, but really started operating in 1985. Great. All right. So our agenda today, we're going to hit a number of these topics and see this as kind of a survey. Then we're going to hit them fast. We're going to keep moving. But definitely take your questions whenever they pop up. So we'll talk about MOUs and reporting structures. We'll talk about board responsibilities and commitments that we're asking our boards to make board recruiting and onboarding. We'll spend a short amount of time not going very deep, but we know that strategic planning and the role of implementation and how your board's involved is important to what you're accomplishing. So we'll spend a few moments on strategic planning. We'll go through some board structures and committee structures. Talk about what does board engagement look like? Some tools that we use to help think about board engagement. We'll talk about, obviously, board's role in advancement. We're here to to raise funds to support and, as I like to say, unleash generosity in our communities to support the dreams of our students and the priorities of our college. We'll talk about that and we'll end with some hands on activities that you can go and use next week at your next committee or board meeting. We also have, Christy gave you some guided notes, so she sent those out. So for those that like to reflect as you listen and write your questions, write your thoughts, do your action planning. You've got a tool to use. We're going to go through a number of like pieces of collateral, some handouts. So things like our MOUs, like our board commitments that we use with our board members, Duchess's strategic implementation plan guide, a board engagement tool, some self-assessed board assessments, and even this slide deck. All of that you're going to get after this session. So if there's a tool that we reference, we're probably sending it to you. And if not, you've got our emails. And so please make sure to reach out. If you didn't get something that you would have liked that we referenced, we'll make sure that you've got tools in your hand that you can use and adapt to your communities. All right. We're ready to get going. Let's jump in. I'm going to turn it over to Diana as we dive into the first topic of MOUs and reporting structures. OK, so MOUs, OK, you know, why are they why is it important to have an MOU? We here at Duchess just got our first MOU five years ago. We did not have an MOU with the college, which caused challenges. Right. But when when a foundation is young, often it's needed to be supported by the college. Right. So at a long for a long time, that's what it was looked like. Like the college was running us and that's not the appropriate way to do it. So we created an MOU. Our MOU basically is broken down into six different sections for the most part. So it's the responsibilities of the board of trustees. It's the responsibilities of the college in general. It's the responsibilities of the college president. And then on the inverse for the foundation responsibilities, the foundation foundation board, and then the executive director of the foundation and how that all works together. So our MOU clearly states due to our funding structure, the college currently pays for our full time positions here on the foundation. We have six staff positions that are full time and then we have two part time positions, which the foundation pays for. We pretty much cover all our other expenses and all this is spelled out in the MOU. And I think it's very important, you know, to have clear guidelines, especially when often presidents change. Right. Boards change. I mean, my board members are typically here longer than college presidents have been like the last couple. So so to keep that stability, because when we make promises to our donors, right, we make them forever. Right. When we take an endowment, it's in perpetuity. It goes on and on. So we need rules and regulations in place that can guarantee that what we're promising that donor today or what somebody promised them 10 years ago or 10 years from now will continue. Right. And that based on one individual coming in or a board changing or, you know, board of trustees members changing and wanting something different to possibly suit their own agenda, that that doesn't happen. And this is where your MOU is vital in this whole process. Some key questions and topics to address in your MOU. I covered a few of those. Here are some more terms of agreement. What's the length? So for us, our MOU is five year term. Right. And basically it states that it should be reviewed every five years. Amendments can be made or we can, you know, if we don't make any, it stays. Right. So that is basically how it's kind of like the Taylor law. Right. If your your contract is in place and you don't make any changes, you uphold what has been previous there. So the roles of the board, you know, our college president serves as an ex officio voting member on our foundation board. We do, even though we have, you know, boundaries and definite lines of delineation, it is very important that we have a positive working relationship with the college. Right. And having the president have a voice on our board is necessary. And I believe that not everybody agrees with that. I know some of my other SUNY partners here don't have their college president as a board member at all. And it doesn't even come to board meetings, which I don't think is necessarily a positive thing, in my opinion. Roles of other college leaders. We interact directly with our finance department. Our financial structure is set up is the foundation through Razor's Edge takes all gift entries. Right. So when a gift comes in, it comes through us. We enter it. That being said, we then walk our records over to Banner Finance and then our finance department handles our accounts payable. Granted, we do a requisition. It goes up. They cut a check. The check comes back to me. I sign the check over a certain amount. Then I have a board member as a second signature. Okay. So, again, we have a strong working relationship with the college and we have other members of the college involved in the work. They don't get to set the policies. That is still managed by the board. And that's very important and made very clear in our MOU. Again, foundation staff, as I said here, I currently have six full-time people in the foundation and two part-time people. The college covers the full-time. We cover the part-time. A lot of the reasons we end up getting part-time people is because we don't necessarily have, not that we don't have the need for more full-time. Who of us couldn't use more full-time staff. Right. But sometimes we want to see if that's the right position or if we need to add things to that position before we institutionalize it and make it full-time. We also have to work with the college's budget. We're not the only department wanting full-time people. So, if we have a way to get the support that we need, and we don't have it in here, but my organizational structure, one of the things that I've done is also we have several consultants that we work with. So, I have been able to fill, like I don't have a prospect researcher on my team. So, I pay an outside prospect researcher and the foundation covers that expense. Right. I probably have seven different consultants in different areas, whether it's graphic design or writing. Like I said, prospect research. We have a consultant that we're looking at possibly going to a campaign that has been working with us, etc. And all of those positions, I'm paying about $200,000 a year. I couldn't hire full-time people. Right. So, that, you know, but the foundation is able to do that without, you know, the college having to support that. Operational support. They do cover our, most of our, you know, overhead. We do buy, like if we need a laptop or we need new computers, we have been purchasing them ourselves. Although they support, you know, all our storage of our data, all our IT needs. Like, so when we need something set up, the college does support that. Marketing and communications has dwindled off for us as the college has taken over greater needs in marketing and communications as far as enrollment and other things that the college president wants to do. We have been forced to kind of hire, like I said, our own marketing people. We do some of it internally. We do some of it externally. We have three different graphic designers that we work with because at times we have major projects all going on at the same time and one graphic designer can't handle it. So, that's kind of it. Grant writing, the way it's split here is we handle all the grant writing for foundations and corporations. And the college has a grant writer that reports to the chief of staff and he handles all of our SUNY or government grants. So, that's kind of how that's divided up as well. Our grant writer and their grant writer work closely together because, quite frankly, a lot of the grants that they're writing for is the same information. It's the same statistics, right? So, again, one more example of having that close working relationship. Scholarships, the way our scholarships are awarded, the foundation obviously pays for them all. The way we pay, we don't ever give students funding directly. We put it on their student account. We work very closely with student financial services to award these scholarships. The majority of our scholarships are merit-based, not need-based, okay? But we do have some and that way FAFSA can be taken into consideration when we have need-based scholarships. They also help choose the recipients because the department is much larger than ours. We make sure that the end choices meet the donor's intent, that they're actually hiring or hiring, sorry, awarding the students that fit the criteria, that they haven't made any shortcuts or anything like that. And we have ultimate veto power if we don't think that's an appropriate student and that's going to upset that donor. But they, again, are very helpful. They work well with us. We have meetings routinely throughout the year as we go into this process. Data sharing, that's gotten a little trickier over the years as we have more issues with breaches and such. We still do get data at the end of every graduation they send us over, but we're getting less and less of the information. It's more about contact information. I do, as AVP, have access to all student records, so I can look up transcripts if I need to or look up some different things that were not actually sent over to us. But that has, like I said, become more challenging at this point. Does anybody have any questions about MOUs or thoughts on what should be included or what you would think is included that maybe I haven't mentioned? Yeah, and I just want to preface this whole presentation. We do want questions from you. We do want this to be more of a conversation and not necessarily a lecture from John and I as we go through this, because, you know, I always think of these webinars and conferences as a learning environment for both of us. Yes, we do have Board of Directors insurance, and we pay for that ourselves. The college does not pay for that. It's included in ours. Yeah, and thank you, Michelle, also for kind of talking about you call it an operating agreement, and you've had it about three years after 60 years of no formal agreement. So it's never too late to start. And I'd encourage you, one area that Diana did mention that we have is we reference kind of our standard operating procedures for how we do scholarships. And so we have that as a living document that is between us and financial aid, because we manage the whole scholarship process. Again, we're for the most part completely independent. None of our staff are college employees. We're not state employees like the rest of the college. We report to our board. So we find that there are some places having the separate, the separation has been really, really helpful, especially in today's times where there is a little bit of a wall of separation and we are a standalone nonprofit organization that gives us a little cover for certain things and gives the organization or the foundation and the college some cover for certain items. So think about those other things, things you might want to reference in your MOU, but not necessarily include as a as an exhibit A or exhibit B, but maybe reference those scholarship operating procedures or other things that are important in that relationship that might want to change more often than if you have a three or five year agreement. You don't want to have to be modifying it because you change the way you're going to do the role of financial aid and the foundation scholarship. So think about those things as you're putting it together. Other questions? Someone did ask if you could explain how an MOU differs from bylaws. So the MOU is more of a contract agreement. It gets down to funding different structures of funding and different rent. Your bylaws is more how your organization is run, specifically your foundation. So my bylaws include terms limits on board members. It includes what our committees look like and what our committee structure looks like. It includes like if we want to change our bylaws, there's a rule in there that says, okay, you have to present at one board meeting and then vote on it at the next board meeting. So it's more like that, where this is more, okay, the college doesn't charge us rent and we get X amount of square footage, right? The college pays our utility bills, you know, so does that make sense, how they differ? