How to Secure New Funding Streams for Your Career Center

Meredith Metsker:

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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Career Everywhere Podcast. I’m your host, Meredith Metsker. And for this episode, I want to share a conversation we had last year with Briana Randall of the University of Washington about how career centers can expand their budget and secure new funding streams. So while Briana gave this presentation last year, I really wanted to resurface it now because I think it’s still highly relevant as we face continued budget challenges in career services and higher ed in general.

So the conversation was facilitated by uConnect’s chief marketing officer, Ashley Safranski, and hosted in the Career Everywhere Community, which you should totally join if you haven’t already. It’s free and open to any higher ed career services professional, but I digress. Anyway, Briana is the Executive Director of the Career and Internship Center at UDub and a longtime Career Everywhere Champion. She is also an incredible leader and very creative about finding ways to expand her team’s budget.

In this webinar recording, Briana shares what worked and what didn’t during her team’s four-year journey to generate revenue for their career center. One major tactic that worked, applying for a student tech fee grant. So in this episode, you’ll hear exactly how Briana secured that funding and be sure to check out the show notes to see a copy of her application for the grant among several other helpful resources. Hope you enjoy the episode.

Ashley Safranski:

Welcome, everyone. Thanks for carving time out of your Tuesday to join us. You can see we have a great topic lined up with an amazing presenter. Before I turn it over to Briana, I just want to highlight we are recording the session. We will add the recording to the video library within the Career Everywhere Community, which is the space we’re in right now. So we’ll be sure to add that.

And we’ll always, as we often do, we’ll put a topic in the discussion board so people can see the recording, any notes, ask follow-up questions and whatnot. So that’s the recording. And then you can see the chat is officially flowing. Welcome, everyone. And we’ll use the chat for Q&A. So as Briana is presenting, you’re welcome to submit questions.

I may interject, as I mentioned to Briana, with questions that are timely based on what she’s discussing, but largely we’ll save most questions for the end and we’ll make sure to leave 10 or 15 minutes for open Q&A at the end. So with that, this is a big topic, so I’m officially going to hand it over to you, Briana, and just thank you so much for doing this.

Briana Randall:

All right, here I am. Thank you all for joining me. My name is Briana Randall. I use she/her pronouns, and I’m the director in the centralized career center at the University of Washington in Seattle. And I saw a few other Pacific Northwesterners in addition to Ashley logging in. So great to see some familiar faces. If any of you attended the NACE Conference that was in Phoenix, I did present on this topic there.

So this is the same. You may go use the hour for some additional reason, but I’m just going to jump right in. We’re going to talk about how to expand your budget. I’m going to share the good, the bad, the ugly, the successes, the fails of this journey that I’ve been on to generate revenue. So a little bit about me is I was hired into the center in 2004, so it’s been almost 20 years, and then I’ve been the director for five years.

And really started a little bit on the revenue generation before I became director, but definitely for the last five years. So what I’m hoping that we cover today is that you’ll be able to list at least five strategies other centers have used to generate revenue, that you’ll understand the more and less successful ways to pitch funding ideas, and identify one potential funding source to pursue for the next academic year.

So I’m just going to give some context about our university and our center and why I’ve had to generate revenue. And then we’ll talk about four main areas plus some other random ways, and then we’ll do some wrap up. All right. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the University of Washington, these pictures are of our campus. Our building is the one on the right behind that beautiful fountain.

We have 50,000 students on our main Seattle campus. About 34,000 of those are undergrads. The rest are grad students. On our campus, we have a hybrid career model. So we are the centralized center, and then there are full centers serving the undergrad population in business, engineering, and the information school. Plus, MBA, law, those sorts of things, have their own career centers as well.

And then there are some colleges that have a career manager role, trying to organize activities in the college, but they don’t have centers. So the students of those 50,000 UDub Huskies that would come to our center for help is about 26,000 of the undergrads, about 9,000 grad students. That’s 35,000 total students. Plus, we do take appointments with alum up to three years.

