Workshops & Team Trainings
Building skills, sharpening strategic thinking, and strengthening institutional effectiveness.
Building skills, sharpening strategic thinking, and strengthening institutional effectiveness.
“Pete Mackey led a leadership workshop that spoke directly to our biggest headwinds. His thoughtful, practical approach is helping us navigate the challenges we and so many institutions of higher education face about cost and relevance.”
Bill Heyman
Gettysburg College Trustee
“Pete Mackey led a leadership workshop that spoke directly to our biggest headwinds. His thoughtful, practical approach is helping us navigate the challenges we and so many institutions of higher education face about cost and relevance.”
Bill Heyman
Gettysburg College Trustee
“Pete Mackey led a leadership workshop that spoke directly to our biggest headwinds. His thoughtful, practical approach is helping us navigate the challenges we and so many institutions of higher education face about cost and relevance.”
Bill Heyman
Gettysburg College Trustee
Leadership teams don’t need more meetings. They need the right conditions to do their best thinking.
We know the challenges leadership teams face because we’ve lived them ourselves—and we know that in higher education, the stakes can be especially high.
With a focus on each team’s particular goals, we design and guide high-impact workshops for boards, cabinets, and leadership teams across practically every campus portfolio.
We create the conditions for candid discussion, frame outcome-oriented questions, and guide the dialogue that turns candor into alignment and practical action.
Whether the challenge is strategic prioritization, a major announcement, financial or structural change, crisis readiness, or communicating with greater confidence, our workshops build the skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking that lead to meaningful results.
OUR WORKSHOPS AT A GLANCE
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
What: Building actionable skills that activate the why, how, and what of effective fundraising. Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
What: Teaching our proprietary method for focusing time, talent, and resources on work of greatest strategic value. Why: Empower leaders and teams to make the hard but necessary choices that boost reputation, recruitment, fundraising, and finances. Who: For executives and staff in any administrative unit.
Expedited Strategic Planning
What: Guiding leaders through our customized process for making thorough and strategic institutional decisions in as little as 24-48 hours. Why: Create sound and comprehensive plans efficiently to meet times of rapid change. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
What: Moderating intensive discussions that help cabinets adjust to hard choices, from budgetary changes to emerging institutional dilemmas. Why: Generate clarity, candor, and decision-making true to an institution's goals. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
What: Using our comprehensive premortem process to help institutions prevent, mitigate, and handle both predictable and unpredictable crises. Why: Ensure strength in planning and response that protect institutions, communities, and reputations. Who: For boards, cabinets, communications offices, and operational teams.
Maximizing Major Announcements
What: Developing detailed plans that achieve the full potential benefits of major announcements. Why: Deliver the full value of emerging news to institutions. Who: For boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams.
Media Training for Public Influence
What: Preparing faculty and cabinet members for media engagements. Why: Advance reputations and news reach with deft, confident media skills. Who: For presidents, cabinet members, institutional spokespeople, and faculty.
Faculty Op-ed Training
What: Teaching faculty in small groups the structures, language, and arguments that lead to published op-eds. Why: Expand faculty influence in public dialogue, raise faculty profiles, and boost institutional reputations. Who: For faculty interested in sharing expertise widely and growing as communicators.
Public Speaking & Presence
What: Building confidence, clarity, and presence for every setting, from admissions presentations to donor meetings to faculty forums. Why: Equip institutional representatives with the psychological and professional techniques to speak with poise and handle even the hardest questions. Who: For admissions and advancement leaders, frontline recruiters and fundraisers, and other professionals speaking on the institution’s behalf.
Customized Workshops
What: Delivering workshops tailored to specific goals and team dynamics, covering topics from crisis readiness to board-administration alignment. Why: Meet tough leadership challenges with a program designed to incorporate and address highly specific contexts. Who: For boards, executive teams, or departmental teams.
“I have been part of many excellent programs during my career in both higher education and public service. I found Mackey Strategies’ customized workshop on strategic change management as valuable as any I have encountered.”
— Blake Thompson, President, Mississippi Christian University
“I have been part of many excellent programs during my career in both higher education and public service. I found Mackey Strategies’ customized workshop on strategic change management as valuable as any I have encountered.”
— Blake Thompson, President, Mississippi Christian University
Explore Our Workshops
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Turning everyday campus moments into donor-ready narratives.
