48 DEANS AND DEVELOPMENT the development process; do not forget that it also may be new to others in your office. Not every development officer starts with fundraising experience, and not every job description for staff or department chairs refers to development responsibilities (although you are encouraged to add these at your first opportunity). Development should be discussed and adjusted with your office team to achieve buy-in and to optimize their role, as appropriate for you and your institution. Dean Above all, the dean’s development responsibilities are to set the devel- opment goals and strategy for the college. As Strikwerda writes in the opening chapter, it is easiest to build upon a strategic plan if one is avail- able for your college, and if not, a list of the college’s key strengths and related top-needs will work. To help turn prospective donors into major donors, your vision for development must have enticing yet attainable goals. Listing grandiose projects, for which you do not have the donor base, projects for which funding should really be supplied by the campus (as for building maintenance), or ones with hurried completion times, will not position your office for success. (BSD) When I started as dean, the former dean had promised to support a department with a large sum of cash for student travel. No money and no likely donors were in hand, yet the students had been planning this trip for a full year and already had press coverage. While I was loath to ‘eat’ this expense, due to the time it would have taken to raise the necessary funding, I decided to charge it to other parts of the college budget. We used our development time to secure other gifts for the college—a more promising start to a deanship. (JCH) I, too, found myself faced with a development effort from a previous administration: a multi-million dollar capital project spearheaded by an individual faculty member, a “Lone Ranger,” as Strikwerda described them in Chapter 1. The project—conceptually exciting, but a low priority for the University—had attracted one major gift and many small