So our stakeholder, student population, alumni population is quite large. Again, filtering out the students and alum who would go to one of the other centers. And we are generally a team of 12. Right now we’re 10. Generally, our coaching team has a leader and four coaches that do most of the direct service. We have an employer and community connections team that works to bring employers to things, alumni, mentors, those sorts of connection opportunities.

And then there’s operations, myself, our front desk coordinator, a new career technologies manager, which is spearheading a lot of our vendor products. And then we share an administrative team with some other units. So we’re a very small team trying to meet with a very huge student population. And our budget is less than a million dollars. So this includes personnel and operational.

When I did a benchmarking survey and they asked to put your personnel budget and then your operational budget, I was like, wait, some people have two different budgets? No, this is all the money we have to do all the things unless we generate revenue in one way or the other. This does not even pay all of our 12 staff. So we really need “extra money” just to fulfill our basic mission.

And I really believe our students deserve really great things. And so that’s what drives me to try to get money so I can provide our students with the things I think they deserve. So the first major strategy I’m going to talk about is University Advancement, fundraising, development, whatever it might be called on your campus. Here it’s Advancement. I’ve been working with different Advancement officers in Student Life for a full five years now.

We’ve done five Husky Giving Days. I don’t know if your university has one big day when there’s a lot of energy around trying to get donors, but we have one in April and started in 2019, then took a pause in 2020, and then since then. Within that, we’ve done two big email campaigns to former clients as part of getting ready for and asking for donations for Husky Giving Day.

In 2021, we emailed about 14,000 alum, which I think some were former clients and some were other people Advancement put on our list. And then we just did another big campaign, three emails to 60,000 plus alum. They were alum from like, I don’t know, 2005 to 2018, a good chunk that I had records for that also I felt confident they were no longer students.

We also emailed a group of Washington-based employers who’d recently posted internships, and we thought they might be interested in giving to some of our specialized internship programs as well. So that was part of Husky Giving Day 2024. We also worked with an intern on having a two-pager for donor prospects when they’re cultivating donors and deciding what they might want to donate to. We’ve put an ad in the alumni magazine about our specialized scholarship for unpaid public sector internships.

This past year, we were featured at our university as part of Giving Tuesday, which happens after Thanksgiving. So those two slides were all the different things I showed you over five years. We’ve raised $2,200. I know. I’m pretty sure we’ve lost money on this endeavor, meaning all the time and effort I’ve put in and Advancement has put in and all different kinds of Advancement lines as well, we just haven’t been able to quite make this click, which is definitely demoralizing.

I will say, I think everybody thinks career is important, but I think they think it’s basic enough that the state should be providing all the career resources that the university needs. It’s not glitzy or glammy enough to get donors to really buy in on our campus. The most successful though has been raising money for our Husky Career Closet. So our Giving Tuesday campaign this past Thanksgiving was just focused on the Husky Career Closet, and we raised more during that than we typically do on a Giving Tuesday, which is about our center as a whole or about internship programs.

And I think it’s because it’s a tangible basic need. Everybody, regardless of generation or background, knows you kind of need decent clothes to have an interview or go to a career fair. I will say clothing expectations here are quite different than in other major cities, but we’re pretty casual here, but you still need clothes and people get that. I was hoping that our specialized internship programs, we actually have three different ones, I was hoping those would be tangible enough to attract donors, but that was not the case.

I’m not sure why. I’m not sure if it’s because some donors don’t understand the benefits of internships or why they’re needed or, I don’t know, but clothing has been tangible and more fruitful. So that has been our experience at a large university with Advancement. I am going to keep doing what Advancement asks me to. They’re working on trying to have comprehensive records, which I do believe in, so that they might be able to look at what former students did, a whole bunch of Student Life related activities, or which of our former clients might show up on other lists they have going.

So we are going to keep progressing in Advancement efforts, but I don’t think getting little donations here and there is going to be what works for us. But maybe as we continue to do these things, maybe a major donor will surface. That’s the hope. So after Advancement, the area I’m going to talk about is campus partners. And just so you know, we will talk about successful things.

