Organizing the Dean’s Office for Development 69 workshop). You can start an advisory board for the college with a giving requirement. Construct a list of referrals from your department chairs and faculty comprised of individuals highly engaged with the departments and students; update and forward this list to the develop- ment office/academic affairs regularly. Through your leadership, you can demonstrate that the college has engaged alumni that provide gifts to the college, warranting at least a shared development officer. Even if your college does not receive a development officer in the near- term, you are organizing the college to follow high-impact practices for development which will nonetheless help the long-term financial health of your college. Conclusion When you first look at development operations in your office, you may feel as if you want to grab the nearest broom, sweep out the existing practices and build everything from scratch. That might work. Yet staff, just like faculty, can be surprisingly resistant to change—trying to implement too much change too quickly may lead to disaster. In Chapter 2, Moen suggests that your first step in development should start with the existing structure; we agree. As you familiarize yourself with that structure and match existing responsibilities to the expected norms for the positions, talk to your staff about pros and cons of possible changes and then progressively implement the changes that are the most likely to be effective for you and your institution. You will never have enough development officers to reach all of your alumni, so the assistance of your department chairs and associate deans is important, particularly in Arts and Sciences, where prospective donors often identify with their former departments. Once your chairs become involved in development, steer them away from the idea that every referral they provide will result in a gift back to their department. John F. Kennedy often said that “A rising tide lifts all boats,” a phrase that well represents the desirable team mentality of development: you cannot predict where gifts will end up, so any outcome that lands a gift anywhere in the college—or even elsewhere in the institution is still a positive outcome.