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Someone else asked, what does the board and director's insurance cover? That covers liability. So if the foundation is sued for some reason, it covers liability and it protects your board members individually to a certain financial, I think ours is a million dollars, you know, from any liability that may happen based on actions of the foundation in general. Exactly. Right. Well, we're going to move, keep those questions coming. We'll try to monitor best we can. And we'll jump into the executive direct reporting kind of structures, kind of pros and cons of these different structures that some of you on the call might have. One of these were kind of a hybrid of some of these. Right. So as I said before, I report 50% to the college president and 50% to the foundation board. And to be honest with you, neither one of them like it. They both want to control what's going on here, right? And that's why our MOU is important because it spells out how this works. The pros of reporting to the president is you have a direct line to the president, right? And campus leadership. You know about fundraising initiatives as soon as they're spoken about. The cons is the appearance of the president running the foundation, right? A disengaged board, right? So for many years before the MOU was put into place, my foundation board felt like they were a rubber stamp board. Whatever the president said is the way it was happening, right? Which is not what you want. You want a board that's engaged, that feel like what they say matters and that their commitment to what they're doing is really making a difference, okay? There can also be ethical issues. And I'll just share with you, I have had some challenges. I've had a president come in and tell me they want me to switch all my endowed scholarships over to unrestricted dollars so they can spend it as they choose, right? And my board's like, uh-uh, NYMIFO, which is our New York State Attorney General's Charity Bureau, clearly states you have to stick with donor intent and you don't have the legal ability to just change things once they've been created. So that is actually a pro to reporting to your board, right? So I had the confidence to be able to go and say, no, you can't do this. And if you don't like it, take it up with the board because the board's going to have to agree with this. And it kind of gets the executive director out of the firing line with stuff like that, which you need to be because it can get ugly. Like there have been times when we were going into putting our first MOU into place, it was a struggle because the president didn't want to give up any control. But the law clearly stated, listen, there are challenges here that make this, you know, that this should be changed and that you need this MOU and this is how this reporting structure should work. So again, reporting to the board chair, you have an engaged board, stronger ties to the community. Cons, there are volunteer. And sometimes you have to have the right board member in that position that is going to be committed to the organization and to you. When I pick up that phone and I call my board chair, I need to know that she's going to answer on the other line and she's going to run with whatever it is I'm coming to her with and help make that decision. Because it shouldn't be me as the executive director, just making blanket decisions, right? I want their support, right? And so you need the people committed. Vice president, I think is probably one of the hardest structures because then you have this person in between you and the president or you and your board, and it can make bigger challenges. I think that is the worst of the structures, really, to be involved in. Pro, it is a buffer between the president, right? So you're not directly dealing with that president, but is that president hearing what you're actually saying as the executive director? Is that president getting the true message or is that person tarnishing it to some degree when they're delivering a message or delivering it in a way that you wouldn't deliver it? So that's a challenge there. And then like any combination, you need to have checks and balances. And I really, the structure that I have, I do like. I do sit on the president's executive leadership team. I do sit on cabinet. I believe my voice is heard. I also, like I said, have been here 20 years. So I have dealt with enough nonsense that I don't sit back and not say anything. And right now, the president's executive leadership team has very new people. I think that other than me, the oldest sitting person is probably six years. So, and some of them are only a couple months. Most, three of them out of six are only a couple months that they've been here. So they're afraid to say things, right? And I'm not afraid to say them. I mean, I say them respectfully, but I know history, right? And I know what has worked and what hasn't worked and not that it can't change, but I don't think you can make positive decisions without knowing the history. So having that level of engagement is important. John, anything to add? Yeah, no, I just encourage you think through, use your guided notes or kind of your own page of notes, write down some of the key questions that you want to address in your MOU. Think about things as you think about your reporting structure. And again, these are things where, we've had conversations at CCA. I do only report to my board chair and vice chair. They do all my evaluation. They're in charge of hiring and firing me, all of those things. So it does come with those pros and cons, but again, we've evolved that. I now sit on leadership levels within the organization, within the college that I didn't use to when I first started. We've evolved those things over time. And so finding that structure, but being very thoughtful with your board, no matter what your reporting structure is, but getting them involved, especially your executive committee, involved in some of those discussions with your president, I found was super helpful. So we're gonna move on now, thinking about boards. Let's get into sort of board responsibilities. I want you to pause and think a little bit about what are some of the factors that created the board you have today? And like, what are some of those words that come to mind that you would describe your board today? But more importantly, I want you to pause and think about, and I'm gonna give some quiet moments of reflection here, a few, 30 seconds or so. What are the five characteristics that you want to describe your board members? Wherever they've started, whatever's happened to cause your board to be what it is today, what are the five characteristics you'd like to describe them one year from now? Take a few moments, reflect in your mind, write it down, whatever works for you. John, do you want me to post anything to the chat? Yeah, you can post to the chat. We'll take a few if you want to post to the chat or if someone is brave enough and you're like, hey, I don't know about five, but here are two or three. I definitely want to be true about my board members. Maybe they already are. Maybe they're what you're aspiring toward. I'd love to hear one or two of you share in the chat or share out loud. I think while people are doing that, someone did send a question directly to me. So I don't think you guys saw it, but this is someone who works in a K through 12 school. So their structure is a little bit different. They said MOUs are used for establishment of funds, but this sounds like a different use. Can you talk about and clarify the difference of when MOUs are used? Yeah, I would say coming from a charter school, public charter school networks, I used to be part of KIPP for five years, ran KIPP in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And so I think there, you know, we had charter agreements with our school district or your charter authorizer. So in some sense, you are spelling out some of those kinds of similar things if you're in a K-12 environment. It may look a little different if you're, you know, again, even a foundation to a private K-12 school, it's probably still a good thing to have those MOUs. Again, I think it was Michelle who said, you know, the MOU governs how the foundation and college behave. So thank you, Michelle, for that in the chat. That's a really nice one-liner. It governs how the foundation and the school or the college behave in relationship to each other. All right, anyone have a top characteristics you'd love to see in your board? I see Josh, thanks Josh for in the chat. Be engaged, guiding and mission-driven. All right, love those juicy words. Those are great. So let's kind of dig in. When we think about stuff at the foundation here, I've talked a lot with our board over the last several years about kind of these four Cs, about clarity, about the importance of driving toward clarity as a board, as an organization, about culture, both at the board level, the culture within our foundation and our staff team. I've talked a lot about connections and we've done a lot of activities around how we build connections as a board, build connections as our college leadership team, our own team here at the foundation. And then lastly, we've talked a lot, just last year, we dug in over several board meetings about board characteristics. What are those characteristics that we wanna recruit for? What are we looking for in prospective board members? So here's kind of the activity of how we unpack that over multiple board meetings. I started with our executive committee. I had a number of these bullet points created for them. We added some new words and then I took this list. And for my board, I always find it's helpful to give them something to react to. We tend to have deeper conversations than if I start at a blank page and say, let's call out what are the characteristics that are important. This helps us move in and plus we're compacting this in a board meeting, we're taking 15 or 20 minutes max to do any of these activities. So you can see here, these are the different characteristics that with my executive committee, we came up with and our staff team came up with. Had them rank it in order of importance with one being the most important to them, five being least important in terms of their top five. From there, I came back the next board meeting. We had breakout groups of small groups of board members take the sort of ranked ones based on everyone's individual ranking and then come up with their small group, their breakout groups, top five. And then we basically had a prioritization conversation, like how do we prioritize? What are the things that really are, we don't want more than five or six. And so we came up with these six, community driven, student, or we added the word learner because not some of ours is learners a better term, but student or learner focused, informed ambassadors, forward thinking, representative and empathetic. That was one that sort of got added on at the end and people fought hard for that. I then worked with a couple of my board members that volunteered to actually unpack and sort of dive into what does community driven, student learner focused or empathetic actually mean? And we wrote some brief definition that then at the next board meeting, we came back and sort of wordsmithed with the board a little bit, but you can see here the way we think of community driven. Well, what does that look like? What are we looking for in ourselves as they should say, in themselves as board members? What are we looking for in potential board members as a community driven, engaged board member? What does that look like? Well, it looks like connecting to our very diverse and we are the most diverse community in all of Colorado. And so that's really important to us. Deep understanding of our unique needs and our strategic goals aligning with the college priorities, right? We unpacked each one of those. And now we have this as part of our board orientation. We will unpack kind of our board commitments. We're gonna talk about that and talk about our key responsibilities of the board itself. But now we add this board characteristics and talk about these and why they're so important for board members when we're looking at new prospective board members to come on. All right, so let's talk now about board responsibilities. We're gonna get into responsibilities, get into some individual board commitments. When I started about nine years ago, I realized that there was a lot of confusion and a muddying of the waters between what is the board's role, what is the college leadership role? What is the foundation's leadership and staff role? There was just, it was just muddy and it was messy when I first came in. People were not in their lanes. It wasn't clear about who has what kind of decision rights. And so we started, we kind of pulled back about 30,000 foot view and said, what are the key responsibilities? What do we think are most important for the board to be managing and what is their lane? And so working with our board at the time, these were the six that we came up with. They are the keeper of the vision and strategy, leadership, oversight, and development. So keeper of the vision and strategy, they're not in charge necessarily of developing the strategic plan or implementing the strategic plan, but they do help in the development of it. And they definitely make sure that we're staying focused and on mission and not getting too much, not getting mission creep from what we're trying to accomplish each year. They oversee me as leadership and develop me and I in turn do that with our staff team. They provide resources. We are a fundraising organization, a fundraising board. So providing resources, we thought like, that's pretty important to have as one of their key responsibilities. They remove obstacles, whether that's political, that's economic, that's financial, that's sometimes technological or structural. They help us remove obstacles and do a really good job of helping us see around corners as we plan and implement. They are responsible, not only just for my oversight, my development, and sort of making sure that leadership is performing as it should, but they are responsible to manage themselves, to think about their succession planning, to make sure they are responsible to make sure that the board is engaged and