I start with Advancement to get it out of the way, but don’t think everything in this presentation is going to be like, “Well, that wasn’t helpful whatsoever.” So campus partners, one example, is the Handshake contract fee. So our other campus career centers who use it, not all do, but if they do and they want to have access to the modules like do their own career fairs or appointment scheduling, they do pay into the contract.

And our center used to pay into it as well when we got Handshake, but now the fee is covered by other career centers. We don’t contribute financially, but we do all the work. That’s our contribution. I had a lot of feelings about this. Bless her heart, my administrator is much more bold with these sorts of things. So she’s like, “Yeah, it’s okay. I wouldn’t pay part of the contract.”

I’m like, “Oh, that feels kind of weird to me.” So I was really nervous to tell our campus partners, who are great. I work in a university who the career center people are collaborative and work together and are nice people, and I’m very grateful for that and for them. So I felt really nervous about asking them and telling them the first year that we didn’t pay in. And I felt kind of bad, kind of like, “Man, it kind of sucks that I need to do this,” right?

Kind of embarrassed about our situation. But you know what? The partners all were fine, at least to me. Maybe they had thoughts in their head and feelings when I sent them the original email, but nobody really pushed back too much and I was really relieved by that. And now I feel really good about it. I think campus partners like that we do the work that goes into it. We’re paying the salary. We’re importing students. We’re answering all the questions. And so it’s worked out.

I think generally partners are willing to pay a little bit of money if they don’t have to do the work. And that’s how I have felt about our Handshake fee. We do have other funding partners, not just career centers. So we have a unit on campus called Parent and Family Programs. They’re kind of under Student Life, kind of under Advancement, kind of under marketing. Their job is to engage the families of students, mostly the families of incoming students, but all kinds.

And we asked them if they would be willing to pay our contract for PathwayU out of the money that they have. And the reason we chose that is because PathwayU is an assessment tool that is really good for students who aren’t quite sure what major, what career, who they are, what their preferences are. It’s a really great tool for young incoming students, which is the main stakeholder group of Parent and Family Program.

So they agreed to that and paid the PathwayU contract fee in its entirety for three or four years. So we’re very grateful for them. They basically want to make sure that what they’re going to use their money for is things that the families that they mostly serve, mostly incoming younger students, would want their students to have. Most families want their students to have a sense of purpose and to get out of college in a reasonable amount of time and to go and make money and be happy.

We also have two other campuses. Our Seattle campus is huge. We have two other campuses also in the same metro area. They have their own career centers and their own budgets. But for some of our contracts, depending on how the vendor writes it, we’re able to invite those campuses in to use it and they pay part of the fee. We don’t have GoinGlobal anymore.

We moved to Interstride. But when we did have GoinGlobal, we also asked the International Student Center to contribute to that fee and they said yes. And then UDub Brand Strategy is within marketing and communications. And I’m trying to convince them that our Next Destination data or career outcomes data is important to the UDub story and the UDub brand, and they do agree with that.

So when I was trying to figure out how to get more responses and just doing a lot of brainstorming and a lot of experimenting, they were willing to give me some money to incentivize participation, which I appreciated. Partners haven’t always said yes. Partners originally said no to LinkedIn Learning. We do have LinkedIn Learning now, and I’ll tell you what was finally successful, but my original strategy was gathering all kinds of campus partners together, mostly at the college and divisional level.

And everybody wanted LinkedIn Learning, but nobody wanted to pay for it because it’s expensive and it wasn’t necessary. And then we do our Next Destination survey, we call it NDS, through a platform called Embark, which right now is operated by Lightcast, and that has a fee associated with it. And I have tried to get people to share that fee and nobody has been interested in that.

I think partly because they don’t understand how much work I do for it and really how much money it would save if I could be doing other things or appreciate the relevance or the value of this type of platform or maybe of the data itself. So partners have said yes to a lot of things, but they’ve also said no to some things. The most successful has been asking in desperate times.

