Introducing the D-SIP class of 2022!

The Development Summer Internship Program (D-SIP) welcomes our 16th cohort this year. We are pleased to bring back “in-person” Professional Development Fridays while students work in a hybrid format with host sites across U‑M and Washtenaw County. The D-SIP 2022 cohort will work on individual projects while exploring the development field and growing as young professionals. Please join us in following their progress throughout the summer.

Meet the Cohort

Zoey Ai

OUD Development Services and Strategic Solutions

Zoey will work to research and benchmark OUDs new data quality data standard, “Golden Record”, against similar programs at similar institutions, including public universities, non-profit organizations, as well as private organizations. She will then work to provide a report of recommendations to improve the Golden Record Standard as well as the OUD data quality program. To help facilitate this final report, Zoey will interview internal partners across OUD, and SCU units to determine the most important data points to the development community, which will inform which data points are included in future iterations of the “Golden Record” data standard as well as ensure the current Golden Record is meeting community needs.

Ranjana Angamuthu 

Dobson – Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels

Ranjana’s project will look at engaging, diversifying and cultivating individual giving, specifically for those individuals who are students or young professionals. This will be done through a series of fundraising events supporting three of our wraparound support programs, which are P.A.L.S (Pets Assisting the Lives of Seniors), Care on Wheels, and CAPABLE (Community Aging in Place, Advancing Better Living for Elders).Events supporting these three programs will all have the goal to diversify development efforts and donor populations through using technological opportunities to help engage and support the work we do at Ypsilanti Meals on Wheels.

Paige Bunker 

Stamps Development and Alumni Relations

Paige will immerse herself in the history of the school and the Stamps family through materials provided by our team. She will be charged with using a creative, structured, and inclusive process to deliver concepts and ideas that would encourage art and design students, alumni, faculty, staff and community members to celebrate and engage in the festivities, while building a foundation for philanthropic support. Using this research, as well as feedback from our community, Paige will create communication, engagement, event, and solicitation plans around the 10th anniversary. The milestone events will allow the new Dean to share their vision in a celebratory forward-looking/future focused event(s), and provide an opportunity for them to forge a relationship with the Stamps family.

Mishal Charania

Rackham Development

For the summer of 2022, Mishal will support the planning of an affinity society for alumni of the Barbour Scholarship program to encourage philanthropy and engagement with Rackham. Mishal will conduct benchmarking research of peer institutions and programs and outline steps and a timeline for implementation of the Barbour Society. The goal of the Barbour Society is to provide Barbour alumni with an active community of fellow alumni upon graduation. The society will encourage philanthropic support of the Barbour Centennial Fund as its primary objective and offer exclusive opportunities for engagement and community-building among Barbour alumni around the world.

Shankhin Chirmade 

Ross Development and Alumni Relations

This summer, Shankhin will evaluate the FY22 major gift team parent efforts, benchmark with peer schools, and help build an effective strategy for FY23 parent fundraising. The evaluation, benchmarking, and strategy would focus on the identification and stewardship aspects of the fundraising cycle. With a more intentional focus on this effort, we can be more mindful and strategic in engaging with a diverse group of Michigan Ross parents and our fellow development community colleagues. Shankhin will also help build rapport with Michigan Ross fundraisers as well as OUD Regional Gift Officers, OUD Parent and Family Giving fundraisers, and gift officers at our peer schools.

Andrea Elsholz 

College of Engineering

Andrea will benchmark annual giving and stewardship practices and activities within the College’s departments/programs and possibly other SCUs. In collaboration with our Annual Giving, Department Giving, and Stewardship teams, Andrea will create an interactive toolkit of best practices and resources to share with CoE departments and programs. The toolkit will be a practical guide on how to create effective and DEI-sensitive annual giving and stewardship communications to build a pipeline of campaign donors. The collaboration among three teams within our office would ensure Andrea has consistent access to guidance for their project in both a hybrid or fully remote experience.