This workshop helps fundraising officers move beyond anecdotes to telling honest stories built to connect emotionally, clarify the value of investments, and inspire generosity.
Having helped educational institutions raise billions of dollars, we build this session around a practical, repeatable approach to storytelling. This includes guiding participants through real examples and showing them how to identify the essential material of a strong fundraising story, structure the narrative for donor audiences, and translate institutional priorities with compelling details.
Participants leave with skills and tools they can use immediately in donor meetings, proposals, and campaign communications, along with a deep sense of what makes a story resonate.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
Helping leaders and teams move from service to strategy.
Administrative units are almost always asked to do too much with too little time. Treating all work as equally important, though, is by definition non-strategic.
In this workshop, we train you in our proprietary approach to strategic prioritization, which is adaptable to any administrative unit's work. It is informed by our decades of experience as part of leadership teams. Through this approach, you will have a proven rubric for identifying true strategic priorities, making intentional choices, and navigating the challenging conversations that prioritization requires.
Participants leave with a shared framework for decision-making, a shared language for operational success, and practical tools for strengthening collaboration with campus partners. Content is tailored to your institution's situation and leadership goals, with absolute confidentiality as a core principle.
Expedited Strategic Planning
A concentrated process for rapid but grounded strategic direction.
Typical strategic planning can take well over an academic year. It has many merits, but in today’s fast-moving higher education environment, can also be far from sufficiently flexible.
Through this program, we guide leadership units (whether at the institutional or college level) through our customized, high-speed, high-impact strategic planning method. In as little as half a way, we will help you surface the pivotal strategic options, stress-test them, and reach well-grounded decisions.
The result is a plan built for speed without sacrificing rigor—a plan comprehensive enough to meet scrutiny, and fast enough to help you pivot in promising new directions.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
A focused, on-campus working session for teams navigating consequential change.
The tougher the decisions that administrations have to make, the more they can benefit from candid and open conversation. But such dialogue can be as difficult as it is imperative. In this program, we help shape and moderate hard discussions for sound and agreeable outcomes.
Informed by our decades of experience working with leadership teams across numerous institutions, this program focuses on creating the conditions for productive conversation and shrewd decision-making around fraught choices.
We work with you in advance to shape the agenda, then facilitate up to a full day of structured dialogue aimed at building understanding and alignment, clarifying the most promising options, and choosing the key steps for achieving the selected goals.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
Preparing for the crisis before it happens.
Most institutions plan how to handle big problems after trouble starts. This workshop flips that problematic sequence. Using our comprehensive premortem process, we help cabinets and other administrative teams identify risks well in advance, prepare for the unexpected, and identify critical actions that will prevent and mitigate the impact of crises.
Participants leave with a clearer picture of institutional vulnerabilities and a concrete plan for protecting the institution, its reputation, and its community.
Maximizing Major Announcements
Getting full value from the news you control.
Not every big announcement gets the reception it deserves, and often that is because the full scale of possibilities for delivering on its promise has not been thoroughly thought through. This workshop helps boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams analyze options, consider available resources and media, and develop the plans that will maximize the reputational upside of good news across every constituency possible.
Participants leave with a practical framework for guiding major announcements from start to finish, and beyond, for greatest institutional value. Typically, participants also develop the skills to do so thereafter themselves.
Media Training for Public Influence
Confidence and credibility at the microphone.
Engaging with the news media usually offers high-reward and high-risk opportunities. Get the conversation right, and you can change perceptions and reputations for the better. But the inverse is equally true. The difference often comes through awareness and poise in the moment.
This hands-on workshop prepares institutional leaders, administrators, spokespeople, and faculty for media engagements of every kind. We will help you turn your knowledge and awareness into rhetorical flexibility, handle challenging questions, guide interviews where you want them to go, and improve your readiness to advance your institution’s–and your–reputation and reach.
Participants become better equipped to handle interviews, tough questions, and high-visibility moments with confidence.
Faculty Op-Ed Training
Helping scholars get published and heard.
Faculty who want to share their expertise through opinion columns (“opinion editorials,” or “op-eds”) must adapt to the different requirements of this medium over academic writing. But with that confidence, faculty often find opportunities for publication they did not recognize before.
We work with small groups of faculty through this workshop to teach the structures, language, and arguments necessary for publishable op-eds. Along the way, we help faculty evaluate and discern areas of their expertise likely to be of interest for editors and lay readers. We can also engage on an individual basis with professors looking for one-on-one support for developing and placing their op-eds.