the board is accomplishing its responsibilities. And lastly, kind of like remove obstacles, but risk management and oversight. They do help us mitigate risks. They help us think through insurances and other things and they'll bring certain skillsets to the board. That's how we think about these key responsibilities. So pause for a moment, think about what role might be missing from my six, and then how do these roles and responsibilities maybe need to be better clarified or have a conversation with your own board about what those responsibilities are. But take a moment, think about what your action step might be or what you would add to this list. And if you've got something to add, I'd love to see that, toss it in the chat so we can all see it, but take a moment to think about that. Michelle asked in the chat, when you say keeper of the vision and strategy, do you mean the college strategy or the foundation strategy? Yeah, great clarifying question. I mean, in this particular case, this is the foundation board, so it is for the foundation, the keeper of the strategy for the foundation. And I think you could say a part of that is making sure is that aligning to the vision and mission and strategy and the strategic plan of the college. Definitely the board should have their eye on both, but they are the keeper of the vision for the foundation. Great, and I see one of these things Liliana talks about advocates, and so advocating for that. And so maybe that is another board responsibilities and definitely something you're gonna see in this sort of the next section as we talk about board responsibilities. And Diana, because I've stolen some things from your board kind of commitment, and what we call our commitment to excellence, I'll let you take the next slide and talk about the roles and the pieces that you put into the expectation for your board members. Okay, so for my board members, board commitment and participation is important. Attendance is very important. We actually have it in our bylaws that if you miss more than two board meetings, then you can be removed from the board, right? Committee meetings, we're not quite as challenged with, and we do our board meetings for the most part in person. We do allow Zoom for most of them because we do have a board member that lives in Texas. But participation is definitely something that needs to happen. Financial, meaningful gift, okay? So when we don't, we don't put a dollar value. I know some organizations do. They don't put a, we don't put a dollar value on what you have to give. We ask that we're in your top three giving organizations and that when you are thinking about giving, we want you to give based on your commitment to us, right? That's another way of we put it. How committed are you to us, right? Because if you're not committed to us, should you be on our board? No, right? That's a simple answer. And also give and get expectations. We do expect our board members to go out and help us. That's a key piece of what they do, right? And not, we have some young board members that we recognize they don't have the ability to give financially at this time, but it doesn't mean they don't have connections that they can't make that happen, right? I have two young board members that both work at our local electric company, Central Hudson Gas and Electric. And they have both made it a point that Central Hudson has become our biggest sponsors at our gala and at our golf tournament, right? Because they're constantly advocating for us at that organization. We also put planned giving. I mean, I have a whole document which you will receive that clearly states out what we want from you. And a planned gift is something that we are asking. We have it in our strategic plan that we're trying to get every year, 10 of our board members to commit to us with a planned gift. We have two from just this year. So our strategic plan just went into effect this year. So we have two new ones from this year. We had four other ones, but they've rotated off the board. So now we're back to getting an additional eight for this year. So that is something really important to us. Volunteer their time. We need people at our golf tournament. We need people at our gala to check people in, to help out with different things, to come here sometimes and get packages out. A few things that we changed this year is in our diploma jackets that go out at graduation, there was nothing in them, right? Because the diplomas get sent later from the college. So we put a welcome to the alumni association because we manage all alumni affairs here in the foundation. So we went and we created a pamphlet to put in there. We have an alumni benefits brochure that we put in there. And we bought an alumni pin for all of our students. So we did some of this, but we needed somebody to stuff 600 of these packets, right? So we get volunteers and you get them in to make a difference. And we expect board members to lead that charge. I truly believe in leading by example. And that's kind of part of what they're asked to do as well. We talked about event participation, donor introductions. That's key, right? Again, not everybody may be able to give themselves financially at that time, but they certainly can engage others that can help. Self-education. So we have a, it's not just a nominating committee to recognize who should come on our board, but it's also board development. And I've added that a couple of years ago because sometimes your board members come on and they don't have all the tools that you would like them to have to be as successful as you need them to be. So my board chairs have been coming to CASE conferences with me. So last year when we were at CASE in Baltimore, my chair wasn't able to come, but she had come the year before in California. So my vice chair came this past year. I'm chairing the conference in New Orleans this coming year and I have three board members coming with me this year, right? And John and I put on a session, very similar to this to where your board, how your board chair and your foundation executive director need to be engaged in what their roles are. So self-education, but also that you need to educate them. I very often send them out articles I get from CASE or I get from the Chronicle of Philanthropy and that sort of thing, because I think you need to keep them. It may not always be top of their mind because most of my board members are very busy business people, right? But if I'm sending them something, they're always reading it and responding to me. They're in a great article. Oh, I really like this. Oh, we should try that, you know, because you want them to learn, but they sometimes, you know, and it goes to one of my things in a later slide, care and feeding, and that's part of it, right? I don't mean just actual food, but it's like caring for them and getting them to where you need them to be, meeting them in their space and bringing them to yours. And I know we had some questions about, Diana, how we enforce these rules or these commitments. And I will tell you at CCA, we use this commitment. We sign it every year as board members. I signed one myself as executive director, our president signed ones as an ex officio board member. And we use that for conversations. And I think someone else mentioned in the chat, right? You don't know what might be going on in their life. They may have missed a couple of meetings in a row because of a health issue or some other struggle in their life. And so using it as a conversation, so I would say use it as a flashlight, not a hammer, right? As a nice analogy to think about how you use your board commitment to excellence. But I have definitely encouraged board members as their term was coming up to sort of roll off. And in one case, it was because I knew that this person lit up differently when she was talking about this K-12 organization that she was a part of. And so I encouraged her to go double down in that commitment. And we created more space on our board for another person that would be more engaged and would light up more for our mission at the college level. So, right, use your commitments as a conversation tool, as a flashlight to reveal what's going on with a person and how you can engage them more or if they just need to take a pause because life is happening and they just need a few months to manage a family situation or a work situation. So great questions, keep them coming. As we move in, I know we're gonna kind of speed up quickly through this. These kind of seconds. One other thing I wanna mention there, John, is one of the things that we do is we do a quote report card for our board members. So once a year, we put together a report that basically says it has all the board members on one report, but it doesn't have their names. Everybody's assigned a random letter and it tells how much they've donated personally, how much they've gotten through third-party gifts, whether it's from their business or they brought a donor to the table. It also states how many of our events that they have attended. So if we have 10 events in a year, this person's attended five, this person's attended three, whatever it may be. It also states how many committee meetings they have agreed to, committee and board meetings they've agreed to attend and how many they've actually shown up for. So it kind of gives them, maybe they don't realize, right? I'd like to think that, that maybe they don't realize how they compare to their peers. And it's kind of that sort of thing without shaming anybody, right? Because nobody knows, all they know is what their letter is. So if you're T, you know that this is you and now you can look and see where you compare, right? And that kind of helps them also make a decision whether they want to step it up a bit or if maybe this isn't the right place because they're not as committed as they see other people are. Great, and we'll make sure to add that to the list of materials that we're gonna send you after the session. So thanks Diana for bringing that up. Now, as we move into board recruiting, Diana, I'm gonna flip to this next slide as you've got, we use something very similar, but just kind of highlight on, I know, again, you'll get this, so we won't go into detail and it's pretty tiny on the screen, but talk about like how you use your matrix about representation, influence, introductions, skills that they bring, influences in the community that they bring, how you do that as you think about what are our board recruitment priorities? And I'll flip to that next slide for you. Sure, thank you. Yeah, so we use this because, board recruitment and diversity is more than just race, right? So that is important part of it. We had a problem here in the foundation where the majority of our board members were just Caucasian. And we wanted people from different cultures cause they feel people from different cultures have different outlooks on things and things that we need to be taken into consideration. Our campus is also a minority serving institution. We have been given that title, a big portion of our, I think 24% of our population is Hispanic Latino with another 18% being African-American. So it's important that our board reflect who we're serving, right? So that piece of it. Additionally, age was a problem. And gender, we had a lot of older white males, right? We needed more diversity there. We needed different ages. We needed different sexes. We needed different sexual orientations, right? All of that came into play. And we look at it because again, there's different mindsets and different thought processes that if you have everybody that's the same, you can't have that amazing tapestry of information, right? And by making some of these are different. Geography also. Dutchess County is a very long skinny county, right? And we have very different demographics. We have cities, suburbs, rural areas, right? And they have different needs through the community and they have different things to offer. So we needed to be able to make sure we weren't just focused. For so long, this board was Poughkeepsie centric, our main city right here where the college is, right? We were not serving the Northern part. We were not serving Southern part. We were not serving the Eastern part of the counties, right? It was all just about this. So we have expanded that to make sure that we have people in different areas of the community. Additionally, expertise, right? You don't want all bankers. You don't want all attorneys. You don't want all financial advisors. You need a mix. You need a mix of community members. You need people, honestly, on other nonprofits sometimes, right, so that you can see, and they may be nonprofits you're working with. We have the superintendent of a Wappinger Central School District, which is the biggest school district here, because we want that K-12 or P-12 voice as well. When we're raising money for programs, what is important? What's gonna pull that pipeline, right? Again, this is where we support the college, a big part of what we do. And how do we pull that pipeline? How does what this foundation does, how does it affect enrollment in the college? And how can we make a difference? Okay, what scholarships do we need to have for our incoming students, right? What is the high schools? What other partnerships can we do with them? So that's kind of areas of expertise are very important. And then length of service. If you look at mine, you can see our board structure is three, three-year terms. So after every three, we can either rotate somebody off or we can keep them on for another two with a fourth term available if you are a executive committee member. But after you rotate off a year, you can come back on. And we have had a couple of board members that do that, that have actually served nine or 12 years and then come back on. And that's probably a very small percentage, but they had to be really great board members for us to be able to bring them back. I will pause, Diana, because