Fundraising

Raising money requires friends.  Deans locate and cultivate friends of a program, often alumni but sometimes other stakeholders in the program's success.  Asking friends for money is like selling.  Show clients the benefit of their gifts and they will give.  Friendly persistence and patience is often required.

Another method is to NOT ask for money, but request help with a non-trivial task.  Enlist their time and effort to help your program and more often than not they will respond at some point, "Can't I just write a check?"

Say yes.

Need a consultant for your friendraising and fundraising efforts?  Contact me at fergusond@cofc.edu

Advisory Councils

One of my proudest accomplishments is helping start a national advisory council during my inaugural department chair term at the College of Charleston.  It started with a tiny handful of participants and grew to something unusual and highly successful.  I cannot take all the credit, but I learned the best way for communication/journalism units to build/enhance a national reputation!  Take a look at the list that our department assembled between 2003 and 2009:

http://www.cofc.edu/communication/council/memberlisting.html

The free advice:

1.  Don't populate your council primarily with alumni and local media professionals.  Go national.

2.  Rely on "snowball" growth.  Each new member attracts peers.

3.  Require the members to donate a non-trivial annual subscription.   

4.  Assign advisory tasks to council members, but protect the faculty from a "board of trustees" approach to advice.

5.  Involve students in mentor relationships with council members.

6.  Create high profile events.  http://www.cofc.edu/bullypulpit

If you'd like details, contact me at fergusond@cofc.edu.  I would be happy to be a consultant to your program.

Welcome

I've been on several short-lists and campus interviews  for journalism dean openings, but never chosen to lead.  Usually the internal candidate is hired and sometimes someone younger or a better fit for unspoken diversity criteria.  It's enough to make me give up, after 12 campus visits in 9 years, but something must qualify me for all those phone/face-to-face interviews.  So I came up with the idea of being a virtual dean.  Some of my advice is free and some will likely require a paid subscription.  I have disabled the comments feature, but you can e-mail me with your questions and concerns.

My CV is available for inspection at http://fergusond.people.cofc.edu/vita.htm -- in case you're wondering what qualifies me to offer advice to colleges/schools of journalism, communication, or broadcasting.  You get what you pay for, so don't judge my free advice too harshly.  Your continued reading is optional but important to me, so I will pretend to be your real dean.  Just e-mail me your predicaments, concerns, hiring dilemmas, curricular crises, and personnel issues.  I really do have all the answers, somewhere, all based on 25 years of management experience.