Making the Case for Arts and Sciences 103 strategic planning team. To be a successful development officer for Arts and Sciences, a development officer needs to understand the complicated structure and relationships that make up your college. You should meet regularly; at UNO and CMU, the dean and development officer meet an hour or more once a week and talk on the phone frequently. The develop- ment officers update their deans on the current status of open requests and discuss the programmatic developments in the college, which frequently turns into ideas for fundraising. Without this kind of teamwork, your development officer cannot work to identify prospective donors for your priorities. Once you agree on a priority, your development officer will then work as needed with her/his development colleagues as well as the appropriate department, program, and/or faculty member(s) to gather the knowledge needed to proceed with planning and engagement with donors. Focused Planning on Your Priorities Havingestablishedfundraisingprioritiesforyourcollege,younowhave to develop strategies for moving forward with fundraising. In many ways, this is the most important and difficult step in the fundraising process because you have to decide what to raise money for within the context of the priorities and needs of your college. It’s one thing to say that you will raise money for political science, and it’s another thing to say you are looking for people to donate specifically for professorships, faculty and/or student research, a lecture series, and teaching awards. The best fundraising opportunities are created when specific goals are developed within the context of department and college priorities. Making the case for Arts and Sciences is about making a case for a good fit between the donor and your college’s programmatic needs— be it scholarships, endowed-speaker series, endowed professorships, and even endowed chairs. You might ask yourself and your team: what are we trying to achieve with this speaker series focused on politics and public policy at Central Michigan University? What are we trying to accomplish when we ask donors to support the STEM Education priority at the University of Nebraska at Omaha? The following cases provide examples of effective planning that led to successful fundraising initiatives. Such planning begins with an idea,