there are some questions going on. Some of that is what areas do you choose to select? I mean, think about the ones that are important to the priorities of your college, that are important to the industry sectors of your community, or you can see here the geography. Our geography is a lot smaller on the sort of Eastern side of Denver, because we have five different community colleges, all what we call right here in the front range that are in the Denver Metro area. So we have a little smaller areas than Diana and her team, and maybe some of you have. So thinking about the industry sectors in all of those communities that you serve. And also around, you asked around board members, this was from Penny, do they self-report expertise and influence? Yes, we do on ours. So we have the list and they will use a survey tool, and then they will select the ones that they have influence, or if they have skill sets in, they will self-report that, and it creates a very similar matrix to this. So yeah, let them kind of self-report. We will talk, I know there's a lot of conversation going on about alumni. While this isn't, clearly is not very alumni board focused, those boards are definitely different than your foundation board, but a lot of what we're talking about and how you're thinking about onboarding, recruitment, mix your competency matrix, you're talking about levels of engagement, what engagement looked like, the expectations of those board members, all these things are transferable, probably with a little bit of tweaking in terms of what you're expecting from an alumni board versus the foundation board. So we will, but I know there's a lot of energy, so probably a future webinar, Christy, I'm thinking is coming specific to that. We're moving through as we think about onboarding. So let's talk about who, when, how, what. Diana, can you talk, I know we have very similar kind of processes of how we meet with prospective folks individually, how we engage them with a few board members then bring them on. Can you tell very quickly kind of your process of how you bring a new board member on? Sure, absolutely. We have an application process. So when somebody is recommended to us, or if we're looking for a specific industry partner, maybe we need an attorney, maybe we need an accountant, et cetera, we then use our board members and we kind of look out and see what we have out there. We look at what our alumni, we go on LinkedIn and see what alumni do we have that may be engaged that have really been focusing on us and responding to our LinkedIn posts or our Facebook posts and that sort of thing, right? So there's many different ways that a board, a potential board member comes to us, right? So once we have that person, we contact them or the person who's recommended them to us, we'll contact them to gauge their interest. And then if they're interested, we send them out an application. They fill out an application. The application where you were selling some of that is self-reporting. Our application is small. It's basically nine questions. One is basically the candidates, general information, their employer, their experience, a CV we request or a bio. We also ask them an area, we put down areas that are important to us, fundraising, special events, capital campaign, alumni relations, communications, policy development, strategic planning, board governance, nominating, public policy advocacy, estate planning, financial and marketing. So those are some areas that we ask them to identify what they are strong in and what interests them. And how can, and ask them, how can they help the foundation board, right? Because we wanna know what their thoughts are and list the priority of experience serving on other boards. Like, do they have that? Do they, have they done volunteer work? That sort of thing. And anything else that they feel is important for us to consider. So once we get that application back, we take it to the nominating committee with their resume and that sort of thing. We talk, right, at the nominating committee. We say, okay, this looks like a person that would be a good candidate for us. Okay, then what we do is set up a luncheon, whether, and it's typically myself and members of the nominating committee. The last two potential board members we met with, we had two members of the nominating committee join us. So there was four of us at lunch so that we could get different perspectives and different reads on the individual. What were they looking for? Once we've done that, then it goes back to the nominating committee for discussion on what everybody heard and what everybody thinks. And from there, assuming that this is somebody we wanna move forward with, I do an online review. So a small amount of due diligence. We wanna make sure there's no issues. We did have a board member several years ago, potential board member several years ago that was recommended to us. And then we went online and we found out very quickly that that board member had been charged and went to prison for embezzlement at a church that he had been to. So good for us for doing our due diligence and staying out of that firework, right? So then once that online review is completed and everything's good, the nominating committee then puts the candidate forward for the full board to vote on. And so that's basically how it is. And we do, you know, part of the application shows, you know, the person, these things, has the checklist and the dates and everything because we're not hiding anything that we're doing some due diligence on this person because, you know, we wanna give that person the opportunity to say, you know what, nevermind. This isn't good for me. If they have something they don't want us to reveal, you know, so that's kind of how we get through our process. And I didn't even know about your online review. That was new. And I know we've talked about this stuff a lot. And so again, I'm walking away with new ideas. I wrote that down as an action step for myself to think about how we could make sure that's part of our process. Ours is a little less formal, but similar process. We do have two to three board members that will meet up with this prospective board member and I'll be there to help facilitate and guide that conversation. Our big thing is we never want a board member to join the board alone. We don't want you to, your first board meeting is the first time you meet other board members. So we think that's pretty important. And we do an informal board mentor. Typically one of our longer serving board members, we'll ask them and they will volunteer to be a board mentor for the first year. Again, pretty informal process. They connect a couple of times throughout the year and check in. We want them to develop like relationships with other board members so that they feel like this is a place they belong. They feel valued, they feel heard, and they can kind of show up as their best self. So those are some things. Yeah, it can be tough. One of the questions where it can be tough if somebody is nominated someone, but they ultimately don't move through. I've had that happen, but usually it's because the person doesn't have the capacity to make the commitments that we're asking to what is engagement look like for a board member. And so that's just a conversation with the board member that nominated them. Hey, here's kind of what we talked about. And oftentimes that person, while in two cases, that person has joined a committee and then maybe eventually later one of them has now become a full-fledged board member after joining a committee because that seemed like the best next step. So use your committee. Same thing if it's an alumni board, use those committee, those working groups to have a trial run for some folks to see if they're going to be engaged, to see if they can make the commitment, to see if this is where they really wanna serve. Don't be afraid to invite them to be part of a committee, even if they're not a full-fledged board member. We have a couple of, we have several folks in multiple committees that are not board members, but are really dedicated committee members and it works best for them and also for us. So make sure to be thinking about that. Diana has asked when there's a board vote after you take the candidate, do you take the candidate to lunch before or after? I know we do it typically either a virtual meeting or a lunch meeting before with a few board members so they can get to know other board members. Again, make sure it's right for them. Make sure a few of our other board members are the ones that are actually gonna recommend them for a vote. And do you also do it like after, do you do lunch or something with that new board member after? We do board orientation. So we have a whole lunch and it's a luncheon and we have all the chairs of our committees at the board orientation so that they can talk to what their committee does as that board member's deciding what committee they want to join. And I think that's important because when I first took over as executive director, I had a board member who had already been on the board for three years and we were talking about finances and we're talking about the difference between our endowment and our spendable account and our restricted account and our unrestricted. And he had no idea. Like, I mean, he'd been on the board for three years and he didn't know what those different funds meant or how they operated or anything like that. So having a board orientation and explaining the nitty gritty of things to people is very important because you do not want your board members not asking questions at a board meeting because they feel like they don't have the information and they don't want to feel stupid. You want them to ask intelligent questions and have the knowledge that they need to make them feel as a vital member of that board. Yeah. And so as we move forward, as we think about, you've heard MOUs, your own sort of reporting structure. We've talked about what it looks like for board responsibilities, where commitments and commitment to engagement, what that looks like, the characteristics of your board, kind of who you're recruiting, what are some of the matrix of priorities that you're looking for in future board members to add to your existing board? Let's go and kind of dial back. I want to kind of look at a high level picture. Think about strategic planning. We're not going deep, but we're a little bit behind schedule of where we want it to be. So we're going to keep this at a pretty high level of strategic planning. And really focus this in on- Dr. Michelle asked, Michelle raised her hand. Can she ask a question real quick? Okay, go for it. I'm so sorry to interrupt. I really appreciate the clarity on the timing. I probably didn't type that question with much articulation. My question is, our struggle is we get recommendations for the slate, and then we ask the board to keep it confidential because we don't want to disappoint people. So then we get a vote on the draft slate, and then we take those people out to coffee and see if they're interested, and then we vote on them. Do you know what I mean? The timing is kind of confusing to us because if you take somebody out to coffee and they seem like a good fit and the board doesn't vote them in, then you've disappointed a community leader. Can somebody speak to that? So what I would say, when we take them out for lunch, we are clear that that doesn't mean that they're going to be able to join the board. We will stay in that meeting while we're looking at candidates for this year and future years, right? So that helps that if you don't choose that candidate that year, that they may be in the running at a future year, or it may just fall off their radar, right? So that you may not necessarily go back to them or they may get committed someplace else that then they're no longer really looking at you. And I mean, for me, honesty has always been the best policy. If there's a reason that they were not chosen for that board, I think sometimes you just need to share that depending on what the reason is. You know, like the candidate that we found with the embezzlement. You know, one of my board members that's an attorney went back to that board member and said, listen, we found this. We're not saying anything against you, but unfortunately the optics of it are not good, you know, and we just can't take that risk. And he was completely understanding, you know? So I think you need to, you know, just honesty is best policy. Yeah, absolutely. And we recognize that in certain communities that may be smaller, like right there, there's more weight to that honesty than if you're in a much more larger metropolitan area. Sometimes that's true, not always, but again, recognizing that there is weight to that level of honesty, but I agree with Diana. Just be honest, talk to them about those concerns. Again, if it can be something where it's like, hey, I have some red flags, maybe around their level of engagement, their time capacity to really, to partner and engage like you would like to see them, look at being on a committee. I've used that sometimes, but then sometimes it just hasn't been a good fit. So just being honest about it and, you know, moving on with that. So, well, excellent. Keep those questions coming. Let's jump in a high level. You can see on the slide that, right, there's lots of elements to your strategic plan, lots of ways that you need to make sure that it's aligning to your college's strategic plan. At the case session in October, when we have more time, we are gonna unpack this piece a bit more. But for today, as Diana and I talked about it, we're gonna keep it focused on sort of how are you implementing and how are you managing the implementation of your strategic plan? Again, assuming that it's aligned with the college's strategic plan and it aligns with your mission and vision as an organization right, all those things are done. Diana, talk a little bit about, you've