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David Chambliss Part 2: How Remote Work Works at Vanderbilt
94 Plays2 months ago
In this episode David shares about how his University is leveraging Remote opportunities to recruit and retain high quality staff and raise more money as a result. He also touches on some of the key advice he wished he had in his early career!
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Transcript
Introduction to the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast. Whether you are a seasoned professional or a first-time fundraiser, we have the advice you need to take your next step toward major gift mastery.
00:00:18
Speaker
I'm your host, Tom Dauber, president of Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Last week's conversation was a blast. I'm so excited to have you with me for this next segment. Let's get back to the show.
Addressing Audio Quality Issues
00:00:31
Speaker
Thank you for your understanding on the poor audio quality this week and throughout the series with David Chambliss.
00:00:37
Speaker
Well, it sounds like you've got a lot of great things going on at at Vanderbilt. You're expanding, you're in a big campaign.
Post-Pandemic Remote Work Challenges at Vanderbilt
00:00:43
Speaker
and One issue when I talk to leaders and even major gift officers that that keeps coming up is the question of remote work. all went remote during the pandemic, then we sort of came back and some people are required to be on site all the time now. Other people are just working straight out of their homes. How's Vanderbilt handling that issue?
00:01:05
Speaker
I appreciate you asking because it's a question that we were all talking about in the post COVID world, like going back to work or back to what does that look like? Vanderbilt has been in a unique position where we sort of leaned into the hybrid model of Letting managers have discretion on how often their teams come back into the office. And so depending on what your role is and how often you need to be on campus or nearby, it kind of becomes managers discretion. And I see both sides of it in terms of like culture and.
00:01:42
Speaker
and getting the right people and and building those, but we've sort of made the decision that if we want to hire the most talented advancement professionals, if there isn't a reason they need to be on campus every day or they need to be in the office every day, we have found that the hybrid, as long as we have transparent communication, we lean into the Zoom and the phone calls and all of the ways of keeping in touch with each other,
00:02:06
Speaker
I mean, coincidentally, maybe, but the last two years, we've been pretty hybrid, if not remote in a lot of ways. We've got almost 20 people who don't even live in Tennessee because we have hubs now in Atlanta, Miami, New York, Northern California, Texas, Louisville, like all of these Chicago people who live in all of those areas.
00:02:29
Speaker
So the last two years, we've been open to remote and hybrid work.
Maintaining Fundraising Success Remotely
00:02:33
Speaker
And the last two years, we've had the highest fundraising years in Vanderbilt's history. So it would be hard to say, well, if people come in, there's more work. What we do have to do is be very intentional when we bring people to campus When we're planning so quarterly we have an all hands where everybody flies in if they're not living here or driving like everybody's here and they get a lot of work done of course around football season people are coming in for reunion and parent and family weekend if they if they work with the prospects and they live there. They're coming to campus and we're very intentional about when people are here like.
00:03:10
Speaker
our advancement professionals, making sure that their days are busy and filled with productive meetings. They're not just flying in to see one person and sit their days are very filled with connecting with each other.
00:03:23
Speaker
And honestly, it's working. I mean, maybe this is a bad analogy, but I'm always like, Tom, if if I said we're going to put together two basketball teams and you can put together a basketball team of five people that live within a 30 mile radius of you and I'm going to put a basketball team of five people that live anywhere in the country.
Flexible Work Success Analogy
00:03:41
Speaker
and then they're gonna play each other, which do you think has a better, and everyone's like, yeah, totally. I'm saying, if you live in Chicago, and you're a very experienced fundraiser, and live to Nashville is not an option, stay in Chicago.
00:03:56
Speaker
You know, we bring them on campus. We have a really vibrant onboarding process. We have a ton of like onboarded training. Our talent management team has put together a really nice program of learning about Vanderbilt and learning about DAR and meeting with the deans. And so we get them up to speed pretty quickly and they're here a lot. So they learn a lot.