Participants leave with the tools to write and pitch op-eds that contribute to public understanding and bring their knowledge and insights to new audiences.
Public Speaking & Presence
Helping institutional representatives communicate with confidence and credibility.
Many people find speaking to a group of people, whether the audience is small or large, intimidating. Those who get good at it, however, often find it becomes one of the most rewarding parts of their careers. And in any number of campus professions, including admissions and advancement professionals, being a skilled public speaker is a necessity.
In these training sessions, we focus on the psychological and practical techniques that help you grow in skill, confidence, and effectiveness as a public speaker. We help you build around your own strengths to connect with audiences, deliver messages with authenticity, and handle even the most difficult questions with poise.
Designed to be highly interactive, the workshop meets speakers where they are, helps them understand and practice proven tools for success, and empowers participants to best represent their institution and advance their careers.
Customized Workshops
Built to help you meet specific leadership challenges.
In addition to the offerings above, we facilitate workshops tailored to specific institutional or departmental needs, goals, and team dynamics. Sample topics that we have addressed in these sessions include crisis readiness, cost-benefit strategic goal-setting, board-administration alignment, and achieving key outcomes of leadership transitions.
We work closely with you in advance to clarify goals, understand context, and design a session that creates the right conditions to generate worthwhile discussion and actionable plans.
Leadership teams don’t need more meetings. They need the right conditions to do their best thinking.
We know the challenges leadership teams face because we’ve lived them ourselves—and we know that in higher education, the stakes can be especially high.
With a focus on each team’s particular goals, we design and guide high-impact workshops for boards, cabinets, and leadership teams across practically every campus portfolio.
We create the conditions for candid discussion, frame outcome-oriented questions, and guide the dialogue that turns candor into alignment and practical action.
Whether the challenge is strategic prioritization, a major announcement, financial or structural change, crisis readiness, or communicating with greater confidence, our workshops build the skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking that lead to meaningful results.
OUR WORKSHOPS AT A GLANCE
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
What: Building actionable skills that activate the why, how, and what of effective fundraising. Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
What: Teaching our proprietary method for focusing time, talent, and resources on work of greatest strategic value. Why: Empower leaders and teams to make the hard but necessary choices that boost reputation, recruitment, fundraising, and finances. Who: For executives and staff in any administrative unit.
Expedited Strategic Planning
What: Guiding leaders through our customized process for making thorough and strategic institutional decisions in as little as 24-48 hours. Why: Create sound and comprehensive plans efficiently to meet times of rapid change. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
What: Moderating intensive discussions that help cabinets adjust to hard choices, from budgetary changes to emerging institutional dilemmas. Why: Generate clarity, candor, and decision-making true to an institution's goals. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
What: Using our comprehensive premortem process to help institutions prevent, mitigate, and handle both predictable and unpredictable crises. Why: Ensure strength in planning and response that protect institutions, communities, and reputations. Who: For boards, cabinets, communications offices, and operational teams.
Maximizing Major Announcements
What: Developing detailed plans that achieve the full potential benefits of major announcements. Why: Deliver the full value of emerging news to institutions. Who: For boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams.
Media Training for Public Influence
What: Preparing faculty and cabinet members for media engagements. Why: Advance reputations and news reach with deft, confident media skills. Who: For presidents, cabinet members, institutional spokespeople, and faculty.
Faculty Op-ed Training
What: Teaching faculty in small groups the structures, language, and arguments that lead to published op-eds. Why: Expand faculty influence in public dialogue, raise faculty profiles, and boost institutional reputations. Who: For faculty interested in sharing expertise widely and growing as communicators.
Public Speaking & Presence
What: Building confidence, clarity, and presence for every setting, from admissions presentations to donor meetings to faculty forums. Why: Equip institutional representatives with the psychological and professional techniques to speak with poise and handle even the hardest questions. Who: For admissions and advancement leaders, frontline recruiters and fundraisers, and other professionals speaking on the institution’s behalf.
Customized Workshops
What: Delivering workshops tailored to specific goals and team dynamics, covering topics from crisis readiness to board-administration alignment. Why: Meet tough leadership challenges with a program designed to incorporate and address highly specific contexts. Who: For boards, executive teams, or departmental teams.