got a great tool that you use. And again, this tool will be made available. You've got a great tool that just helps you with implementation. Let's just take like one or two minutes and kind of dig into that. Because again, starting with a strategic plan is one of those areas, the keeper of the vision. So you need to have a plan, you need to have a tool and a process and some rhythms that help your board be the keeper of the vision and make sure that the organization is executing that vision with fidelity throughout the year. But Diana, talk a little bit about your tool. Sure, so we just started this with our current strategic plan. So our new strategic plan just started this past year. And we needed a way to track that we were accomplishing the work. And who was responsible for the work, right? Because in my opinion, accountability and responsibility are very important things. So we set it up and basically we took each one of our initiatives and put all the tasks that go under them, right? So we have seven initiatives, key initiatives, and then tasks vary depending on what it is. And then we assigned a committee to it. So what committee is actually responsible for this and who should be involved in looking at this piece of it? We assigned a staff member. What staff member is ultimately responsible for making some of this happen? And then do we have consultants assigned to some of this, right? So we also assigned them like what pieces, like we're looking at going into comprehensive campaign and we have a consultant for that. So he's attached to several pieces of this. Like I said, we have a prospect researcher, he's attached to pieces of this. We have a grant consultant that we're working with that helps us identify grants and then reviews after we've written them. So different pieces, we have our goals, we have our progress to goals, where we're at 100%, 75%, nothing. We have dates, start date, end date. So maybe there's certain pieces of this plan we don't plan on starting. This is a five-year plan that we have and we don't plan on starting those for two years. So we don't, our start date is in two years, but it's there to remind us, guess what? Two years from now, we need to have A, B and C done because we're gonna get to D and we need these done before we can get to that piece of that strategic plan in two years. And then we have notes. So part of that is also, we all know the best laid plans don't always happen, right? So you have to be able to adjust, right? So our notes, if we are not able to meet the deadline that we set for ourselves, we put that in the notes, why we can't, right? So guess what? We wanted to write for a bunch of grants and current government leadership has removed those grants. So they're no longer available. Guess what goes in our notes, right? Like some things are beyond our control. Some things are within our control and some things just for whatever reason don't happen, right? And so that's kind of how we started tracking. So what we'll share with you is my draft of my implementation plan. It still has a lot of pieces that I still need to fill in because we just put this together within the last couple of months. And so, I mean, I think it's gonna be a good tracking tool. It's gonna keep myself and my staff on course. It's gonna keep the board on course and it's gonna move us in a positive direction. Yeah, and as you think, team out there, think about that. I'm gonna just kind of go to this last bullet point about annual priorities. So thinking about your strategic plan and what she's talking about, your annual implementation plan, not only that there's alignment, but think about the sort of rhythms and the structures. I'm a big believer that you are accomplishing as an organization, what your systems are designed to accomplish. And if you don't like, if you want to accomplish more or accomplish different, think through about those systems that are supporting that. And some of those systems are your rhythms. So what are the rhythms? How often are you talking about your strategic plan goals? How often are you giving reports to your board? Is that twice a year? Is that every quarter? Is that every board meeting about goals and priorities for the year and sort of accomplishments, progress toward those goals over time? How are you incorporating these organizational goals for each year into performance goals for each team member? And do they really see where their roles are aligning into those organizational goals? Does everyone have ownership on those? We even do a performance incentive plan, so a bonus, but they're all based on evidence and sort of we set those goals, the board approves them, but they're very tied into our annual kind of implementation plan and those organizational goals. And then we create even some rhythms within the team where I have individual check-ins with the folks that I directly manage and our senior director of development with her person. We work as a team, one meeting a month is always focused on this year's priorities and what we need to be doing together as a team to achieve that for the next month. And then most months we have a second team meeting that's looking a year ahead. So we look at a PBAI cycle or a planning, budget assessment and innovation. So as we come into July, we're in the assessment cycle, looking back to last year, what did we accomplish? How far did we go? Let's tighten up our goals for this next year. And then we move into the innovations, like how do we want to, a year from now, what do we want to create differently to do differently? What strategies aren't working? What strategies could replace those? And then we're looking at planning and budgeting as we move into kind of late winter and early spring. And this time of the year when we present our budget to our board. So thinking about those rhythms, thinking about those systems that are supporting the execution of your work is just as important as creating those aligned goals in the first place. So yeah, a lot to think about. I know we couldn't really unpack fully with strategic planning. There may be some great questions that are popping up. And yes, we are going to send attachments, including these slides and an audio recording as is being recorded. So you will have those to come back to and sort of unpack further. Diana, you mentioned importance of, in your plan, I love that, that you talk about connecting your plan and outcomes and strategies in your plan to committees. Talk a little bit about, let's talk a few minutes about what type of committees should we be thinking about on our boards and looking at like, how are we engaging those? We'll jump into that next after board structure. Talk a little bit about your committees. Sure, so our committees consist of an executive committee, a development committee, a nominating and board development committee, finance and investment committee, board governance slash audit committee, strategic planning committee, and then of course scholarship, which is different. Under our development committee, we have subcommittees. We have like our gala committee, our golf committee, a couple of different things. We also have our campaign planning committee will fall under there once it's up and running. And so we attach those committees not only to our strategic plan and key initiatives, but we attach them to our executive committee as well. So the way our committee, the chairman of our, so our immediate past chair of our board is also the nominating and board development committee chair. The chairman, the chairperson of the board is also the chair of the executive committee. The vice chair is also the chair of strategic planning. The treasurer is also the chair of finance and our secretary is also the chair of board governance. The only one that doesn't have a chair sitting on the executive committee would be our development committee. And that's kind of a little bit different, right? And that, we don't have that because that committee has a huge amount of responsibility. So having them on one more thing wasn't, didn't make sense to us at this point, but if they ever want to, or if we need them, they certainly would come to executive committee meetings. So that's kind of how we connect those to the board and to our strategic plan. Yeah, and then you heard us mention earlier around we've got committees, right? And then you're also thinking around from the bylaws discussion and from some of the pieces earlier, Duchess and CCA, we have board limits. And so one question to ask yourself, right? As you're thinking about your board, do I have the right committees to accomplish the work? Do we have, and I love that Diana has built in a lot of succession planning in the way that they structure the committee and how people are on their executive committee. We do the same, you're a vice president for two years before you become president for two years. And then your first year as past president, you stay, we ask you to stay on the executive committee as past president. And then we have other at-large members that we're using to develop capacity to take on a role of secretary, treasurer, vice president, or president of the executive committee. Right, so think about we have the right committees. Do we have succession planning built into the way that we're structuring those committees? But then ask yourself, do our board terms, are they hurting us or are they helping us, right? Those can be tricky conversations. And so we have unlimited in terms of their three-year terms, but we don't have a limit. I know Diana mentioned earlier, there's a limit on the number of terms that you can have. So we have some folks and we've just found in our very relational kind of style is that we have conversations as it may be time for folks to roll off. We have those conversations and don't shy away from them. While at the same time, celebrating the incredible commitment and work a person has done. But we don't actually have a limit to the number of three-year terms that you can have. So for some, that could be a real problem. And I'm sure in the organization's history, it probably has been. We've been very fortunate at least the last nine years. But thinking about, are those term limits helping or hurting you? As we move into board engagement, Diana, you mentioned earlier, I know it was related to this slide, the caring and feeding. Unpack that a little bit more and then team, we're gonna jump into, you heard about this report card. We're gonna show you another tool that you'll also get. It's about, well, how do I think about engaging the board a little bit more? But before we get into that, Diana, talk a little bit about the importance of that caring and feeding and making sure that you're having the right conversations in each of those meetings. Yeah, so caring and feeding is really recognizing your board members for the great work that they do, right? You want them to feel welcomed and valued. And that's kind of what I feel like. I know another board that, they would go to their golf tournament and then their board members, their volunteers up there and their board members would get a bag lunch with peanut butter and jelly while the other people at the golf tournament were getting a regular meal, right? That's not the impression you wanna give to your board members, right? You want them to recognize that the time, which is one commodity you can't develop, right? You can always make more money. You can't make more time in your life. So the fact that they're giving of their time is something that you need to take into consideration. So I have had board members tell me how much they appreciate how much we do for them, right? And it's not just going to an event and giving them food or whatever, but it's also, you know, when they call, we respond immediately, right? They are my first priority always because without them, we couldn't function, right? We wouldn't be able to expand our reach to donors. We wouldn't be able to do the work that we do and be successful. I wouldn't personally have the support that I get from them to be able to do this job every single day. So to me, making them feel like the most valued person in the world, not making them feel that way, but making them the most valued person, you know, when I'm dealing with them is extremely important to me. You know, and when you're bringing them, don't waste their time. So make sure that your committee agendas and your board agenda are valuable information for them. That again, this is where engagement, they need to be engaged. They need to feel like what they're there for actually makes a difference. Like if they disagree with something that's going on, they need to know that they're being heard and that they're not just being ignored and you're gonna do whatever you wanna do anyway, right? Take everything they say into consideration. Even if you don't agree with it, you don't always have to agree with it. But if you don't agree with something a board member saying, you need to have a reason why and you need to have that conversation with them. Hey, while I appreciate what you have said and I appreciate your point of view here, these are the reasons why I'm not sure that is the best route for us to go or however you wanna put it, right? But you have to not treat them with gloves because like I said before, I think honesty is the best policy, but there's always a way of delivering news that may be in opposition to somebody else. And that's part of the caring for them as well. When I think, it's easy to deal with your board members when everything is happy and going the right direction and everybody agrees. It has to be even more important when things aren't going how everybody agrees, right? You have to even be more caring in those moments. So, I mean, that's my opinion. I do make it a point to go out with every single board member for a one-on-one lunch every single year. And I have 32 board members, right? So that's a good part of the year. I only get 20 weeks off