Stepping back(ish)

After “retiring” as president of CCA in 2023 I enjoyed my “immediate past president” role through January of this year and now am part of an illustrious group of “emeritus” CCA presidents. This year I’ve tried to step back just a bit and let a new round of leadership move the organization forward (while continuing to be a source of institutional knowledge and a helping hand at conferences).

I have been the Institutional Representative (IR) for the ACE Virginia Women’s Network since June 2018. This past year the co-chair of the W&M Women’s Network, who had been part of the most recent Senior Leadership Seminar cohort, expressed interest in becoming more involved with the Network and being a co-IR with me, so as of this year W&M now has two reps which has worked out great. She is able to attend events that I cannot and bring in experience and insight from being in active leadership with the W&M Women’s Network (I had been a W&M Women’s Network co-chair for three years but rolled off when I became IR back in 2018). As with CCA, the VA Network is a group that I love being a part of and want to continue to play an active role, but also don’t want to take up all the space so that someone else doesn’t have the opportunity to experience and get the benefits of being an IR.

A Higher (Digi)Col-ing

So with somewhat stepping back from two volunteer roles in the last year, and acknowledging that I’d said back in 2023 that I was going to get reengaged with the higher ed community, I toyed with the idea of dedicating time with another professional association, and wanted to elevate the level of organization I was volunteering with to higher than the state level, so I decided to apply to be a member of the board of directors for Digital Collegium (formerly HighEdWeb).

As a “community dedicated to advancing digital innovation in higher education,” I have been involved with DigiCol from my first days at W&M in 2010 (known then as HighEdWeb). I attended my first annual conference in Austin in 2011 where I presented (for the first time ever at a proper conference) with co-presenter Doug Gapinski (then with mStoner) on mobile websites and apps in higher ed. In 2013, I presented a poster session about deciphering Facebook Insights (after Facebook had promptly changed their interface days before the conference). In 2015 I presented a session about how to create and manage a social media users group (it was squirrel themed, and still one of my favorite presentations I’ve ever done). In 2016 I co-presented with my then-W&M colleague Sarah Juliano about how to utilize social media to promote campus events (this also evolved into an article in the Spring 2018 issue of the Journal of Education Advancement & Marketing).

After I moved to my position in Advancement in 2017, learning the ropes of a new area of campus and being a new manager meant that I didn’t have the bandwidth (and did have more schedule conflicts) to attend the HighEdWeb annual conference for a few years. 2020 became a reset moment for me, I was a newly elected president of CCA and had to figure out how to make our biannual conference virtual. Organizing two virtual conferences, plus going through pandemic at a university and all its associated chaos, and relying on the higher ed comms community for support, reemphasized the value and impact of professional conferences and the associated networks and amazing people that are a part of them.

Back in the community

Somewhat serendipitously, I was contacted in the spring of 2022 by Brian Piper about becoming a leader of the HighEdWeb Management and Leadership Community Group. Of course the imposter syndrome immediately set in. I had been a manager for only three years, how could I lead a group focused on the topic? But darn if I did know how to organize an event, and I’d wanted to be more engaged with the community, so this was the perfect opportunity to get plugged back in with HighEdWeb. This volunteer role brought me back into the orbit of the annual conference, as each community group holds a discussion session for conference attendees facilitated by the group leader(s). In the last few years I’ve had the privilege to engage with awesome and smart folks from across the higher ed, both as part of the online discussions throughout the year and at the conference.

After the 2023 conference, Jackie Vetrano asked if I would join her and Rachel Underhill to help plan a HighEdWeb regional conference in North Carolina. As the attendee relations lead for the 2024 North Carolina regional conference, I was able to rely on my CCA experience planning conferences, and worked closely with the other volunteers and HighEdWeb staff to execute a great conference.

During the conference planning process Jackie was on the HighEdWeb board of directors and I became curious as to what was involved. After moving to my emeritus president role in CCA and having a co-IR for the Virginia Network, I felt I had bandwidth for another volunteer opportunity and could build on what I’d learned in my previous roles. So in February I applied to be on the Digital Collegium Board of Directors. In April I received a request for an interview, followed by an email a few weeks later letting me know that I’d been elected for a three year term.

As of now I’ve completed all the necessary trainings as well as my new director orientation. I’ll attend (virtually) my first board retreat in July (I somehow managed to have three organizations with retreats the first two weeks of July so there were some inevitable scheduling conflicts).

Room to grow

When asked during the board interview and onboarding about why I’d applied and what I hoped to learn, I realized a lot of it boiled down to getting experience with being more strategic and less tactical. I’ve always been the person folks go to in order to get things done. When discussing a project my brain often immediately jumps into the tactics to execute (or why it wouldn’t work) rather than higher level strategy and I’m hoping that being part of a governing, rather than a working, board, dedicated to a cause and a community that I care so much about, will help me strengthen those “high level” thinking skills. I’ve elected to be a part of the educational events committee so I’ll still get an opportunity to flex my organizing and planning skills and on the budget committee to get more experience in that administrative area. I’m excited to see what this three year term brings, and how I, and DigiCol as a whole, grows and evolves.