So I started some of the asks in late… No, well, right when COVID hit, so the first time vendor contract fees came due after we all went remote and we had canceled basically two career fairs. And so that, of course, hurts our revenue a lot. And we just weren’t certain about anything. I started asking about cost sharing and nobody had a ton of money, but people were willing to belittle, which was great.

Mostly what I ask for is under $5,000. I think one of them was 9,000, but mostly I’m not asking for much. I’m asking for two, three, $4,000 typically. And again, I think a lot of partners can see the value in that and can come up with that from somewhere in a budget. And really being thoughtful about which products I’m asking which partner to contribute to based on the relevance to their particular student population.

I’m going to pause for a second. We’ve covered two of the four main strategies, Advancement and campus partners. All right, let’s talk about corporate partners. So we used to have a program called Husky Signature Employer, and we usually had five to eight, it seems like, corporate employers. And we stopped recruiting employers for that program in 2020 due to low interest.

So we found it was hard to get them to join. Then they wouldn’t all join on the same timeline, and then it was hard to track who was using what benefit. And really the money that we were getting from that was probably not worth the effort that we were putting in. I will say that college-based career centers I think probably have better luck, but we’re the centralized center and there’s other partnership programs on campus that are very specific for employers.

So for us, that wasn’t particularly helpful. But there are corporate sponsors who have contracts with the institution at large. Some of these will not surprise you being in Seattle, Alaska Airlines and Starbucks in particular. So they give a lot of money to the university at large, and then Advancement funnels a little bit of money from those units to us. And Alaska Airlines is a little different.

They give us not quite a whole position and benefits. And we are on year eight, so I’ll get two more of those payments, and then I’ve got to figure out how we’re going to cover behind that money because I’m not sure it will get renewed. The benefit about Alaska is they don’t attach a lot of streams. So we weren’t required to put their name on everything, which was a blessing. And we do some reporting for them.

We put their name on some things, but it’s been a lovely low maintenance partnership. And then the other four give us $2,500. So I will say this doesn’t really net us much overall because of the benefits we give the partners. We don’t go to a ton of work for them, but we let them have one free in person registration at career fairs, free virtual registrations for fairs. So overall, we’re probably not netting a lot of money from those.

But if you don’t already get a little bit of money from your institution’s bigger partners, that might be something to look into. I will say, I believe Advancement started this with us. We didn’t approach them, but maybe you can. Out of the blue, the foundation that’s associated with one of our corporate partners gave us a no strings attached grant, and they’ve done so a couple times since then, and that’s been a huge blessing.

What we typically do with a lot of that money is help restock the Husky Career Closet with the sizes and the styles that young people want and need these days. What hasn’t worked, we’ve asked a major retail partner here in the area who’s been a good corporate partner of ours and to the university, and they didn’t have a way to donate in kind, clothes to the closet, which was disappointing.

We’ve asked retailers to give us clothing discounts and to consider us for part of the grant process they might have, and we haven’t had any luck there either. I would say in the corporate sector, the things we’ve tried haven’t really worked, but we have been able to just get some money given to us. And then my Advancement person would say, “But you’re doing a good job of stewarding that. Once it happens, so then it’s likely to continue to happen.”

So when Advancement emails me and they need a report, I just drop everything and do it because I know how we treat the people who are supporting us is really important. So we do get some money from companies, not usually directly and often through other sources. The next thing I want to talk about has been our most successful, and this is what I’m happy to share more about and hoping that some of you might be able to try some of this if you haven’t had the opportunity to.

So on our campus, there are a variety of different campus fees, little grants through different departments, things like that that you can apply for. I start… Well, let’s see, I won’t say I started. One of the types of grants that we’ve applied to is called the Diversity Seed Grant and it’s offered through our Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity, and the max they would give you is $3,000.

And it’s really to help support the diversity blueprint of the university. As we were setting up our permanent closet once we came back from COVID, I applied for money to buy some clothes and some other things like organizers for the closet, and they gave us the full amount, which was great. And then you’re not supposed to apply again, but I did. Why not? And they did give me another 3,000. They did say that time, “Don’t apply again,” but it’s been a couple years, maybe I’ll try.