a year if I go to lunch with one every single week, right? But it's important because I need to hear their individual information and I need to take any constructive criticism they have about me or my staff or something we're doing. And I need to take it to heart and take it well and receive that information for the way that it's meant to be constructive. And that's all part of this process, I believe as well. And as you're thinking about that compelling board and committee agendas, make sure to be celebrating board members. I know of one foundation, they love socks. And so when a board member sort of did something above and beyond or connected a new donor to the organization, anything that connected back to their commitment of excellence for their board members and what it meant to be engaged, they gave them a pair of socks with their logo or their mascot, I can't remember, but they just loved their socks, right? So I'm curious, anyone, what is one way that you are celebrating your board members when they do accomplish those things and kind of go above and beyond or make that really important connection to the college and to the foundation that makes a gift or provides a resource to students? How are you celebrating those? If somebody wants to, I'd love to hear from someone in the chat or if there's somebody brave enough to unmute and tell us one way that you're celebrating your board. There are some coming into the chat. Ray said, an engraved gavel is a great gift for an outgoing board chair. We give a board member of the year award. People love awards. Handwritten notes from your college president or your chancellor. I know our board loves that as well. That's a great one. Kudos, nice. Yeah, again, celebrate people, right? They are volunteers. I tell them all the time, I want their membership, like their service on our board to be the thing that with the rest of their careers and lives, they look back to and compare their board experience to this one. I am not naive enough to know that they're gonna always be with us. They are gonna go and serve on other boards, but I want them to always remember like, wow, I felt cared for and I felt valued. I felt the work I was doing was really important that I was showing up at meetings. I wasn't just rubber stamping things. I wasn't just getting an update. I was actually engaging in strategic conversation that moved the mission forward, is the reason that I joined this board, right? We wanna have those things. So great, I love these different awards and vests. We've done cutting boards with an image of our college. We've done ice buckets because of things. We've done some things related to biking because our board member that had been on for many, many, like a few decades was phenomenal. So invested in the community was a huge biker. So right, personalizing those gifts as best you can. Even a magic eight ball from president to president. That's a great one. I love it. You guys are so creative. I am learning so much today, Diana. This is fun. So as we think about board engagement, I'm gonna walk through a tool. Here's a tool that we use. This is something that we just developed. I developed it this year thinking about how do I help the board actually plan for the year and think about their level of engagement? So if you were using this sort of report card idea, how do you help them plan so they make a plan for how they wanna show up this year? And so these columns on here about volunteer, event participation, personal, a meaningful financial gift is kind of the same language that we use that Diana uses. Board meeting attendance, donor introductions, committee membership. We ask for at least one participation on one committee. Others that are less bullet points and more narrative in their thinking. They can tell the story of what success looks like to them. So this is a tool that we created that lays out all the dates, puts everything in one page and has them during our annual board kickoff, which is basically a half day strategic planning retreat with our board that we do every beginning of September. We kind of get through the start of school in August and then meet with us and our college leadership team comes together as part of that as well with our board. And so this is part of the afternoon when it's just us and the board, the leadership team is kind of left from our morning activities. And so they have a chance to kind of reflect on this. And then following up in the next couple of months, so in September and October, myself and our senior director of development, we also took this year, our scholarship and donor impact coordinator and our donor engagement coordinator, our other two staff members to certain of these meetings, but we call them our connect, give, engage conversations. We review this engagement plan with each of them. And so when we think about connect, it is how do you as a board member want to connect in a meaningful way this year outside of board meetings and committee meetings? What does that connection look like? And so we'll talk about what that looks like, the events they want to go to. And then we make sure that we're giving them, we get them all on their calendars at the beginning of the school year. Then we have the conversation around give. What is that personal financially meaningful gift? And like Diana, they'll ask, well, what is financially meaningful? Well, we want to be in your top three. That's what we want to be. And that's what we need, all right? And so we have this give conversation for two reasons. One is because we want to know and we want to plan and we want to know what's going to capital, what's going to scholarship, what's going unrestricted, like kind of where they're thinking about giving. We have the same conversation with them as we would a donor. And that's important because we get the information that we need from them, but they also have a chance as we now move into the engage part of connect, give, engage conversation. We're asking, who is it that you want to connect? Who are the two to three people? And I have learned that doing more than three, I usually get less done in terms of making those connections with that board member. When I had five or six, I'd still get two or three. So starting with two or three, and then moving on from there, once those folks are connected, meaningful with our organization has been a very successful strategy for me. But as we talk about engage, I wanted them to get comfortable with, we just had this give conversation with you. This is our style. This is how you can trust that we are going to care for those people that you're introducing, just like we care for you. So having that conversation is really important because it helps them have trust in you as the staff team, as you're going to be stewarding the relationships that they connect. And you want them to be comfortable with knowing what can they expect? How's that going to look on the receiving end of the person they connect to you? So connect, give, engage. We use this tool to help us do that. We do see some things about who's managing the board. And so we split that up at our organization. I manage executive committee. I work closely with my board chair and vice chair to self-govern the board. I lead the work of our finance and investment team. Our senior director of development leads the work of our development committee, our scholarship and donor impact coordinator. She leads the work of our scholarship committee and sort of all of those activities. So we sort of divide and conquer among our four staff persons. And Diana, on yours, do you do something similar or do you lead all those committees? Yeah, no, so I don't lead all those committees. So the same thing, I lead the majority of them, but like our board governance committee only meets when we need an audit or changing bylaws. So it meets once or twice a year. So my director of development leads my development committee and I lead the other ones. And they're pretty, most of the other ones are more simple. The development committee has the most pieces. And like then the subcommittees, we have other people that lead the subcommittees under development committees. We have a special events and alumni relations committee and that's led by two other members of our team. So we do split it up as well. One of the things I want to do going forward is actually split up the board members. Like I said, we have 32 board members and it's a challenge for me to manage them all, right? So I am going to start splitting them up probably between me, my director of development and my assistant director and give us each 10 that we are responsible for dealing with them with fundraising, with their needs and that sort of thing. I do have an executive assistant that's an executive assistant to myself and to the board. So the board are welcome to go to her with any questions. And she helps with a lot of the preparation for the committee agendas and she does the minutes and that sort of thing. So there is a lot of other support to make sure that this all runs smoothly. Yeah, and Veronica, we're giving you some kind of award. I don't know, 63 board members on your roster. That is intense and a lot. And yes, I think, you know, trying to find, right? We have 16 on ours, not counting our board, our college president who's ex-officio, but right, like trying to find again, the structure and the rhythms that's gonna work with how many. So if you've got more than 20, that looks different than if you've got 10. And so thinking about that and I would also encourage, not really in our sort of guided notes here, but thinking about your staff development, right? You're caring for and feeding your board members, do the same with your staff. And I feel as a manager, part of it is, I'm always trying to coach and support our team members for what's next in their career. And I hope that is with us, but I know it's not always, right? And so making sure how can I engage as Diana's doing, as I'm doing, how do you engage your other team members in this work, working either with donors, even our scholarship coordinator, she is stewarding relationships. She is actually helping raise additional endowed gifts from our current donors and even new prospective scholarship donors, right? But she didn't start there. We worked to get her comfortable to be part of the fundraisers. She's incredible and golden with our students, running programs in some of our cohort models with a few of our scholarship programs, but we coached her and supported her. And now like, I don't even have to show up in our senior director of development. We don't even have to be involved because she is so comfortable because we've given her those at-bats in her role so that she could kind of expand her role within the foundation that aligned to some things that she wanted to accomplish as a person. So think through some of those things as you're thinking how to engage your team members thoughtfully with your board, as obviously there are pitfalls to that as well you want to avoid, but the opportunity to help those board members feel engaged, to feel cared for, if it's all on you as one person, whether you have 10 or 63, it can be definitely tough. So think about that. And I would say your staff, like John said, we don't really have that as part of our thing, but yeah, your staff definitely need to be included in all of this. My executive assistant runs our whole scholarship program with the department of student financial services. I don't have the time even get to the meetings anymore because I'm stuck in a cabinet meeting or a president's leadership meeting. So you need to have the right people in place that you can trust and know that if they run into a challenge, they're gonna come to you and that's where then you step in. I also require all of my staff to go to professional development every single year. And I don't care. I have a receptionist that is part-time and she's going to fundraising programming because she needs to know what we do and why we do it to be the best that she can. Cause she gets pulled into things left and right. The same with my executive assistant. Is she out there asking for money? Absolutely not. But is she talking to my donors on a regular basis when they call for me and I'm not here? Yeah. And I have to educate her. This is how we do the scholar. You know, if somebody wants a new scholarship, this is what you give them. This is the brochure. This is what you can talk to them about. And then yes, please set me up a meeting, right? To have a further discussion. So having just like having a very educated board, you need to have a very educated staff so that they can support you the way that you need to be supported for all those things. I do wanna point out, I know that the question was asked around kind of some DEI pieces and sort of as we think about demographics of our board and tracking some of those things and how that shifted or changed over the last, not even year, but over the last since January. And yes, I suspect that most of us are having those types of conversations. One of our board characteristics I shared with you earlier is that our board says we will be representative of our community. We are the most diverse community in all of Colorado. And when I walk across our campus, I can meet people from 60 different countries easily, right? And so I'm speaking a myriad of languages on our campus. And so our board, that's really important. And so we have talked about that. And so we have modified some of our scholarship language. I know we're not gonna dig into those kinds of things today, but yeah, being aware of those, but having that conversation, like in our case with our scholarship committee first and our executive committee, and then updating the board and saying, here's kind of where we are. Here's what we've worked with our attorney and sort of how we believe that this language is limiting our liability and protecting the college, which actually, even though