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Turning everyday campus moments into donor-ready narratives. • What: Building actionable skills that activate the why, how, and what of effective fundraising. • Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. • Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising. This workshop helps fundraising officers move beyond anecdotes to telling honest stories built to connect emotionally, clarify the value of investments, and inspire generosity. Having helped educational institutions raise billions of dollars, we build this session around a practical, repeatable approach to storytelling. This includes guiding participants through real examples and showing them how to identify the essential material of a strong fundraising story, structure the narrative for donor audiences, and translate institutional priorities with compelling details. Participants leave with skills and tools they can use immediately in donor meetings, proposals, and campaign communications, along with a deep sense of what makes a story resonate. Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
What: Teaching our proprietary method for focusing time, talent, and resources on work of greatest strategic value. Why: Empower leaders and teams to make the hard but necessary choices that boost reputation, recruitment, fundraising, and finances. Who: For executives and staff in any administrative unit.
Expedited Strategic Planning
What: Guiding leaders through our customized process for making thorough and strategic institutional decisions in as little as 24-48 hours. Why: Create sound and comprehensive plans efficiently to meet times of rapid change. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
What: Moderating intensive discussions that help cabinets adjust to hard choices, from budgetary changes to emerging institutional dilemmas. Why: Generate clarity, candor, and decision-making true to an institution's goals. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
What: Using our comprehensive premortem process to help institutions prevent, mitigate, and handle both predictable and unpredictable crises. Why: Ensure strength in planning and response that protect institutions, communities, and reputations. Who: For boards, cabinets, communications offices, and operational teams.
Maximizing Major Announcements
What: Developing detailed plans that achieve the full potential benefits of major announcements. Why: Deliver the full value of emerging news to institutions. Who: For boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams.
Media Training for Public Influence
What: Preparing faculty and cabinet members for media engagements. Why: Advance reputations and news reach with deft, confident media skills. Who: For presidents, cabinet members, institutional spokespeople, and faculty.
Faculty Op-ed Training
What: Teaching faculty in small groups the structures, language, and arguments that lead to published op-eds. Why: Expand faculty influence in public dialogue, raise faculty profiles, and boost institutional reputations. Who: For faculty interested in sharing expertise widely and growing as communicators.
Public Speaking & Presence
What: Building confidence, clarity, and presence for every setting, from admissions presentations to donor meetings to faculty forums. Why: Equip institutional representatives with the psychological and professional techniques to speak with poise and handle even the hardest questions. Who: For admissions and advancement leaders, frontline recruiters and fundraisers, and other professionals speaking on the institution’s behalf.
Customized Workshops
What: Delivering workshops tailored to specific goals and team dynamics, covering topics from crisis readiness to board-administration alignment. Why: Meet tough leadership challenges with a program designed to incorporate and address highly specific contexts. Who: For boards, executive teams, or departmental teams.
Leadership teams don’t need more meetings. They need the right conditions to do their best thinking.
We know the challenges leadership teams face because we’ve lived them ourselves—and we know that, in higher education, the stakes can be especially high.
With a focus on each team’s particular goals, we design and guide high-impact workshops for boards, cabinets, and leadership teams across practically every campus portfolio.
We create the conditions for candid discussion, frame outcome-oriented questions, and guide the dialogue that turns candor into alignment and practical action.
Whether the challenge is strategic prioritization, a major announcement, financial or structural change, crisis readiness, or communicating with greater confidence, our workshops build the skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking that lead to meaningful results.
Workshops at a glance
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
What: Building actionable skills that activate the why, how, and what of effective fundraising. Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
What: Teaching our proprietary method for focusing time, talent, and resources on work of greatest strategic value. Why: Empower leaders and teams to make the hard but necessary choices that boost reputation, recruitment, fundraising, and finances. Who: For executives and staff in any administrative unit.
Expedited Strategic Planning
What: Guiding leaders through our customized process for making thorough and strategic institutional decisions in as little as 24-48 hours. Why: Create sound and comprehensive plans efficiently to meet times of rapid change. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
What: Moderating intensive discussions that help cabinets adjust to hard choices, from budgetary changes to emerging institutional dilemmas. Why: Generate clarity, candor, and decision-making true to an institution's goals. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
What: Using our comprehensive premortem process to help institutions prevent, mitigate, and handle both predictable and unpredictable crises. Why: Ensure strength in planning and response that protect institutions, communities, and reputations. Who: For boards, cabinets, communications offices, and operational teams.
