Organizing the Dean’s Office for Development 51 the number of requests for assistance that will land on your develop- ment officer’s desk: annual giving, the Alumni Association, college and department advisory boards, your communications team (for newslet- ters and magazines), homecoming committees, department chairs … the list goes on! The more time your development officer spends on tangential activities, the less time spent cultivating donors. Your devel- opment officer is likely to encounter conflicts where another college or athletics lay claim to particular donors. Since you are much more likely to have established relationships with these other units, it is best if you resolve these cases for the college as they arise and avoid putting your officer in an awkward situation. As described in Chapter 2, Arts and Sciences is a complex college, and you will have alumni-rich and alumni-poor departments, both in numbers and in gift potential. You need to determine the strategy for working among departments. You and your development officer will tend to be drawn where the money is; the University and your marketing staff will love to tout large gifts. However, by supporting only “rich” departments, the others will become disenchanted with your time spent on development. Your development officer(s) will always number fewer than needed, so you need to leverage department chairs and faculty to assist in the college’s development efforts. Do so by ensuring all depart- ments are receiving some attention from development, even if they seem to have poor prospects. When all departments are seeing some atten- tion to their stated needs, they are much more likely to pass on referrals (good leads to potential donors) to your development staff and to help connect you with those individuals. (BSD) I have arranged with my development officer (as well as with their supervisor in the University Foundation) that a priority for the college is to have at least one individual in each department, each year being developed towards a major gift. Departments which had never sent a referral to the devel- opment officer are now doing so on almost a monthly basis, many of which are excellent prospects.