Hybrid Work Model at Vanderbilt
00:04:18
Speaker
But we've kind of found that There's you don't have to be in the office five days a week to be a successful colleague and be a successful fundraiser. I know some places like the pendulum has swung where they were like fully remote and then they asked everybody to come back in and every in a lot of places are still trying to figure out what works best. And I don't know that there's one size fits all. I think that each school and each company has to decide what they think works best for their company culture or
00:04:47
Speaker
I was just at a talent management conference in New Orleans in January with probably 100 to 150 of some of the best universities in the country. And wasn't like everybody agreed upon the same thing. Everybody was saying, what does your school do? Some were five days in. Some were three days in, two days hybrid. Some were as needed. Some were you more remote than others.
00:05:09
Speaker
And, you know, some were saying the challenges of fully hybrid or the challenges of asking people to come in five days a week. So, you know, I don't make the case that it's one size fits all, but I would argue that Vanderbilt has leaned into the treating people like adults and get your work done. And we've been very successful the last couple of years because of it. I think if you would ask me two years ago, I might have said,
00:05:34
Speaker
I can't see how that's going to work. you We're all seeing people in the office. You have these organic conversations, and I feel like if people work from home, they won't be as productive. I've been wrong so far. i I was on the committee of helping think about this, and I was pushing, like, let's keep it hybrid. Let's make it manager's discretion.
00:05:52
Speaker
and trying to think through what that looks like. And we're like, let's just test it for a little bit and we can decide later if it's working. And right now it's not broken, so you let's not try to fix it. And so it's been good.
Communication in Hybrid Settings
00:06:05
Speaker
So I've got a question for you because i've I've known for quite some time, I've been convinced, I should say, that hybrid working can work very well, remote working is a fundraiser that can work very well.
00:06:20
Speaker
caveat that I would add, especially if you're embedded in a college where you have to work closely with faculty. The one thing that I would say is, you've got to be able to, you've got to spend time with the faculty to develop credibility you need in the relationships in order to raise money well. How are you getting around, how are you dealing with that issue at Vanderbilt if people aren't on campus that much?
00:06:41
Speaker
Yeah, and that was a concern of ours was making sure that you keep the relationships with the leaders on campus, the deans, the faculty, the staff that are so important to this. A lot of it comes back to, again, leading into the Zoom and the communications.
00:06:57
Speaker
making sure that our teams are on lots of Zoom calls with faculty and deans and then also being very intentional about when they're on campus. So I just did a little like half day retreat with my team last week. And, you know, we will meet with various faculty on campus and have them come in and speak to make sure that they have a good relationship and really just trying to make sure that they have those open lines of communication where Faculty know what development are doing and development know what faculty are doing and it's not always perfect, right? There's always areas that you can learn more about. But ironically, we weren't, you know, a lot of schools, they're not really.
00:07:35
Speaker
centralized into the schools anyways. So we were, our offices at Vanderbilt are over in the Lowe's Vanderbilt Hotel. There's a hotel on one side and then office space on the other. We have a couple floors. And so you, even if you were in five days a week, you still had to be intentional about coming over to campus because it theoretically could go to, and you know, we worked at schools in the past where the development office is kind of like one building somewhere and then if you don't you mean you could go in five days a week but never see the faculty because if you don't have space in those offices so you always have to be intentional i think as an associate dean in my role i'm always trying to make sure that my team knows the faculty that are here and some of the good work that they're working on and then of course really gets to know the dean and for us like you know her strategic priorities scholarships and faculty support some of the programs that we're building
00:08:27
Speaker
So that people can talk about those. we've got over, I mean, just at Peabody College alone, we've got over 200 faculty and, you know, another couple hundred staff that it would be virtually impossible for our team to know every single one of them. It's really knowing about the leaders, the deans and the associate deans.
00:08:44
Speaker
and trying to build those relationships. Because once, you know, once I've met you a few times, Tom, you and I can do a Zoom call or a cell phone calling. I don't need to come to your office to always know you can feel comfortable forwarding emails to me and vice versa. So, yeah, it's it's a constant conversation about appropriate communication. How much communication does a team need? You know, I'm probably more of an overshare, you know, forward as much
Flexibility and Retention at Vanderbilt
00:09:09
Speaker
information and emails as possible.
00:09:11
Speaker
I'd rather people feel like they're getting too much information than they're left in the dark, like then you can kind of decide what's going on. But, know, for the most part, we focus on the big buckets of scholarship and faculty support and programmatic support. and if we have capital projects in those areas. We're not getting too much into the weeds of specific faculty research areas. A lot of that's grant funded or you the dean funds it out of unrestricted support. But yeah, it's an ongoing task to make sure that your teams up and down feel communicated to my team, the reports to me, and then the people that I report to. like they know what I'm doing? Do they know what my team's doing? Do I feel like I know what they're doing?
