Development and External Relations Update

The Development and External Relations office UPDATE is a monthly summary of activities in the section and is published for your general information. If you have questions, please contact Jim Goit or call at (902) 893-7950

• External Relations
  •  Mr. Jeff Jennings, Manager of the Potato cluster in New Brunswick was invited to visit this month and he did so on Jan 24th.  David Fullerton had created an literary that included stops to visit several scientists on projects that would be of interest to the efforts of the group.
  • Jim worked with the representatives of progress R &  D Magazine and Acadian Sea Plants Inc on a joint article for the March edition of the magazine.  It will feature our cooperative with in the development of students and new knowledge through research for the company.
  • Met with Rob Gordon on process for selecting nominees for awards at NSAC.
• Marketing
  • Consulting with Research and Grad Studies on the development of a Masters marketing plan and promotional material for current research activities
  • Compiling mid-campaign statistics on the current marketing and recruitment campaign
  • Continued work with the New Residence Planning Committee including physical specifications and site selection
  • On-going consultation with Recruitment on marketing programs
  • Developed survey questionnaire for Engineering on program specific marketing
• Communications and Alumni
• 493 alumni records were found/changed or added this month
• Participated on promotional committee for NSAC Research Capacity
• Participating on promotional committee for new Enterprise Management program
• Work ongoing on Centennial Annual Report, Centennial Finale Event and production of Centennial CD
• Winter edition of NSAC Agricola News currently being distributed to 5300 alumni
• Event planning for President's List reception.
• Development and Fund Raising
  • The transfer of land that had been donated was completed.  An official appraisal of $25,000 was finished and the necessary paper work completed. Once a suitable offer has been obtained, the property will be sold.
  • There was an in kind donations of laboratory equipment during the month valued at $5000.
  • Joanne and Jim worked to get the final receipts from the previous calendar year ready for issuing and began to prepare for the annual audit.  The numbers of transactions continue to climb so it is important to have systems in place to handle the volume.
  • Work was begun on outfitting the Call Center for operation in February and March.  Plans are to call just under 3000 alumni to ask for their support of the Second Century Endowment campaign. A letter was designed and sent out this month as part of that process.
  • Met with representatives of Class of 1956 on their expenditure of their funds for 50 year project.
  • submitted a report to the Class of 1959 who have their own campaign underway.
  • Donations continue to come in and we are well ahead of last year.  The number of memorial givers continues to increase.

• Website
  • Website transition to includes are 99% completed.
  • Removed multiple folders and old .htm files from departmental sites to improve the backend navigation.
  • Tested new software which allows a user to search documents online. This would allow for forms, such as animal care forms, to be posted and searchable. The software is prohibitively expensive and another options are being explored.
  • University Day forms and site were setup to allow for online registration.
  • Continued help was given to departmental web editors throughout the month.
  • Requests for Blackberry assistance has dwindled off as users have found them to be very user friendly.
  • SurfStats live has been purchased and installed and is working great. We now have a reliable webstats that are updated every 12 hours. This allows for almost instantaneous stats to be generated. Much improved over our old analog stats, it ignores all bad requests/hack attempts.
  • Investigation into using ColdFusion to bring dynamic pages to our site is underway.