Anjali Francis

School of Public Health

There are several key projects Anjali be involved with this summer: 1) Support the development of strategic alumni engagement initiatives. Meet with SPH partners (departments/OSEP/Marketing and Communications/AE Committee) to learn about our needs, identify opportunities for engaging alumni into the life of the school and connecting them with key constituents (prospective/current students). Collaborate with internal partners to coordinate and carry out at least one new initiative. 2) Continuous improvement of the online mentoring and networking platform and SPH’s formalized mentoring programs. 3) Campaign & Alumni Engagement benchmarking with peer schools of public health. Create a contact list of SPH’s peer schools. Develop and share a survey to determine how they are engaging alumni, how many scholarships, professorships, etc.

Yena Kwon 

Michigan Medicine Development – Communications

Yena will assist with a communications audit and benchmarking in regard to the new fundraising campaign. The audit would entail a comprehensive review of the Michigan Medicine Office of Development’s communications, and it may include the collection of audience feedback. Benchmarking efforts would entail collecting and analyzing communications produced by other academic and medical institutions during major fundraising campaigns.

Nora Lewis 

Dobson Internship – Friends in Deed

This summer through a crowdfunding campaign for our mural project, we will create a video and supporting materials to boost that campaign. Nora will help Friends In Deed craft compelling and visually dynamic messages, as well as strategize with us around how to reach younger audiences who may be interested in our mission. For our Annual Golf fundraiser, we will ask Nora to help us make the auction a success by soliciting donated items from local businesses. That outreach will double as an opportunity to introduce FID to the local business community.

Yasmine Mansi

Michigan Medicine Development – Events

This summer, Yasmine will aid in the creation of a tool to be used to provide evidence-based, data-driven decisions on event success, including but not limited to tangible return on investment (ROI), strategic effort, alleviate team burnout, provide historical reference, and overall strategy of events through benchmarking against similar institutions doing like work. We would like to create an ROI scorecard, which will offer an intentional strategy to the success of an event and serve as a guide on the process by which to achieve that success. The scorecard will be completed at the conclusion of every non-ceremonial event, and a follow up completed six to nine months following as well. We will lean on our partners from the leadership team, major gift teams, prospect development, data team, and communications to develop and track these efforts. Yasmine will aid in the launch, help devise processes and analytics, reporting process. Yasmine will act as an active member of the Events team and will be looked to in providing onsite event logistics planning and execution as well as volunteer at large scale events.

Olivia Newman

Matthaei Botanical Gardens

This project will give Olivia the unique opportunity to take a deep dive into a specific donor experience, from discovery to solicitation to stewardship. Throughout the project, Olivia will evaluate and benchmark the tribute program, present recommendations for, and implement proposed solutions for increasing unrestricted giving, reducing administrative time/costs, and updating communications and marketing materials. She will be part of the MBGNA Dev-Com team, working collaboratively with staff throughout the organization and OUD. This D-SIP experience will require time on-site, in the field on both properties, and can be achieved through a flexible, hybrid work schedule. The outcome of the project will be a streamlined program that engages donors meaningfully to build unrestricted support.

Hannah Nguyen

Institute for Social Research (ISR)

Hannah will play a fundamental and exciting role in helping us reach our goals for two pillars: amplifying our message and building a new coalition of donors. Hannah will identify innovative opportunities to share our refreshed narrative about ISR with relevant audiences across the U‑M community and beyond. She will also lead brainstorming around strategic pipeline development, with a focus on next generation prospects and enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. As ISR’s traditional, longstanding donor base ages, it is vitally important that we identify younger, more diverse donors and cultivate their relationships with the institute. Projects will include researching best practices for pipeline development, conducting donor research, and thinking critically about frontline fundraising. Hannah will also have ample opportunity to participate in a variety of smaller but deeply impactful projects that will introduce her to many areas of development (student support stewardship, communications, working with faculty leaders, etc.), a distinct advantage of working with our small team.

Charlotte Parent

Michigan Medicine Development – Prospect Development

In preparation for a future fundraising campaign, Prospect Development and the Top Donor Engagement (PD & TDE) teams at Michigan Medicine Office of Development are piloting a project to explore the networks of our high-profile donors and prospects to discover individuals who are new to our constituency and could potentially become part of our principal-gift pipeline. This pilot will become part of pipeline development efforts and inform future campaign planning. Charlotte will provide analytical and research support as well as project management. Her work will consist of coding information gathered by a vendor in electronic resources and other means, verifying information as needed, and preparing it for presentation to gift officers who will be facilitating another aspect of this project. This internship will provide an opportunity to learn more about the strategic analysis of information in a fundraising plan.