00:09:52
Speaker
And I don't feel that I have to be in person with them all the time to know those things. We've reached a spot in society where technology can allow me to know exactly what's on the dean's mind at any given time, even if I'm not in her office. Tom Dauber here for Abundant Vision Philanthropic Consulting. Fundraising can be hard work and it can be hard to mentally get into the place you need to be in order to see new opportunities. Everyone struggles with it. We are like the fish in the fishbowl who just can't see the water they're swimming in. That's when having outside expertise comes in handy.
00:10:28
Speaker
For 25 years, I've been helping nonprofits analyze the challenges, discover new ways forward, and develop clear plans that lead to greater fundraising back to the show. How is this approach impacting retention?
00:10:58
Speaker
I think one of the biggest things that can put the kibosh on positive fundraising. Well, honestly, Tom, if I had the, uh, the exact answer on, you know, development officer retention, I, you know, I'd be a trillionaire now. Everybody would you buy that book or the Ted talk and understand it. Everybody's at a different point in their career, but I would say that it's had a really big impact on our retention because we've leaned in on two things. One is,
00:11:27
Speaker
you know, the hybrid, it allows people to, and I heard this quote one time, you used to sort of work life around your job, and now you can kind of work your job around your life. And it allows people with young families or that don't live as close to campus, they don't always feel like they have to drop everything, they can sort of, you know, get get responsibilities done and how can they integrate their work life balance or maybe just a life balance as you call it. I think we've been able to retain a lot of people because one, it's this idea of like, here's our goals. They're very ambitious and we're going to invest in making sure you have the things you need to be successful. But also if you need to, you know, do a doctor appointment from 10 to 11 or like it's, it's okay. Like we treat people like adults,
00:12:17
Speaker
And we're able to quarterly and make sure, especially on frontline fundraisers, you can track their outreach, their activity. So I can see like, wow, Tom did 150 outreach emails this week. I don't have to worry about him working from home or ah ah Tom had no outreach last week. What are you doing? So there's a lot of that and tracking. I think we've really leaned into like that hybrid remote environment. And in a weird way, when people get used to that, it's, it's, I think it's hard to recruit them away because somebody will call and say, hey, Tom, I know you're at Vanderbilt. Would you consider coming to this university? and And you're like, do I have to come in five days a week? And and you have to decide how much is your flexibility worth.
00:12:58
Speaker
Yeah. And some people love that. I mean, for some people, they do go in a lot more because they feel they can get more done. And we offer, you can go in seven days a week if you, I mean, there's office space that you can use if you want, but it's not mandated in a lot of the positions. And so that's been very helpful for us.
Career Progression and Internal Growth
00:13:14
Speaker
And then we've also, of course, invested in a talent management in terms of like growth in people's careers.
00:13:21
Speaker
The one thing I'm really proud of, and I see it all the time on LinkedIn, is somebody in Vanderbilt's DAR office is sharing that they've been promoted from assistant to associate director or director to senior director or new. We've really taken on the responsibility on our part to say, we want to retain people by giving them flexibility to work, giving them audacious goals to hit, but the support needed to hit them, and understanding that as their career progresses, they need more responsibilities.
00:13:49
Speaker
and better opportunities to do bigger things or manage or compensation. I think our retention is really good. And so those are ways that we're trying to talk to people about thinking about coming to Vanderbilt. And I've worked with, I mean, I've been here five years and I'm still one of the newer associate deans here. So I mean that in the terms of like a lot of the leaders are still somewhere in DAR. Some of them have moved up to even higher roles.
