Not-For-Profit Fundraising and Presentation Skills: National Park Foundation

| Developed by Stephen K. Dishart, Department of Communication Studies, Baruch College, CUNY |

This assignment uses historical images as necessary pedagogical materials, integrating them into communications and business strategy classes, including COM 9626: Counseling The Corporation and BUS 9558: Strategic Business Communication. Professor Stephen Dishart reviewed the Rockefeller Archive Center’s available materials and assigned students to use RAC to access historic images of the United States National Parks. To access RAC online, students simply access the center online at rockarch.org. The photos from RAC provide an excellent opportunity to expand students’ awareness of Open Educational Resources and to use those materials to build a presentation to support the National Park Foundation. Students develop enhanced presentation skills with material often not considered by students for class projects. This approach ensures students broaden their understanding of available resources for their future careers.

The OER and Course Artifact

First, the lecturer will highlight the Baruch Library research guide on Primary Sources in American History and Culture.

Other resources to be reviewed during the lecture and links provided to students:

The lecture preceding the assignment introduces students to various types of Open Educational Resources, including the RAC and Baruch Archives. Using OER sources presents an opportunity to provide a group breakout session in developing a PowerPoint slide and verbal presentation to promote contributions to the National Park Foundation. Each group will be required to use the images along with the learnings of the course to date, the textbook, and other readings to develop a 7-10 minute presentation.

In addition to introducing the OER, the lecture and assignment teach students to avoid the commonplace problem of overly wordy slides. The approach enhances understanding of the need for not-for-profit organizations to obtain funding by promoting a mission rather than for income, as with for-profit businesses. A key point of this presentation is that students must not use any text on the slides other than to provide credit to the source and licensing.

The National Park images from RAC provide an opportunity to provide students with a way to share the beauty of the National Parks and link a direct connection to the importance of preserving the parks through the National Park Foundation. Without the images accessed through the OER RAC, students would be relying upon long, narrative descriptions that will likely not be as compelling as the photos themselves.

Teaching Artifacts

The items below are excerpted from my syllabus for Counseling the Corporation, including course description and methodology, followed by the class lecture and assignment. The dates, FYI, are based on the course taught in summer 2021 in the Baruch communication master’s program.

Syllabus Excerpt 1:

Syllabus Excerpt 2:

Faculty Information

Steven K. Dishart is president of Dishart Communications and Crisis Management Consultants. Dishart, who teaches communications, marketing, and public relations at three Manhattan area colleges, is also a frequent speaker on crisis management in the United States and abroad. He has spoken on communications management and conducted Crisis Management Master Classes in Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and Hong Kong.

Dishart is an adjunct instructor at Baruch College, CUNY; The Fashion Institute of Technology; and Fairleigh Dickenson University. He also is a senior advisor to The Triana Group, Inc., a Wall Street business advisory firm. Formerly, he was managing director of corporate communications for Swiss Re and director of corporate communications at Mellon Financial Corporation (now BNY/Mellon). He earned his B.A. from West Virginia University, an M.A. from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and received an Executive Management Certificate at INSEAD business school in France.

More information about Stephen Dishart:

Licensing Information

The Not-for-Profit Fundraising and Presentation Skills assignment is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike4.0 International License.

The linked resources are openly licensed but not necessarily OER. Licensing conditions may vary among items.