Quiet Contributions

The combined months of April/May represent a unique blend of activities in the annual cycle of Advancement and the university for that matter. Not only do we get to celebrate the many achievements of the fiscal but we translate our learnings and aspirations to the next fiscal through our planning and goal setting.

Another important activity that happens this time of year, but perhaps is less well known, is what we do to close out the year. Regardless of the where you work in the organization, there are likely contributions you make that help us meet our reporting responsibilities to our senior administrators, the Board, and the government, be they financial, human resource, information technology, or program related. Since I will surely miss someone or something, thank you to everyone who contributes in some way to this lesser known, yet critical, aspect of our annual business cycle.

In Advancement Services, colleagues have largely completed a number of important functions as we put the fiscal year in the rearview mirror and prepare for new activities. A few examples of these activities include updating reports and tables to reflect fiscal goals, Gift Club rollup and donor wall updates, database backup and archiving, fiscal philanthropic revenue reporting and analysis, re-setting prospect management goals for key metrics and year-end activities in Gift Services.

With respect to this last item, I would like to make special mention of what we affectionately call “Year End” in Gift Services. In many respects, the end of May sometimes feels like the true end of the fiscal as this team is busy preparing a daunting array of analysis, financials, and working papers for distribution to a variety of partners, including internal and external auditors. Deep thanks are in order to Christa, Laura, Lauren, and Jennie as they guide us through another successful year-end process. And since none of us succeed in a vacuum, I would also recognize the efforts of ITM in producing and vetting an immense amount of data in support of this effort including the Service Desk who assist with the secure transport of this sensitive data to our external auditors during these unique times. Christa specifically wanted to send her thanks to her colleagues across Advancement for your patience as she and her team balance these efforts and the ongoing support of Advancement.

An excellent example of where we can see some of this information in the public domain is through the Registered Charity Information Return, more commonly known as the T3010. The Charities Directorate of the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) provide statistics and data on all registered charities for the sole purpose of providing the public with a source of valuable information that could inform charitable decision-making. Christa and I both believe that it would be beneficial to incorporate some training on the T3010 in one of our upcoming training sessions.

You can see elements of the Charitable Return by accessing the link and searching for “Queen’s University”.

One of the ongoing objectives in Advancement Services is to bring new information, updates, and learning opportunities to our colleagues in the Office of Advancement. In June, Advancement Services colleagues will consider how we can build on some of the activities of the last couple years to provide a deeper level of understanding on specific items that we hope will benefit the delivery of your programs.

Help Narrow Our Advancement Values

Thank you again to everyone who participated in our two surveys about the values of the Office of Advancement and the Advancement Values Staff Meeting May 29. Based on the outcome of those three exercises, we are thrilled to confirm our first two values.

As previously shared, without bias created by knowledge of other submissions, more Advancement staff mentioned integrity as an important value for the Office of Advancement than any other value in the first survey – in fact staff mentioned integrity almost 60 per cent more than the value with the next highest number of mentions in that survey. Integrity was also voted as the most important value for the Office of Advancement in the second survey by the greatest number of Advancement staff.

Based on the frequency that each value was mentioned by staff, accountability was also included in the top 10 values for the Office of Advancement in both surveys.

A resounding 75 per cent of attendees at the May 29 meeting also voted to include both integrity and accountability in the top five values for the Office of Advancement — well above the value with the next highest percentage of votes.

For these reasons, we are very excited to officially confirm that integrity and accountability will both be adopted as values for the Office of Advancement.

How do we confirm additional values?

Let us first confirm that two values on our list of the top 10 values for the Office of Advancement after the first two exercises received less than 30 per cent support to be included in our top five on May 29 — passionate and supportive. These values also only appeared in the list of the top 10 values in one survey, so they will be removed from contention going forward.

Six values on our top 10 list after the first two exercises received 51 to 57 per cent support to be included in our top five on May 29.

• Collaboration
• Communication
• Customer Service Focus/Orientation
• Inclusivity
• Innovation
• Respect

We now invite everyone to participate in a poll – open until June 14 - to rank these values in order of their relative importance for the final values for the Office of Advancement.

Each value should be assigned a rating of 1-6. The ranking 1 should be assigned to the value you consider the most important for the Office of Advancement, and 6 should be assigned to the value you consider the least important. Definitions of these six values from the notes taken May 29 are available on the poll, and you may also wish to revisit the ratings of these values coming out of the first two exercises – released in the May 11 edition of ALTogether Now.

We hope to narrow the list of values for the Office of Advancement following this fourth exercise. We plan to confirm up to five values, but this number may be influenced by the results of this poll.

Please help us add to our list of confirmed values for the Office of Advancement. Think about how you define these six values; and participate in the poll to help narrow our focus.

Don’t Forget to Register

Advancement Enhancement Month continues this week. If you haven't already registered, don't forget!

You can check out the activities on the Advancement Enhancement Month calendar. Also, if you haven't yet donated to our charity of choice, Lionhearts Inc., please consider donating.

Great news

Advancement will be able to provide 250 meals with the donations that have been received. On average, Lionhearts Inc. serves 700 meals per day between its four locations. The cost to produce the meal package pictured is $5.25. We'd like to challenge Advancement by setting a goal to donate enough to provide 300 meals!

Here's an interesting fact: Lionhearts Inc. has served their 30,000 meal since the COVID-19 Street Project started on March 18.

A Collaborative Success Story

You may have noticed that the most recent edition of the Queen’s Alumni Review included a new segment titled Planning Makes a Difference.

Over the last several months, the Gift Planning team worked closely with Andrea Gunn to integrate their standalone newsletter with the magazine. The first issue of the newsletter, formally known as The Financial Planner, was produced in 1992 and over time became a semi-annual mailing. Resulting from this collaboration, the reach of gift planning donor impact stories and technical giving content to Canadian alumni has tripled from approximately 37,000 to 111,000.

(left) Spring 1996 Financial Planner cover.