00:14:17
Speaker
But there's not a lot of turnover, which, as you know, is a great thing. That's those great things about the workarch culture at at and Vanderbilt. So, you know, you you've shared with us a little bit about, you know, your journey in your career. And I'm curious as you think back to those early days of your job,
00:14:42
Speaker
as a fundraiser. What's one piece of advice you wish someone gave you early on? Yeah, I laughed when I when I saw this question, because I feel like it's the same advice that I still get these days. So is be more patient. um um I think I think 25 year old David and 40 year old David still struggles with like, not everything comes to you right away in life. And I'll probably never be a great stock investor because of that because I you know, I want want the stock that I buy today to go up 1,000% tomorrow, and if it doesn't, I'm just going to sell it, and everybody else just who waits. Fundraising's a lot like that, too, where we are measured on you audacious goals as a frontline fundraiser. And so in your mind, you kind of put these gifts need to close by certain dates, and that helps you manage how you manage your portfolio and who you focus on. And it is important. But at the same time, understanding that not everything in life
00:15:37
Speaker
is on your timeline and sort of linear progression of life doesn't look like a straight line that's just like, do this and this happens, do this. Obviously we see that from the 2009 market crash, from COVID, from all the different things that might set people back either in their careers or financially or personally. And then obviously all people have things personal in life that can change like family health issues or just spouse things that you might have to move for, things with your kids. I've never been, you I'm never gonna win the gold medal for having a ton of patience with just macro things where I'm like, I wish this would happen or I just wish this guy would call me back you about gifts. And so I think, but as I look back over time, it's really encouraging me because I think about all the things I was impatient about
00:16:27
Speaker
that didn't happen necessarily on my timeline, but might have happened even better than I ever expected. So that's hard to tell somebody when they're younger that no matter how big their dreams are, things will probably happen in their lives even bigger and better and bolder than they can even imagine at this time.
00:16:48
Speaker
you can, you can tell anybody that, and they might say like, Oh, thanks. That makes me, but like a lot of times you just have to live life to understand the wisdom of when I was 25 and didn't know where things were going. And I wanted.
00:17:01
Speaker
And now I look back like I can't believe I've had so many amazing opportunities that I would have never thought, you know, might have happened had not somebody reached out you or ah an individual invested in me or whatever.
Career Advice and Advocacy
00:17:15
Speaker
So I think that one's the one like patience. And I think the other one is always being an advocate advocate for yourself.
00:17:22
Speaker
The one thing that I always think is funny is always hear these stories of, oh, I was in this position and I was loving in it. And then my phone rang one day and it was this old colleague of mine and they had this vice president job and I was like,
00:17:36
Speaker
Unbelievable. That's never necessarily happened to me. I've never really had just like a phone call of some position where they're like, hey, man, you want this position. It's yours. I've always, every job I ever got, there was some kind of like network or advocacy around it. Like I knew somebody through AFP that I could reach out to. And I was able to sort of network and say, because I know you, Tom, or because I knew somebody at Ohio West and Ohio State, I was able to say, hey, can you tell me more about this opportunity Like I reached out and was proactive. Even in the Vanderbilt job, I'd reached out to somebody on LinkedIn and said, hey, what's going on at Vanderbilt? I always think like if I would have never sent that message, what might my career look like? You know, I might still be very happy at Ohio State or doing something different or at a different part of the country. But so I think patience and also being your own biggest advocate. I think that it's important to have leaders who advocate for you and managers and
00:18:32
Speaker
I felt that a Vanderbilt, like I've always worked for people here that have been like my biggest advocate. How can we be supportive of your careers? And that's probably one of the reasons I've stayed. But also I also have to say, here's my interest. Like I would like to take on more responsibilities or manage more people, or I'd like to consider this part of advancement. only, you don't know what you don't know sometimes. And I even tell my team, if something's on your mind, like tell me because like, please advocate for yourself. Let me know if you're thinking about something or there's an area I'm you'd like to get more involved in that I can try to be supportive of. And so I think no matter what your career is, and especially at higher ed and in development, it's like being advocate for yourself. And I think in an appropriate way of letting your supervisor know what are your long-term goals or short-term goals. But if you sit around your whole life waiting for somebody else to come and just promote you all the time, may be waiting a long time.
Podcast Conclusion and Call to Action
00:19:26
Speaker
That's all the time we have today, but be sure to tune in next week to hear the next part of this exciting conversation. Now, if you've enjoyed this podcast, please be sure to subscribe and give us a five-star rating on your podcast provider. I'm your host, Tom Daubert. Thank you for joining me as we journey together towards Major Gift Mastery on the Abundant Vision Fundraising Podcast.