Lana Pontone 

UM-Dearborn – Business Foundation and Engagement

This summer, Lana will focus on a need within the B&FE Team for a more enticing communications presence. This could include launching the Foundation Relations website, making valuable updates to the Business Engagement Center page, and identifying some ways we can better communicate with our external constituents. Creating sponsorship package templates which could be used for Student Organizations, and other student facing programs across campus. Collecting data on who tends to interact with our online presence and communications so we can make more informed decisions about what marketing efforts are most effective. This data could also be bulk uploaded into DART to better capture our generalized communications with external constituents.

Dipro Prattoy

OUD Stewardship/Donor Relations/Marketing and Communications

This project will focus on our DIY Impact Reports and will provide RGOs and development assistants strategies and tools to best utilize the DIY reports in ways that are most meaningful to Michigan donors. Dipro will work with the MarCom designers and student workers to create ‘how to videos,’ guidelines, and best practice materials that RGOs can reference when making their own DIY reports. In addition to refining the DIY process, Dipro will also act as a liaison between RGOs and stewardship team members to determine optimal donor strategy for these reporting tools, what information is most meaningful to share, and how these DIY reports can further advance engagement and stewardship for U‑M donors. He will consult with RGOs, stewardship officers, and MarCom colleagues to understand the reporting process from diverse perspectives and help to refine the process to meet the diverse needs of U‑M donors.

Juliette Quenioux

School for the Environment and Sustainability (SEAS)

As a member of the SEAS team, Juliette will digitally market and promote our online alumni engagement and mentorship platform, SEASnet. She will research and suggest strategies to increase student and alumni engagement, such as virtual event ideas, mentorship programs, and will play a role in generating marketing material for the SEASnet through email and social media campaigns. Juliette will directly engage with alumni by collecting SEASnet user testimonials, and by contacting accomplished alums to gather information and compose alumni impact stories to be posted on SEAS digital platforms. Additionally, Juliette will support SEAS’ annual stewardship reporting process by gathering content from scholarship recipients and compiling endowment financials reports through Business Objects. She will have the opportunity to benchmark stewardship efforts from other smaller units across campus to provide an analysis on how SEAS can improve its current processes.

Sonali Ramchandani

Taubman: Development and Alumni Engagement

Sonali’s project will focus on identifying Taubman College alumni of color who have not been engaged with the College as alumni. Many of these alumni may not have had a good experience as students, and thus have not engaged with the college. We aim to change this moving forward. We will use this information and outreach to build strategies to re-engage them with the college, particularly as mentors to current and future students. Sonali will be researching and gathering data on our alumni and building an outreach framework to reconnect with them, as well as conducting conversations with alumni, current students, and DEI colleagues across the college and wider University.

Gabrielle Rivas

School of Social Work

Gabrielle’s work will focus on three key projects: 1) Develop materials and a strategy to help the SSW Development and Alumni Relations team elevate the profile of the important successes and contributions our School makes to the larger community. 2) Work with key teams in the SSW to gain access to all past Named Scholarship recipients and input all information into DART. From there, she will be asked to develop a strategy for engaging all of our past Scholarship recipients, which may include a solicitation and stewardship project for this specific group of SSW alumni. 3) Assist in the research work to identify potential Dean’s Advisory Board members through creative prospecting work.

Hadley Samarco 

Michigan Medicine Development – Medical Education

The Medical Education and Alumni Relations team will collaborate with Hadley on a project to better understand how we can successfully engage our growing population of women graduates. This project will involve interviewing our women M.D. alumni to understand their medical school experience, how UMMS can best communicate, their interest in engaging with students and volunteering. We’d also like to learn about philanthropic designations women are most likely to support and the willingness of women in leadership roles to mentor students.

Brenna Schnelbach 

School of Information

Brenna will research and develop an alumni relations plan that accounts for varying needs across different segments of our UMSI alumni. The project will be executed by benchmarking across campus and other universities to identify best practices and forward-looking strategies, with particular attention to the evolving demographics of younger alumni and shifting trends in engagement with an increasingly tech-savvy population. The project will also entail outreach to a variety of segments of our alumni to identify needs and preferences with respect to engagement with the school. Diversity and inclusion are hallmarks of a robust alumni relations program, and the intern’s project will incorporate these themes into a cohesive plan. Brenna will also have side projects, such as assisting with stewardship activities like ThankView.