Maximizing Major Announcements
What: Developing detailed plans that achieve the full potential benefits of major announcements. Why: Deliver the full value of emerging news to institutions. Who: For boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams.
Media Training for Public Influence
What: Preparing faculty and cabinet members for media engagements. Why: Advance reputations and news reach with deft, confident media skills. Who: For presidents, cabinet members, institutional spokespeople, and faculty.
Faculty Op-ed Training
What: Teaching faculty in small groups the structures, language, and arguments that lead to published op-eds. Why: Expand faculty influence in public dialogue, raise faculty profiles, and boost institutional reputations. Who: For faculty interested in sharing expertise widely and growing as communicators.
Public Speaking & Presence
What: Building confidence, clarity, and presence for every setting, from admissions presentations to donor meetings to faculty forums. Why: Equip institutional representatives with the psychological and professional techniques to speak with poise and handle even the hardest questions. Who: For admissions and advancement leaders, frontline recruiters and fundraisers, and other professionals speaking on the institution’s behalf.
Customized Workshops
What: Delivering workshops tailored to specific goals and team dynamics, covering topics from crisis readiness to board-administration alignment. Why: Meet tough leadership challenges with a program designed to incorporate and address highly specific contexts. Who: For boards, executive teams, or departmental teams.
Explore Our Workshops
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Turning everyday campus moments into donor-ready narratives.
This workshop helps fundraising officers move beyond anecdotes to telling honest stories built to connect emotionally, clarify the value of investments, and inspire generosity.
Having helped educational institutions raise billions of dollars, we build this session around a practical, repeatable approach to storytelling. This includes guiding participants through real examples and showing them how to identify the essential material of a strong fundraising story, structure the narrative for donor audiences, and translate institutional priorities with compelling details.
Participants leave with skills and tools they can use immediately in donor meetings, proposals, and campaign communications, along with a deep sense of what makes a story resonate
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
Helping leaders and teams move from service to strategy.
Administrative units are almost always asked to do too much with too little time. Treating all work as equally important, though, is by definition non-strategic.
In this workshop, we train you in our proprietary approach to strategic prioritization, which is adaptable to any administrative unit's work. It is informed by our decades of experience as part of leadership teams. Through this approach, you will have a proven rubric for identifying true strategic priorities, making intentional choices, and navigating the challenging conversations that prioritization requires.
Participants leave with a shared framework for decision-making, a shared language for operational success, and practical tools for strengthening collaboration with campus partners. Content is tailored to your institution's situation and leadership goals, with absolute confidentiality as a core principle.
Expedited Strategic Planning
A concentrated process for rapid but grounded strategic direction.
Typical strategic planning can take well over an academic year. It has many merits, but in today’s fast-moving higher education environment, can also be far from sufficiently flexible.
Through this program, we guide leadership units (whether at the institutional or college level) through our customized, high-speed, high-impact strategic planning method. In as little as half a way, we will help you surface the pivotal strategic options, stress-test them, and reach well-grounded decisions.
The result is a plan built for speed without sacrificing rigor—a plan comprehensive enough to meet scrutiny, and fast enough to help you pivot in promising new directions.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
A focused, on-campus working session for teams navigating consequential change.
The tougher the decisions that administrations have to make, the more they can benefit from candid and open conversation. But such dialogue can be as difficult as it is imperative. In this program, we help shape and moderate hard discussions for sound and agreeable outcomes.
Informed by our decades of experience working with leadership teams across numerous institutions, this program focuses on creating the conditions for productive conversation and shrewd decision-making around fraught choices.
We work with you in advance to shape the agenda, then facilitate up to a full day of structured dialogue aimed at building understanding and alignment, clarifying the most promising options, and choosing the key steps for achieving the selected goals.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
Preparing for the crisis before it happens.
Most institutions plan how to handle big problems after trouble starts. This workshop flips that problematic sequence. Using our comprehensive premortem process, we help cabinets and other administrative teams identify risks well in advance, prepare for the unexpected, and identify critical actions that will prevent and mitigate the impact of crises.
Participants leave with a clearer picture of institutional vulnerabilities and a concrete plan for protecting the institution, its reputation, and its community.
Maximizing Major Announcements
Getting full value from the news you control.
Not every big announcement gets the reception it deserves, and often that is because the full scale of possibilities for delivering on its promise has not been thoroughly thought through. This workshop helps boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams analyze options, consider available resources and media, and develop the plans that will maximize the reputational upside of good news across every constituency possible.