we're separate, is still the most important and not lose their title funding from something that their foundation is doing. So we've been very thoughtful about those, but from a board demographic perspective, we still think it's important to monitor that, to look at it and to prioritize the representation of our very diverse community. We want it to be more reflective than it is today on our board. So we're gonna keep moving about that. And I know Christy captured some notes too around a legal session or something else that could dig into that topic a lot more deeply. As we continue on, you've got a tool, you've got your Connect, Give, Engage conversation to have. How do you then have the board assess? And if you're not doing assessments, we really encourage you, even doing a micro, a little mini assessment with your board at your next board meeting could be very productive and helpful. Or for us, we do it about every three years. We did earlier when I was new here, I came in May of 2016. So that fall, we did one, we did one the next year, and then a couple of years, and then you can see the last time we did it in 2023, last September of 23. We do an assessment using a survey tool. I now have our institutional research team, they build it out and sort of manage it. It's great. I used SurveyMonkey when I first came, that was great as well, but now I've got somebody else that's doing the data analysis and tossing this all in in this Excel spreadsheet. You'll get this Excel, so you'll see how columns add and subtract and communicate a difference. So we'll give you this actual tool in Excel so you can play with it. It has whole board assessment questions that they're thinking of. As I think about the whole board, how is the whole board doing? And so we'll dig into, again, those key responsibilities of the board and a little bit on like, how's the whole board doing in terms of fundraising and are they participating, right? So you can see on the slide a few of those questions. The second group of questions that we do are around how are you doing as a board member? Self-assess your own engagement as a board member. And so you can see those kinds of questions. Again, I very closely back to our commitment to excellence, that board engagement commitment that we ask everyone to do. So financially meaningful gifts, are you stewarding three donor connections during this last academic year? How are your relationships with the executive director and team members and the college? It's really very personal. How are you feeling about your experience? And then here's something I think you might think about doing a mini board assessment at your next board meeting. If you're not regularly doing these types of assessments, start with open-ended questions. These were the questions that we asked with the 2023 version. What are the great strengths? What are the board areas they can improve? What's one idea for increasing the foundation's impact over the next three years? What's one way the foundation team could increase the meaningfulness of your board experience? Again, that's a personal question that's really important to me. What I would most like to know about the college, we had several new board members and we knew that the institution, right? It's big, it's multiple campuses. There's no way they can know everything. So we wanted to find out what was important for them and make sure that we had those college leaders showing up at future board meetings to kind of unpack those programs, those areas, those priorities, those student experiences, and so on. So those are some of the things that you could think about as an assessment. How are you doing as a board? How are you doing as a board member? And how can we continue to grow stronger together? All right, just checking chat. So take a moment, think through, if you see these five questions, if you were to do a mini board assessment at your next board meeting, what might be two or three questions that you could ask as part of your pre-read packet? And I highly encourage you to use pre-read packets, is what I call them, send out the agenda, but I send out, yes, the minutes. We use a consent agenda, so we don't spend, we used to when I started, like 20 minutes talking about finances at every board meeting, and that just was not the most useful conversation. So that becomes part of the pre-read packet and a consent agenda. And then we deep dive with our investment committee and sometimes depending on what's happening with our executive committee on those topics, but we're the whole board, we do not spend but a couple of minutes talking about finances at any one time usually, unless it's the budget, then it's a longer conversation. So think about your next board meeting, what are two or three questions you might unpack with them to give you a better insight to how they're experiencing, how they see the board in terms of its strengths and its areas of growth. All right, I will slide to this. And Diana, I'm gonna let you talk a little bit about the kind of donor-centered fundraising cycle and what we're going to do checking on our time. We're gonna do some breakout groups and we're gonna give you a little bit of time to sort of unpack some things you've learned today here in just a moment. But Diana, walk us through a little bit as we think about how we're engaging the board in the stewardship and kind of cycle, because we know it's more than just the ask. Right, so identifying your donors, of course, and then doing discovery, right? Finding out about them, what interests them, that sort of thing. Then you go into your cultivation, which is here we have three to 10 visits and we all know that sometimes some donors are ready to give much quicker, some are ready to take a lot longer. You feel like you're dating them forever and you're never getting married, right? So that you have to all take all of that into consideration. And then you get to the point where you actually do the ask, right? You ask them for money, assuming they give you a gift, and then you have stewardship activities, right? Stewardship, stewardship, stewardship, before you solicit again, right? And you have to approve them through this stewardship, I think is one of the biggest things, is you have to prove to them that the gift that they made is making a huge difference, right? What is it doing? How is it showing impact? How is the legacy that they're creating? This is who they are, right? This is what is important to them and make it make significant difference. I know somebody asked a question earlier, like how do you, if you do something with students. So one of our biggest stewardship activities for our scholarship donors, and we're starting to use it as a cultivation activity as well, is our annual Honors Convocation Luncheon, where we bring our donors of scholarships together with the students that are receiving their scholarships that year. And we have a luncheon and we intentionally seat them all together and we have faculty and staff there. So there's conversations that's going on. And this past year, we had a couple of people that I had been talking to about scholarships that kind of on the fence, what they were gonna do and what does it look like and blah, blah, blah. So I brought them to this event. I said, hey, why don't you join us at this event, right? Come and see what our scholarship ceremony is about, see the engagement between the donors and the students and see, you know, hear the stories. Needless to say, they came to this luncheon. Both of them have now committed to scholarships. They loved it. I additionally, I sat them strategically at tables where I had board members also. And I told the board members, listen, this is your job. This is what this person is interested in. Please talk to them about the scholarship you created and why it was so important to you. Even though you're a board member and you've also committed your time. Why did you commit your time and your dollars, right? So these stewardship activities are vital. But look at them as cultivation tools as well because there is no better person to speak to your mission than somebody that has given and loves the fact that they gave you money already. I mean, that is my opinion because you're not doing anything to get them to say that. You're not being paid to say that to them, you know? This is a peer-to-peer situation and in my opinion, it doesn't get much better than that. So with that- Well, and I love, Diana, I just wanna pause because I really love, I know in previous conversations it made me rethink about some things that we did this year at our college beyond walls luncheon, our kind of biggest fundraiser that we do every year. And so we had about 500 people in a room, mostly corporate foundation, community leaders, elected leaders, all of that, right? And something, Diana, that you and I talked about last year was how you're very intentional about giving assignments. Like you just mentioned two board members during certain events. And that was a huge takeaway for me last year. And so we've done that. And I can say that I had board members that said, wow, I enjoyed this year's luncheon even more. And it was, and they're like, because I knew these are the three tables you had me go to and I engaged in these conversations. I got to give my elevator pitch that we practiced as a board, those kinds of things. And right, it was, they had a great time. And then I had people that were at those tables, like take the moments to just email me and say, hey, it meant so much that your board president stopped by our table to introduce themselves. And I got to know them and in a couple of cases, like, oh, and I'm having coffee with this board member in two weeks, right? So it is really amazing, the power of giving your board assignments. And we'll talk about some strategies, some hands-on activities of how you can even help the board determine what their assignments might be at an upcoming event when we come back from our breakout groups. Diana, before we slide into breakout groups, oops, sorry, I hit the wrong button here. Anything else that you wanna mention on that piece around stewardship solicitation or any other questions out there? And then we're gonna go into breakout groups for about six or so minutes, and we'll kind of describe your assignment while you're in your breakout group. Anything else before we do that? No, I just think when you're going through this whole process and even might be before the stewardship piece is make sure your donors know all their options. So I recently had a donor come to me and he's making a $10,000 gift each year for us to spend for different things. DEI is really important to him. So needless to say, over this past year, DEI has even become more important to him where it's gotten so much opposition. And so he came to me this year and again, and he said, I wanna make a $15,000 gift for this this year, and I wanna make a $10,000 gift for these other things. And I said to him, I said, well, Henry, we have a conversation about endowing one of those gifts. I said, why don't you start creating your legacy? I said, so when you no longer choose to give or whatever, you still have that legacy, what is important to you happening, right? And he said, well, I don't think I can afford that. I said, you absolutely can. I said, a minimum gift for our endowment is $15,000. I said, you could take that. I said, granted, it only pays out 5% the first year, but if you're willing to continue giving each year, you can give a portion to what you wanted to go to it. So you're spending the money you wanna spend now while building that legacy. So I had this, and he left the phone conversation with me, still a little unsure, but I set up a meeting with him. And it was funny, the more he thought about it on his own with the tools that I had given him, and I sent him a couple of brochures. We have a brochure on creating an endowment. We have a brochure on creating a scholarship. Ultimately, he created the Rickey Multicultural Support Fund to support Black History Month, Women's History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, et cetera, LGBTQ. And when he came into my office that day, he said, Diana, the more I thought about it, the more excited I got about this. This is something I really wanna do. I am so excited. Thank you for letting me know about that. And thank you for kind of having that conversation with me, even though I was resistant and didn't think it was possible. So that's part of what I consider your stewardship too. He's been a donor. He's been an annual gift donor. But to get your annual gift donors to that next level, that's part of what you're doing, I think, when you're stewarding, you're educating your donors, you're getting them to see other opportunities that may be available for them. And reminding your boards, right? This slide that you're seeing is that most of this, the stewardship part, the sort of cultivation part, 95% of the work, 5% of the work, really. If you think about it in terms of time is the actual solicitation and encourage you to think about, one, inviting your board members. How are you inviting them? How are you practicing? How are they feeling prepared at events? But how are you inviting them into conversations? Even if they're not comfortable yet inviting you to conversations with people they know, but how are you inviting them to conversations that you know are going to be successful, that are going to end in a gift? I've had both. I'm very fortunate to have a board president that is incredibly dynamic and is visible in ways that our former president was not, is an external leader in ways that our former president was much more of an internal leader on quality and sort of student experience. And so I know I'm very fortunate to have a board president that I don't have to do much handling or coaching around, but I haven't always had that. And so how was I preparing my board president for these conversations and creating agendas of