Mariah Stevens

Dobson Internship – Food Gatherers/Washtenaw Food Policy

Mariah will compile a catalog with a wide variety of metrics related to food, farms, and the environment from which council members can more quickly find and utilize compelling data in grant applications. In addition, she will research grant lists such as the Foundation Directory Online (available in the U‑M Graduate Library) to identify grants that fit the WFPC’s mission and vision. If an appropriate grant under $10,000 is available, Mariah will work with the WFPC and Food Gatherers to submit a grant application. Mariah will also review our current social media platforms, research other food policy council’s social media efforts, and provide recommendations for growth in this area. As a Dobson Intern, Mariah will also have the opportunity to support the Food Gatherers annual fundraising program, primarily by working on our summer fundraising event – Grillin’ for Food Gatherers but also supporting the production of our summer newsletter and fall appeal.

Jack Sweeting 

UM-Flint: Advancement Team

With the new University of Michigan capital campaign underway, Jack’s project focus will be to strengthen our plans and develop a successful launch at UM-Flint. It is important that we identify priorities, programs, and opportunities for our campus campaign focus, which cuts across all six academic colleges/schools, including campus-wide initiatives like diversity, equity and inclusion. The campaign plan project will include identification of priorities; internal and external communication ideas; prospect research; identification of specific donors/prospects for priority funding opportunities, developing funding proposal templates for naming opportunities; and developing community engagement ideas.

Jim Wang 

Michigan Medicine Development – Children and Women’s Team

Jim will establish a program for Mott Hospital similar to the LSA College Connections and collaborate with UM-LSA on this project. Jim will reach out to lead annual giving Mott donors to interview them, listen to their “why” they support Mott and explore their interest in getting more involved in the life of Mott Hospital. Jim will then feed the leads to MGOs on the Mott/VV team. Similarly, UM-LSA will add one question to the LSA College Connections questionnaire they use when interviewing LSA alumni to identify potential donors for Mott.

Ruowen Wang 

Dobson Internship – Huron River Watershed Council

This summer, Ruowen will work to strategize securing new corporate sponsorship approach, inviting sponsors to commit for 3 year sponsorships for Suds on the River. Suds on the River is HRWC’s iconic annual fundraising event. It is supported by individuals, corporate sponsors, restaurants, breweries, volunteers and friends. Suds on the River has been a part of HRWC’s annual fundraising strategy for about 15 years, and is loved by the community for its fun, casual atmosphere on the banks of the Huron River. It has become a friend raiser as well as a fundraiser.

Gabrielle Wiwigacz

LSA Advancement (Dean’s Office)

Our team is committed to serving underrepresented groups so that we can help to foster a diverse, equitable, and inclusive culture for all students at LSA. We believe that Gabrielle can help with the market research process of validating our brand refresh roll-out by assisting with surveys or focus group activities such as writing discussion guides, note-taking, and debriefing the findings, and of course offering their unique and valuable perspective as a current student. Gabrielle’s opinions and insights, especially about DEI within the LSA culture and how the brand is conveyed for LSA, would be extremely valuable to us in this process. It would allow us to refine the brand articulation and offer the student an opportunity to get great marketing experience while impacting the campus community.

Darina Wolfe

OUD Talent Acquisition

Darina will conduct market research and analysis regarding conversion rates for internship programs. This will help determine what our target goal should be for converting D-SIP interns/alum into the Michigan Development Community as staff members. Along with the benchmarking work, Darina will identify gaps within our current process to engage and attract D-SIP interns/alum into working for the Office of University Development (OUD).

M. Zhu

Dentistry: Development/Marketing and Communications

Our project would consist of M. labeling and categorizing archival photos for a myriad of uses. As we embark on a new campaign, it will be more important than ever for us to be able to tell our story, connect with donors, retrieve and store in an easily accessible database photos and stories of alumni, donors and friends. This project will significantly improve our ability to market, communicate and fundraise to our alumni and friends community. Our long standing peer to peer fundraising is the foundation of our program, this work would be a key element of elevating that work to the next level. The project will include work with the school’s marketing and communications team to research stories found in the collecting and organizing of the photos.