Participants leave with a practical framework for guiding major announcements from start to finish, and beyond, for greatest institutional value. Typically, participants also develop the skills to do so thereafter themselves.
Media Training for Public Influence
Confidence and credibility at the microphone.
Engaging with the news media usually offers high-reward and high-risk opportunities. Get the conversation right, and you can change perceptions and reputations for the better. But the inverse is equally true. The difference often comes through awareness and poise in the moment.
This hands-on workshop prepares institutional leaders, administrators, spokespeople, and faculty for media engagements of every kind. We will help you turn your knowledge and awareness into rhetorical flexibility, handle challenging questions, guide interviews where you want them to go, and improve your readiness to advance your institution’s–and your–reputation and reach.
Participants become better equipped to handle interviews, tough questions, and high-visibility moments with confidence.
Faculty Op-Ed Training
Helping scholars get published and heard.
Faculty who want to share their expertise through opinion columns (“opinion editorials,” or “op-eds”) must adapt to the different requirements of this medium over academic writing. But with that confidence, faculty often find opportunities for publication they did not recognize before.
We work with small groups of faculty through this workshop to teach the structures, language, and arguments necessary for publishable op-eds. Along the way, we help faculty evaluate and discern areas of their expertise likely to be of interest for editors and lay readers. We can also engage on an individual basis with professors looking for one-on-one support for developing and placing their op-eds.
Participants leave with the tools to write and pitch op-eds that contribute to public understanding and bring their knowledge and insights to new audiences.
Public Speaking & Presence
Helping institutional representatives communicate with confidence and credibility.
Many people find speaking to a group of people, whether the audience is small or large, intimidating. Those who get good at it, however, often find it becomes one of the most rewarding parts of their careers. And in any number of campus professions, including admissions and advancement professionals, being a skilled public speaker is a necessity.
In these training sessions, we focus on the psychological and practical techniques that help you grow in skill, confidence, and effectiveness as a public speaker. We help you build around your own strengths to connect with audiences, deliver messages with authenticity, and handle even the most difficult questions with poise.
Designed to be highly interactive, the workshop meets speakers where they are, helps them understand and practice proven tools for success, and empowers participants to best represent their institution and advance their careers.
Customized Workshops
Built to help you meet specific leadership challenges.
In addition to the offerings above, we facilitate workshops tailored to specific institutional or departmental needs, goals, and team dynamics. Sample topics that we have addressed in these sessions include crisis readiness, cost-benefit strategic goal-setting, board-administration alignment, and achieving key outcomes of leadership transitions.
We work closely with you in advance to clarify goals, understand context, and design a session that creates the right conditions to generate worthwhile discussion and actionable plans.
Signature Offerings
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Turning everyday campus moments into donor-ready narratives.
This workshop helps fundraising officers move beyond anecdotes to telling honest stories built to connect emotionally, clarify the value of investments, and inspire generosity.
Having helped educational institutions raise billions of dollars, we build this session around a practical, repeatable approach to storytelling. This includes guiding participants through real examples and showing them how to identify the essential material of a strong fundraising story, structure the narrative for donor audiences, and translate institutional priorities with compelling details.
Participants leave with skills and tools they can use immediately in donor meetings, proposals, and campaign communications, along with a deep sense of what makes a story resonate
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
Helping leaders and teams move from service to strategy.
Administrative units are almost always asked to do too much with too little time. Treating all work as equally important, though, is by definition non-strategic.
In this workshop, we train you in our proprietary approach to strategic prioritization, which is adaptable to any administrative unit's work. It is informed by our decades of experience as part of leadership teams. Through this approach, you will have a proven rubric for identifying true strategic priorities, making intentional choices, and navigating the challenging conversations that prioritization requires.
Participants leave with a shared framework for decision-making, a shared language for operational success, and practical tools for strengthening collaboration with campus partners. Content is tailored to your institution's situation and leadership goals, with absolute confidentiality as a core principle.
Expedited Strategic Planning
A concentrated process for rapid but grounded strategic direction.
Typical strategic planning can take well over an academic year. It has many merits, but in today’s fast-moving higher education environment, can also be far from sufficiently flexible.
Through this program, we guide leadership units (whether at the institutional or college level) through our customized, high-speed, high-impact strategic planning method. In as little as half a way, we will help you surface the pivotal strategic options, stress-test them, and reach well-grounded decisions.