So that’s been a real blessing to have that money. So that when students come, there’s the types of things that would interest them. The Student Tech Fee has been amazing. So this particular fee is attached to tuition. So every quarter, part of what students pay for tuition and fees goes into the Student Tech Fee, and that fee is then managed by a group called the Student Tech Fee Committee.

So it’s all students with a staff advisor. And they have a lot of money, a lot of money, several million. So it’s like, yes, somebody has money. Let’s try this. And so what they do is every quarter there’s a proposal process and units can apply for funds as long as the tech-related thing directly serves students. So I wouldn’t be able to apply to get my staff all new computers, but anything that is definitely going to help students directly, you can submit a proposal form.

I would say it’s been interesting. When this was created, I’m guessing most of the proposals were for physical things, machines, LCD, lab equipment. And now mostly what I apply for is software. So it’s been an interesting experience trying to evolve. So I will say making proposals and submitting them to a group of students who has a bunch of money when I have no money does not feel great, but they have been super generous.

So I’ll walk through what they’re funding for us. After I failed getting campus partners to pay for LinkedIn Learning, I went to the Student Tech Fee and they… LinkedIn Learning suggested a three-year contract because it takes big institutions a long time to change the culture. And so that’s what I proposed, which is a little bit unique for the fund, for the Student Tech Fee, but I applied for three years for all three of our campuses and got it.

And then after those three years, I proposed again and got another three years. So we’re at year four. We have two more years to go. And LinkedIn Learning has been a huge success on our campus, both for students and staff and some faculty. They are paying our uConnect contract, so we brought uConnect to campus before we had Student Tech Fee money.

But after I had success with LinkedIn Learning, I was like, let’s try something else. So this was my next big contract proposal, and I proposed once for one year and then another year, and then you’re allowed to apply for perpetual or block funding. So my last proposal, they said they would essentially fund it until they decided not to or until something happened.

So I don’t have to reapply every year, which is great.And for those of you who are on the call and aren’t uConnect customers, uConnect is the virtual career center that is the architecture of our website. And it’s a huge asset to our operation. We also brought Interstride to campus about a year and a half ago to support international students. I just went ahead and applied directly for perpetual block funding.

They didn’t give us that, but they did give us two years with the option for renewal. So we’re one year into that. And then we just got two other contracts. Jobscan is a system that helps students tailor their resumes for different applicant tracking systems that different employers use. We applied for that this past winter and we’re given two years. And then Yoodli is a really amazing AI mock interview tool that you can type in specific questions or use their question bank.

You answer the question, it gives you feedback specifically on each question and then how you could answer it better. And then also gives you the more numerical things like, what was your rate of speech, that sort of thing. It’s really cool. So they gave us one year for that with the option of renewal. So we’re about six months into both of those. The main physical thing we’ve applied for is our Iris Photo Booth.

So they approved that about a year ago. So within our first year, we had almost a thousand students use our Iris Photo Booth for LinkedIn profile photos. They also did approve VMock, and a lot of you are familiar with VMock, but we were not able to clear procurement hurdles. So UDub and VMock couldn’t come to terms on a couple things. And so SDF approved it, but we don’t actually have VMock.

That’s partly why we got job scanning weekly. One other thing I will say, and this is such a distant memory, which is why I sometimes forget about it, but the first thing I applied for to the Student Tech Fee committee was for iPads. So I wanted iPads to be able to go stand in graduation lines to have people take our Next Destination survey. I wanted to be able to have quicker check-ins at career fairs and events.

They approved that. That was our first request early on in my directorship. They came in the mail. They approved it. We ordered them. They came in the mail February 2020. Then we went remote for a year and a half and basically never even opened the box for a year and a half. So it’s a whole lifetime ago, but that’s another option, something you could think about a Student Tech Fee for is portable machines for you to do your business more efficiently on campus.

So the Student Tech Fee and the Diversity Seed Grant have been very helpful for us. There’s another fee called SAF or the Services and Activities Fee that’s also attached to tuition. We have not applied for that and we kind of can’t really. There’s so many of my Student Life units and closed partners that are funded by that and they max out every year. There just isn’t really money for that.

