RAISE Podcast

On this episode of the RAISE Podcast, Brent catches up with Jake Lemon, Senior Vice President for Development at the UConn Foundation. Jake shares his team's strategy for using incentive compensation for gift officers and how it's helping them break records.

About Jake

As Vice President for Development, Jake oversees planned giving, corporate and foundation relations, constituent, health, and athletic fundraising programs. Prior to joining the Foundation, he served as assistant vice president for development and principal gifts at Florida State University, with gift planning, regional development, performing arts, and principal gifts in his purview. He also held development positions at the University of Mississippi as development officer for the School of Pharmacy and at the University of Alabama at Birmingham as assistant athletic director for development. Jake earned a BBA and MBA from the University of Mississippi and a certificate of financial planning from Florida State University.

About Angela

Angela Wimmer serves as vice chancellor of Institutional Advancement for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), a standalone health sciences university. She has responsibility for managing all advancement programs, including principal, major and annual gifts, comprehensive and capital campaigns, alumni and constituent relations, all gift processing and database services as well as donor relations. She also serves as primary liaison to the 56-member UAMS Board of Advisors. Previous roles include associate vice chancellor for Central Advancement at the Texas Tech University System, senior associate director of development at the University of Cambridge and director of corporate relations at Auburn University.

About Stephanie

Stephanie Froehlich, CFRE, serves as associate vice chancellor for development for the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), Arkansas’ only health sciences university. In this role, she leads the enterprise-wide major gift fundraising strategy and efforts, including prospect research and prospect management.

Prior to UAMS, Froehlich led the College of Human Sciences development team Auburn University. Previous roles at Auburn included successive positions at the Raymond J. Harbert College of Business, culminating as director of corporate and foundation relations. Froehlich began her development career as a community representative and e-revenue manager for the American Cancer Society Mid-South Division.

Froehlich is from Huntsville, Ala., and lives in Little Rock, Ark., with her husband, Dan, and two soccer-loving boys.

About Megan

Megan Doud serves as the Assistant Vice President for Strategic Resource Development in the Office of University Development at the University of Michigan. In this role, she is responsible for strategic planning and resource management, finance and administration, talent management, leading the development of new digital fundraising strategies, and overseeing annual giving and pipeline programs including student philanthropy.

Since beginning her tenure at Michigan nearly 12 years ago as an Assistant Director of Annual Giving, Megan has helped to build and develop programs in Annual Giving, Leadership Annual Giving, Student Philanthropy, and Digital Fundraising for both the university and Michigan Medicine. Last year, U-M had more than 116,000 annual donors who collectively contributed more than $66 million.

Prior to joining the University of Michigan, Megan worked on the Annual Giving team at Northwestern University and served as the Director of Development for Peninsula Players Theatre in Fish Creek, Wisconsin.

Megan holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Northwestern University and an MBA from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

About Carrie

Carrie Bhada has spent more than 20 years working to advance the goals of national non-profits, healthcare organizations and institutes of higher education. She has comprehensive fundraising and management experience and has raised millions of dollars on behalf of these organizations over the years. Her efforts and those of her teams have resulted in the establishment of scholarships and endowed chairs and provided funding for capital projects.

Currently, Carrie serves as Assistant Vice Chancellor of University Development at NC State University. In this role, she collaborates with other senior university advancement leadership on the management of the University’s Think and Do the Extraordinary Campaign. The growth and leadership of the central development teams (central major gifts, corporate and foundation relations, annual giving and gift planning) along with several other school and unit-based teams are a primary focus. Prior to this, she served as the Chief Development Officer for the Wilson College of Textiles and Executive Director of the North Carolina Textile Foundation.

Before joining NC State University, Carrie served as vice president for institutional advancement at St. Joseph’s College (New York), she has been responsible for all areas related to fundraising, alumni relations, planned and major gifts, and special events for two campuses. She developed both short- and long-term goals which included building the infrastructure of the Institutional Advancement office by employing best practices and board development. She previously served as the vice president of development at Huntington Hospital and as the senior director of development at Stony Brook Medicine. She holds a master of healthcare administration from Hofstra University and a bachelor’s degree from St. Joseph’s College.

About Colin

Colin Hennessy serves as the Executive Director of Alumni Engagement and Annual Giving and head of the University of Chicago Alumni Association. In this role, he leads the overall strategy and direction for University-wide engagement and annual giving activities and spearheads the University’s ambitious alumni participation efforts. From 2018 to 2019, Hennessy served as Associate Dean of Alumni Relations and Development for the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. As a member of the Dean’s senior leadership team, he provided advice and counsel on all matters related to alumni relations and philanthropy and was a core member of the team charged with the grand opening of the Keller Center, the new home of Harris Public Policy.

Previously, he served as executive director of The Penn Fund at the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn, he oversaw the global undergraduate annual giving program and the largest of the university's annual funds. Under his direction, The Penn Fund won national awards from CASE, for partnership with Wharton School faculty on fundraising experimental design and testing, and steadily increased annual alumni donor participation and both unrestricted and endowed scholarship revenue to the university. Prior to joining Penn, Hennessy held positions at the University of Iowa Foundation, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics and as a global training and implementation manager specializing in the implementation of complex information technology solutions for local government, healthcare, and direct store delivery vendors.

He holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Iowa and a doctorate in higher education management from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the 2019 Diane Thompson Award Winner for Excellence in Annual Giving from the Northeast Annual Giving Conference Association and CASE Crystal Apple Award winning speaker.

About Brittany

Brittany Shaff is the Assistant Vice President of Digital Engagement + Philanthropic Giving at the University of Miami. In her role, she oversees an innovative team that focuses on creating personalized and measured experiences supporting all units across the University and the University of Miami Health System. Her team is constantly testing and improving new ways to engage, measure, and retarget current and prospective donors. Prior to this role, she served in various analytics and marketing positions including at the University of San Francisco, Towson University, and Johns Hopkins University and Medicine.

About Rob

I dream big, get sh*t done, and have fun. I also kill quotas (2019 NAMER Sales MVP, Top 1% global sales rep 42 consecutive quarters, 6X Club winner), create amazing experiences and craft creative content. All with love, compassion, and positive energy.

A thought-provoking speaker with a unique perspective on sales, education, marketing, and the college to career transition I love to share real stories assembled from over a decade working with global employers, students, and educational institutions of all types. On a continuous transformational journey, I have completed several successful “missions” at LinkedIn, most recently as a Senior Manager of Content Marketing pioneering personalized and episodic video marketing, taking our marquee events to virtual audiences and creating the best performing content for LinkedIn Talent Solutions.

I am top-performing member of LinkedIn’s Education Vertical team, and advisor to Arizona State University, Ithaca College, Denison, and the author of an upcoming book on the college to career journey. #dowork

About Astria

Astria L. Smith is the Senior Executive Director for Annual Giving and Alumni Relations at SMU. She provides strategic leadership and direction for efforts that engage, solicit and steward SMU alumni, parents, faculty, staff, students and friends. This role allows her to integrate several areas of passion and expertise, including front-line fundraising, annual giving stewardship, multi-channel direct marketing, volunteer management and alumni engagement.

Astria holds a bachelor’s degree from Baylor University and master’s degrees from Amberton University and SMU. She began her development career at Methodist Children’s Home in Waco, TX before joining SMU in 2007. Astria has been a presenter for a variety of conferences and webinars and has participated in numerous fundraising and alumni relations networks over her 16-year career in advancement.

About Payton

Payton Keith is an Associate with Harris, DeVille & Associates, an issues management firm based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he provides a range of public affairs and governmental relations services to clients in the energy and manufacturing industries. He specializes in strategic planning, strategic communications, public opinion research, and public affairs management. A graduate of Southern Methodist University, he held various positions on political campaigns and in state governance before joining HDA.

Payton currently resides in Port Neches, Texas, with his wife, April, and three daughters (Grace, Emma, and Charlotte).

About Jo

Jo Lew is a Sophomore at Southern Methodist University studying Political Science and Public Policy with minors in Economics, History, and Law & Legal Reasoning. She is involved in SMU's Student Senate as the Queer Senator, East Asian Student Association and First Generation Association as the Vice President, and Armstrong Commons Council as the Event Coordinator. In her free time she enjoys working on social justice activism projects and she is currently working on multiple majors at Southern Methodist University.

About Dr. Collado

Dr. Shirley M. Collado is the ninth president of Ithaca College. She is known nationally for designing and implementing innovative approaches to higher education that expand student access and success, and has extensive experience overseeing complex not-for-profit organizations in both the private and public sectors of higher education. She is a national thought leader on developing successful cross-sector collaborations, building the capacity of equity, inclusion, and full participation in organizations, and strengthening the pathway to the professoriate and leadership roles in higher education.

Prior to joining the Ithaca College community, President Collado served as executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer at Rutgers University–Newark. Prior to Rutgers, she served as VP for Student affairs and Dean at Middlebury College, and as the executive VP of Posse.

About Chris

Chris Campbell is the Sr. Associate Vice President for the Information Strategy Business Unit, where he oversees a team of 25+. He’s been with the Oklahoma State University Foundation since December 2004 and has worked across the organization during that time. He started in Athletics, securing private funds for the football stadium’s $300 million Next Level Campaign, which was the largest single capital campaign in the history of the University at the time. He then served as a major gifts officer for OSU’s Spears School of Business, also managing the annual fund drive for the Spears School. In 2008, Chris moved into the Foundation’s central offices to oversee the Prospect Development Team, growing it from two staff members to a department of ten during OSU’s largest ever comprehensive campaign, Branding Success.

About Jim

Jim Husson is the Senior Vice President for University Advancement at Boston College, overseeing the university’s development and alumni relations functions. He joined the development team in 2002 as the Vice President for Development and was promoted to his current position in June 2004. He and his colleagues spearheaded “Light the World,” the university’s 150th anniversary campaign, which concluded in 2016, having raised a record $1.6 billion in gifts from more than 140,000 alumni, parents and friends.

Jim has more than 30 years of experience in educational advancement and has served as the Vice President for Development for Brown University and as the Director of Major Gifts for Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Jim is a graduate of the University of Rochester and Northfield Mount Hermon School.