About the West Coast Office
The Office of the Vice Chancellor for Institutional Advancement has made a commitment to the campus’ relationships on the West Coast by creating a satellite advancement office, the Illini Center West. The goal for any advancement operation in higher education is to advance the institution’s mission through the active and strategic engagement of core constituencies comprised of students, alumni, friends, corporate partners, foundations, and government agencies, who in turn support the institution through various means.
Advancement is not rocket science, just good business practice that leverages each point of contact with our constituents to deliver a clear and consistent message resulting in sustainable support of the University’s priorities and continuous growth of the communities who provide that support.
So how are we executing advancement at Illini Center West?
Communication
The practice of advancement begins with marketing and communication of the campus messages to the core constituencies listed above. These messages help our audiences understand how we are executing our mission and why the case for support exists today. Our communication also allows us to share messages of success about our alumni, corporate and other partners who tell another part of Illinois’ story by their active connection to our campus.
But before we can do this, we must first gather contact information for our constituencies. We are working on several strategies, electronic and otherwise, to improve our ability to communicate in this region. To date we have roughly 10% of our alumni email addresses. We’re working toward 100% and taking a grass roots approach beginning with our students.
Alumni Relations
Second, we work on building the Illinois community locally. In order to effectively build the community, we must first organize it and our community-building activities around several factors. The first factor is all-encompassing: being an alumnus/alumna of the campus makes us generally interested in campus-wide leadership, missions, and successes. So events where we bring the President, Chancellor, Provost, or a Vice Chancellor to the West Coast to speak about strategic plans for the campus would warrant an event open to all alumni.
The second factor is associated with the college or colleges our alumni attended and in many cases we factor down to the department level. Often we will work with a college, department, research center, or campus program, to create an event for all of their alumni in the Bay area that is relevant to both the market place and the priorities of that campus unit.
The third factor is associated with topical information, perhaps a current event, presented by a faculty member or distinguished alumnus, that would be of interest to a broad set of alumni regardless of major, that allows people to learn and network among like-minded people.
We also work with the local alumni club which is governed by the University of Illinois Alumni Association (UIAA). The local club is working hard to build a strong club culture among those alumni looking for networking opportunities, social and cultural events, local community service, links to programs run by the UIAA, and various faculty and alumni speaker events.
Corporate Relations
Many of the companies on the West Coast benefit by having our alumni in high ranking positions and thousands of our alumni in the rank and file. This affords us an opportunity to engage at multiple levels within corporations to find intersections between the goals of a company and the goals of our campus. We then work with the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Office of Corporate Relations, as well as many college and departmental corporate relations offices to bring these opportunities to fruition. We are also working on scalable annual giving programs targeted at the alumni population within each company that has a critical mass of Illini. By engaging an internal alumni advocate, creating targeted communications and coupling this with many companies’ matching program for charitable contributions we will begin the process of lifelong giving for thousands of our alumni.
Foundation Relations
Many philanthropic foundations are located on the West Coast and have intersections with our alumni who serve on their boards or are founding members. Our campus Office of Foundation Relations looks to Illini Center West for strategic connections within these foundations that will allow greater communications regarding the proposals they submit.
Fundraising
While the Brilliant Futures fundraising campaign is underway for the entire University of Illinois system, the Urbana campus has a goal to raise over $1.5 billion. Many campus units are relying on the financial support from alumni on the West Coast to help bridge the gap between unmet need for student, faculty and programmatic support and available resources. Because the population of alumni residing on the West Coast makes up the largest concentration of alumni outside of Illinois, this constitutes a critical mass of people who have the potential to give back to the campus that played a role in their success. We are working on fundraising across all levels of giving; from annual giving to major and principal gifts and for all units across the entire Urbana campus.
This means proactively identifying, cultivating, soliciting, and stewarding gifts that are transforming the landscape on campus and filling the most critical funding gaps for both faculty and students. Our fundraising efforts involve close coordination with campus staff who administer the gifts we cultivate to meet their specific needs. We rely on the University of Illinois Foundation for the many aspects of gift planning, processing, accounting, investing and stewardship of the gifts we work on. We also utilize the Foundation’s fundraising expertise and resources in the areas of estate planning and planned giving.
In addition to the communications and event activity for the alumni population-at-large listed above, we are also producing communication pieces and events specifically aimed at reaching our population of alumni who support the campus through their generous financial contributions.
Metrics
Just as in the private sector, we measure our advancement activities for outcomes. As with any new program, we are looking at baseline numbers for all of the areas listed above and measuring the change from new programs and efforts in both the short and long term. This provides us with a road map for where to allocate more resources or re-prioritize energies as the numbers dictate.
As is often the case in public higher education, there is no shortage of ideas that come from both internal and external sources, on how to address the advancement priorities listed above. We follow the metrics very closely as a source of direction for which of these ideas will produce the biggest impact with the limited resources we have and at the same time allow for sustainable advancement practices.