So we haven’t tried that, but I do know some career centers are funded in that way, so that’s something you could look into on your campus. There’s also another little grant called the Sustainability Seed Grant. We thought about that for our closet, but it has to be sponsored by a student group. And at this point, it just hasn’t seemed worth it to try, but that’s something we might consider in the future as we continue to evolve how we run the Husky Career Closet.

I will be honest, I do not love pleading our case to student committees who have lots of money and lots of power. It doesn’t feel great that that has to be part of my job. I wish I had more money from the state and the university, but I don’t. And like I started with the very beginning, I do believe students deserve, and so that’s why I continue to write proposals and go in front of committees and speak and answer the questions.

All right, I’m going to do one more category, which is just other, some things to think about. Some other things that have been successful, our Advancement team here on campus, they have an annual holiday party, which if you can ever get invited to that, ours was pretty swanky and they did a clothing drive. So I collected a lot of clothes for our Husky Career Closet that way.

As part of getting federal work study dollars, there’s a program called Job Location Development, and we partner with our financial aid office. And so we run a report on the different ways that our campus is trying to create during school jobs and internships. And then by doing that work and collecting information about it, we’re able to get some money from the financial aid, which had come from the Fed.

So that way predates me, but I’m happy to do some work to get that money. So if you’re not participating, that could be something to look into as well. We’ve tried some other clothing drives and other units have done some clothing drives and generally trying to get the types of clothes and nice enough quality has not been super successful for us, so we just aren’t trying right now.

We did have an Amazon wishlist for our Husky Career Closet. And shortly after I made it and put it on our website, we got a donation and we’ve never gotten a donation since. It’s also hard to keep an Amazon wishlist up to date because things go out of stock. And then also we need all the sizes in one item, but it’s hard to do that. So we just took our wishlist down.

I do know that some universities who have closets have had more success with an Amazon wishlist or similar for their closet. I’m going to go ahead and do this wrap up section and then we can go back to the chat and I’m willing to take questions. So tips, I think really broadly about what might work. I think on our campus, what is both frustrating and amazing is that the career work doesn’t really live anywhere.

As my boss would say, it lives everywhere. And so there are lots of potential partners who could potentially think supporting career related things is also good for their students or their business or their bottom line. So just try to think more broadly than you might be more inclined to think originally. And also it really helps to have a thought partner. It helps me that my boss has done a stint in Advancement, so she’s able to think of things that I wouldn’t.

So bringing somebody else in, not from career services to help you brainstorm I think is really great. I’m generally a believer that two brains are better than one. And have courage. Like I mentioned, it’s not really my favorite thing to do, but I’ve been willing to take the time to write proposals, to make the ask, sometimes to plead, sometimes to nag, follow-up, and it has paid off.

We just have to have the courage to even approach the issue and be brave. And also set boundaries. There’s some partners I haven’t wanted to ask because I’m not sure what the strings attached to that would be. So you also have to be mindful of how much you’ll get out of it. A lot of the federal grants or foundation grants, a lot of those just I feel like would make us do a certain thing and then hire staff to do that certain thing.

But really net-net, we wouldn’t be any further ahead than we are now because I need somebody to pay for us to do the things we already do, not new initiatives. So I haven’t pursued, lately we did prior to me becoming director, big grants to run specific programs because it hasn’t felt like it will help with what I need help with, which is our basic expenses. And really try to tie your ask to potential funders’ goals or their vision.

What are they trying to do in their work or with their stakeholder group? And if they have money and not a lot of time, really talk about how your unit will do the time to maintain whatever it is, but that you need the financial help. And asking for very tangible things. And not all of you have a closet, which is fine, but the more tangible and relatable that you can ask for, the better.

That’s been our experience. And again, I thought a scholarship or unpaid public sector internship would be very tangible, and that hasn’t gained steam yet for us. And as student committees, I will say the Student Tech Fee Committee has never turned me down. You get to give a three-minute presentation, followed by 12 minutes of Q&A from the committee. And they do ask questions.