like, here's the questions, here's what we're listening for in this conversation. Here's kind of the roles that I see you playing and me playing and kind of practicing that a little bit. Like that's what I would do with my former president. And then we would go. And she literally, for someone who said I'm not good at fundraising was batting a thousand. And part of that is right, how we set up the conversation, the work that we do with the donor leading to that conversation and the president comes in or your board member comes into that conversation. But think about how are we coaching and preparing them using board time to do it, using one-on-one meetings, even your connect, give, engage conversation. It's all about building the capacity of your board to jump in easily, more easily to the 95% of the activity. And then sometimes into that 5% where they are helping with the solicitation ask. So here's what we're gonna do in your breakout groups. I just have one thing real quick. And that solicitation ask, if you're doing the rest of it right is basically just giving them a number and telling them how that's gonna work. It's not necessarily an ask because if you've done your stewardship and your cultivation properly, they're wanting to give you their money and they're wanting to make that difference. Right. As I always encourage our board, we ask a whole lot before we ask, right? So we're asking a lot of questions and it really is, we use a one-pager kind of a gift proposal after this sort of initial meeting. So when we're going to really solicit, we've already sort of nailed out most of the details and we're just fine tuning. And that to me is a great time to invite them in, give their testimony. And, you know, Diana, when you talked about this donor, what it made me think of is you made this donor feel like, and not just feel, but were, they became part of your story as the foundation, your story of the college. They felt really connected to your story. And I tried to scroll through as many pictures and names on here. We have a really wide, diverse group of folks from all over the country today. In your community, your stories really matter. Your community needs you. And I know because I believe so powerfully in the space that community colleges occupy that we have a powerful story to invite people into. So I hope you heard in Diana's example of just the easy way that she invited a person to become part of that story. And then they felt that and felt even more engaged becoming part of this remarkable story of your college's foundation and the impact that you're having in the lives of people. So what we're going to do, let me see if I can cut and paste. I may need your help, Christy, on this. Okay, here it is. We have two questions. We're going to take this. So I'm going to give you about two minutes. You're going to have a total of six minutes in your breakout room. Use it how you want, but I'm going to encourage you, take a minute or two and just reflect on these two questions. What's one way you've engaged your board successfully in some aspect of the fundraising cycle? Brag on yourself. We don't do it enough. Say it, tell what's going really well, something that really worked in your foundation, all right? The second question I want you to discuss is based on today's session, what's your one to two action steps and by when will you take them? What's your takeaway from today and when do you expect to kind of implement that? What will it look like? So take about two minutes to think about this and then each of you give each other, you're going to have about three people in your session, give about 90 seconds to share your answers to these two questions and then we'll see you back here in about six minutes, all right? Any questions on that? Got it? All right, I see some heads up from the few pictures I can't see. All right, we're going into breakout sessions. We'll see you back here in six minutes to wrap up. I'm on mute. Well, welcome back everyone. Thank you for taking that time. We're kind of right here, kind of on our time here. So I want to encourage everyone when you receive your evaluation link in today's session and I was so glad to jump in one of the groups and hear a little bit about two colleagues from different parts of the country. When you receive your evaluation link, please let us know, like what are the one or two next action steps and kind of when are you planning to take them as well as giving us your feedback on what worked today. I know a virtual session is a little different than the in-person, but what worked today? How could we strengthen this as a virtual session? Where would you like to see us spend more time or less time? And I know definitely some on the alumni side, definitely there's opportunity there to talk about those differences of boards since we do manage and oversee and develop different types of boards for different purposes in our work, especially at the two and the four year and at the K-12 level. So thinking a little bit more about that is clearly a good piece of feedback. So think about that. Please put that all in the evaluation and let us know some of the collateral pieces that you'll be sending. We're going to give you a lot. So use what works for you, make it, transition it into fit. We'd love to hear your feedback. You'll have our email addresses and such. So please let us know how you're using any of those tools or ways that you've improved them even better because we like to keep improving. Here's a Temple tool. I'm going to go back to share and we're really kind of now winding down in the home stretch. Let's make sure I am sharing hopefully the right screen. Let's see if this works right. All right, it looks like it is. All right, so we've talked about the donor-sender fundraising cycle. You've got to debrief there with a couple of colleagues and sorry if any of you ended up alone. We tried to jump in and out of some rooms if we saw one person by themselves, but we hope that that was valuable reflection time for you. Thanks for staying with us this whole time. Here's a couple of hands-on activities you could put into place at your very next board meeting or committee meeting. Yeah, go back. The simple one. Oh, here we go. The simple one is something that I call just easy, medium, hard. You can use this tool for anything in the fundraising cycle of the donor-sender fundraising cycle. When you're talking about stewardship, you're talking about solicitation, you're talking about roles at an upcoming fundraising event, right? Just simply have board members, give them a chart or have them create it. Say, here's easy, medium, and hard. And now I want you to put what are one or two actions that you would be willing to take in this area? So in this case, we were talking about donor stewardship and how we are stewarding those donors after they've become donors. And so this is how I started. It's like such an easy one might be write a donor thank you note, right? Something, a medium for that particular board member might be calling the donor and saying thank you. And something a little bit harder for that particular board member might be inviting them to coffee with the executive director, right? That's an easy, medium, hard. It's a super easy tool that you can use in so many different ways. Diana, you created using this resource that you're gonna share with us, a book that I know I have on my shelf as well. And Andrea, who's an author on there, she's with Capital Campaign Pros. She's been at some of our case conferences in the past and presented as well as Amy Eisenstein that runs Capital Campaign Pros. Great, great colleague in the community. But you used her book and kind of took these activities and created a whole sort of board retreat about this. So I'll click to the next slide. Talk to us a little bit about the agenda and sort of some of those activities as we've got just a couple more minutes left. So our agenda was as you see here. So we did our welcome introduction goals for today's session. We had our board chair speak about the goals. Then we talked about the cycle of fundraising. So the book is at the bottom there, Train Your Board. And I have to tell you, it's an amazing book. There are so many great resources and it's inexpensive and it makes this process easy. My board was so impressed with these exercises and what they got out of it. And it really made them engaged. One of the things that we did is we played musical chairs throughout this retreat. So while they all started at whatever table they wanted, so they all gravitated to the people they knew, right? The other board members that they were friends with. We numbered them one through four, I think it was one through five. And we moved them from table. So we were like, okay, you're all sitting where you want. Now, anybody with a table one, you're gonna go here. So each exercise, we moved our board members around so that they got to hear from other board members their perspectives. Because you know, when you gravitate towards people, you kind of sometimes get that group think mentality going on and we wanted to break that apart. We didn't want that to exist in this situation because we wanted to get a full scope of what everybody thought. So the cycle of fundraising, and this was partially to help them understand how fundraising works, to kind of break down some of those fears about fundraising. Again, it was to talk about that cultivation and stewardship are the biggest parts and that the ask is the smallest and quite frankly, the easiest part of this and why they should not fear it. And from this, we actually have had a couple board members say that they want to take some development on asking for money specifically so that they get and start feeling more comfortable and doing some role playing in that process. And so to me, that is a huge takeaway from that particular exercise. Next, why people give, right? And again, this is to feed into it. Why people give, it's like the donor I spoke to you before, Henry, why he gave. He didn't give because I twisted his arm. He didn't give because I went and wrote out a check out of his checkbook. He gave because this was important to him, right? And this excited him. We have one donor that has given us $2 million for our top 10% scholarship. And one of the things that he said at every luncheon we had for his students was, I just love seeing their smiling faces, right? It's those are the reasons why people give. I mean, we know there's a tax benefit for some people, which has gotten less and less, unfortunately, over the years, but they don't give for that, right? They give because it makes them feel good. And we have to further that. Then we had the next one is the case simplified. So we were trying to get them to understand, again, why they're giving to us, right? So talking about the case, the case that we have set up here at Dutchess Community College and why that's important, why they need to talk about that, right? And from this came creating an elevator pitch and that sort of thing, right? To go along with the case. How do you take that case and boil it down into something that you can talk to somebody about in less than a minute, right? And so it's, again, to give them a bigger understanding and give them more insight into what we do and why we do it. And so we have two cases, right? So we have an annual fund case for that year, right? So we create an annual fund case every year. Okay, this is what we're raising money for, and this is why. And then we also talked about creating a case for a bigger campaign. What does that look like? What are some of the initiatives the college is currently looking to have support for? And how is that going to differ slightly than the annual fund case? So we kind of talked about that. And I know, Diana, we're right kind of at time here, a couple of minutes over. So just want to pause and say thank you for all of those that have been with us the entire time. We're so honored that you would invest time with us and even share some of your successes and your questions and your next action steps with folks that you did a breakout room with. What you'll see in this advancement training is that you can see that some of these take a little longer than others, but there are so many ways that you can just engage like that elevator pitch. We did that in 25 minutes as part of a longer, kind of a longer board meeting that we meet every other month, usually an hour and a half, but that one we did a two hour so we could do it. We also have extended board meetings so that we could do a networking experience with some of our scholarship recipients that our board loves. And they're like, we must do this every year. So it's become an annual tradition now for two years. So there are ways to engage. So I just hope you see in this, find those things that work, find the rhythm that works, but keep building the capacities of your board because we are all stronger together. And I think that we can move further and faster when we do it together, especially with our incredible volunteers, whether it's alumni board or your foundation board. We're so, so thankful. If there are any other final questions, I wanna give just 30 seconds for any last questions and just, again, tell you, thank you, thank you from Diana, from me, from Christy, and from Case for joining us today. Any last question? No? Awesome, well, as one of my board members always likes to tell me, he's like, John, make it a great day. And we hope that you make it a great day in your communities as well. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. I will be sending a follow-up email with all the things to you all afterwards. So have a great day, everyone.

board engagement

educational foundations

John Wolfkill

Diana Pollard

board responsibilities

strategic planning

committee structures

MOU

leadership changes

community-driven

student-focused

diverse boards

competency matrix

donor-centered fundraising

collaborative learning