And a couple times over all the times I’ve applied, I’ve had to really pause or collect more information, but generally the students get it. They get that career is important. Once you’re able to explain that why you need the money, because this is how many staff you have and you’re not going to get any more money and that this is the only way you can get money to provide better career resources, they get it and they say yes. It’s amazing.

So I would encourage you to really think about your next steps. We talked about a lot of different things here, some of which have been successful and some which haven’t, but every type of institution is different. Every campus is different. So even if I’ve had success with something, it’s not to say that you can’t try as well. What is a funding source that you want to investigate student on your campus?

And of the categories we talked about was Advancement like Husky Giving Day or Giving Tuesday, campus partners, funding different initiatives, grants and fees, and corporate partners. And then when will you do that? For quarter systems like us, we have plenty of time left in the summer. Hopefully you would be able to knock off some type of attempt this summer.

I know for semester systems, you’re probably at the point where you’re like, “Whoa, the summer’s coming to an end. I’m not sure I can handle something,” but I think it is good to have an idea and try to write it in your schedule summary. All right. So I am more than happy to take questions.

Ashley Safranski:

Cool. Briana, there was one question in there, but I want to really quick back to the Student Tech Fee grant. A couple of things I want to highlight. In the chat, Meredith, my colleague Meredith, dropped a link to an article because I think it’s very relevant. In section two, you’ll find a link to the team application for their Student Tech Fee grant. So I’m going to call that out. I think that may be very helpful just to read what was shared. And thank you, Briana, for sharing that with us and allowing us to share it.

Can you share more about, I know you mentioned the students get it, but anything that seemed to really strike a chord with them related to what you were highlighting? And then also, did you work with any of the partners for the Student Tech Fee grant? Are they supporting your request? Are they providing you with data to really arm your proposal or language or anything like that? I think that might be helpful to cover.

Briana Randall:

Yeah, those are both great questions, kind of what appeals to the Student Tech Fee Committee and also how have the vendors been supportive of my proposal. Our Student Tech Fee Committee really likes numbers. So for example, when I applied for VMock or Jobscan, which is about resume help, I was able to say, “This is how many resume appointments we’ve done and the other centers on Handshake have done. This is how many people come to resume workshops. This is how many people do our online resume review.”

And so I’m like, “Clearly the need is there.” And so being able to, from whatever platforms you’re using, pull numbers that show the need. And this was really interesting. One of the committee members asked, “So if you were able to get this product, would that mean that coaches would lose their jobs?” And I said, “Oh no! It just means that we might be able to keep up a little.”

Clearly there’s work to be done and we’re just trying to get this product with Student Tech Fee money to help us keep moving forward. So numbers have been really helpful. And also on our campus, how they do Student Tech Fee applications is you’re able to get endorsements and they’ve done it a couple different ways. Sometimes you get quotes from campus partners, and I’ve been able to do that when that was the option.

So asking campus partners, telling them you’re applying and telling them why it’s important and asking them to go in and submit endorsements is helpful. Now they just do a vote system, but I’ve been able to get a lot of votes. And the Student Tech Fee one time was like, “That’s the most votes I’ve ever seen.” I’m like, “I’m good at this.” Yes, the vendors themselves have been very helpful and sometimes they’ll write pieces of it.

There’s a very standard application, so there’s categories I have to fill in. And I’ve had sometimes them provide me text for a specific thing or I can submit images or videos or other documentation. So sometimes they’ve included that. Sometimes I’ve had them look over what I’ve written to see if they would include anything else. So most of the vendors know that if I don’t get Student Tech Fee money, I can’t partner with the vendor. So they’re highly motivated to help me get funding. So they’ve been very helpful. Hope that answers your question.

Ashley Safranski:

Cool. Thanks, Briana. Question from the chat. I’m just going to read it here verbatim. “How successful was your project of asking alumni? Were you asking alumni to donate financially to support a particular project within career services or overall funding? And then did you work with Advancement on something like that?”

Briana Randall:

Yes. So we do work with Advancement. We would not do it on our own. And if we did it on our own and Advancement found out, we’d probably get in trouble. We did work with Advancement, and that means that Advancement was either writing the messages that went to alumni or were helping us or we co-wrote them. Generally, I have the content and they’re able to use better donor language.

So yes. They also make the emails pretty in the Advancement condoned email system. And so the emails are actually coming. They look like they don’t come from me, but Advancement’s writing them and putting them in their system. So yes, anytime we’ve asked alum for money has been with Advancement as primary partner. And no, we have not been successful. So that’s where over five years we’ve raised $2,200.

Now, I will say part of our challenge is that we are the centralized center and a lot of students come to us one time or two times. And even though I think we make an impact both short-term and long-term, I don’t know that the students really think about us as somebody they’re super connected to and would open an email from. I think college-based career centers or maybe at smaller schools where the career center has probably engaged with a higher proportion of the campus might have better luck there.

Ashley Safranski:

Sure. I think that makes sense. I’m going to move on to the next question. I also just want to highlight really quick. I’m going to throw a survey in the chat. Brie, we’ve been lucky at uConnect to work with Briana on her funding and have gotten to highlight a lot of work, but we’ve also worked with lots of others. If you want to continue the conversation around alternative funding, our team does have a lot of experience in pursuing some of these different avenues too.

So I’m going to throw that in there if you want to continue the conversation. But the next question, Briana, and I think you talked about this, maybe you can just cover it, it doesn’t seem that you approach corporations to provide funding or sponsorship. Is there a reason why you don’t go after corporations yourself?

Briana Randall:

Yeah. So we were for a while trying to bring partners into the Husky Signature Employer program and we just were not very successful there, so we stopped.

Ashley Safranski:

Also, real quick, is the Husky Signature Program, that would be what you all were calling an employer sponsor program? Okay.

Briana Randall:

Yeah, that’s a good clarification. So they get extra visibility on things we put out to students, that sort of thing. And also, most big dollar potential corporate sponsors have an Advancement overseer. Me going out directly and contacting a corporation and asking for money would probably not… Allowed is not the right answer, but there’s people and steps and protocols for that on our campus. And then I only have so much time.

So if we’ve tried something several times and have not had success, I don’t have the time to keep beating my head against a rock. When we did try for corporations, it wasn’t super successful, and so we have just stopped. I do see another question in there about alumni career advising. We used to charge for alumni career advising. We used to start charging alumni for career appointments the day after they graduated, but then we eventually changed that.

And where it lives right now, it’s been through iterations, is we take appointments with alum up to three years out for free, and we do not take appointments with alumni after that. We don’t have the bandwidth. We don’t have the expertise. And so that three year out mark lets students who hadn’t quite taken the time to think about their career trajectory while students and people who are wanting to take a gap year to get experience to apply to medical school, then they can come still use us, but we do not charge for them, but we also don’t take appointments with people forever.

Ashley Safranski:

I want to echo what Brida had shared in the chat about just an honest overview. Briana, it’s like one of the things I love about you is that you’re a straight shooter and we always have just really great candid conversation conversations. And I think that’s important because I think it’s all experimentation. And you’re totally right. What has worked at one place may or may not work somewhere else, and campus cultures are so different even at similar sized institutions.

So just keeping it real and trying and learning. I think that’s it. Everyone, thank you. Thanks for joining. Briana, Mindy, thanks again for sharing your best practices and what hasn’t been a best practice so far. And again, everyone, this is recorded. We’ll share the recording in the community. We’ll start a thread in the discussion. So if you have follow-up questions for Briana, I’m going to put her on the spot and say if we tag her that she may pop in to respond. So hope everyone has a great rest of the week.

Briana Randall:

Yeah. And you’re welcome to email me as well if you have questions. I will say I’m underwater right now, so I might not respond right away, but I’ll get to you eventually. Thanks so much, everybody. Appreciate it.

Ashley Safranski:

Thanks all. See you.

Meredith Metsker:

That’s all for this episode of Career Everywhere. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to hit subscribe and rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time.