The result is a plan built for speed without sacrificing rigor—a plan comprehensive enough to meet scrutiny, and fast enough to help you pivot in promising new directions.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
A focused, on-campus working session for teams navigating consequential change.
The tougher the decisions that administrations have to make, the more they can benefit from candid and open conversation. But such dialogue can be as difficult as it is imperative. In this program, we help shape and moderate hard discussions for sound and agreeable outcomes.
Informed by our decades of experience working with leadership teams across numerous institutions, this program focuses on creating the conditions for productive conversation and shrewd decision-making around fraught choices.
We work with you in advance to shape the agenda, then facilitate up to a full day of structured dialogue aimed at building understanding and alignment, clarifying the most promising options, and choosing the key steps for achieving the selected goals.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
Preparing for the crisis before it happens.
Most institutions plan how to handle big problems after trouble starts. This workshop flips that problematic sequence. Using our comprehensive premortem process, we help cabinets and other administrative teams identify risks well in advance, prepare for the unexpected, and identify critical actions that will prevent and mitigate the impact of crises.
Participants leave with a clearer picture of institutional vulnerabilities and a concrete plan for protecting the institution, its reputation, and its community.
Maximizing Major Announcements
Getting full value from the news you control.
Not every big announcement gets the reception it deserves, and often that is because the full scale of possibilities for delivering on its promise has not been thoroughly thought through. This workshop helps boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams analyze options, consider available resources and media, and develop the plans that will maximize the reputational upside of good news across every constituency possible.
Participants leave with a practical framework for guiding major announcements from start to finish, and beyond, for greatest institutional value. Typically, participants also develop the skills to do so thereafter themselves.
Faculty Op-Ed Training
Helping scholars get published and heard.
Faculty who want to share their expertise through opinion columns (“opinion editorials,” or “op-eds”) must adapt to the different requirements of this medium over academic writing. But with that confidence, faculty often find opportunities for publication they did not recognize before.
We work with small groups of faculty through this workshop to teach the structures, language, and arguments necessary for publishable op-eds. Along the way, we help faculty evaluate and discern areas of their expertise likely to be of interest for editors and lay readers. We can also engage on an individual basis with professors looking for one-on-one support for developing and placing their op-eds.
Participants leave with the tools to write and pitch op-eds that contribute to public understanding and bring their knowledge and insights to new audiences.
Public Speaking & Presence
Helping institutional representatives communicate with confidence and credibility.
Many people find speaking to a group of people, whether the audience is small or large, intimidating. Those who get good at it, however, often find it becomes one of the most rewarding parts of their careers. And in any number of campus professions, including admissions and advancement professionals, being a skilled public speaker is a necessity.
In these training sessions, we focus on the psychological and practical techniques that help you grow in skill, confidence, and effectiveness as a public speaker. We help you build around your own strengths to connect with audiences, deliver messages with authenticity, and handle even the most difficult questions with poise.
Designed to be highly interactive, the workshop meets speakers where they are, helps them understand and practice proven tools for success, and empowers participants to best represent their institution and advance their careers.
Customized Workshops
Built to help you meet specific leadership challenges.
In addition to the offerings above, we facilitate workshops tailored to specific institutional or departmental needs, goals, and team dynamics. Sample topics that we have addressed in these sessions include crisis readiness, cost-benefit strategic goal-setting, board-administration alignment, and achieving key outcomes of leadership transitions.
We work closely with you in advance to clarify goals, understand context, and design a session that creates the right conditions to generate worthwhile discussion and actionable plans.
Media Training for Public Influence
Confidence and credibility at the microphone.
Engaging with the news media usually offers high-reward and high-risk opportunities. Get the conversation right, and you can change perceptions and reputations for the better. But the inverse is equally true. The difference often comes through awareness and poise in the moment.
This hands-on workshop prepares institutional leaders, administrators, spokespeople, and faculty for media engagements of every kind. We will help you turn your knowledge and awareness into rhetorical flexibility, handle challenging questions, guide interviews where you want them to go, and improve your readiness to advance your institution’s–and your–reputation and reach.
Participants become better equipped to handle interviews, tough questions, and high-visibility moments with confidence.
Leadership teams don’t need more meetings. They need the right conditions to do their best thinking.
We know the challenges leadership teams face because we’ve lived them ourselves—and we know that in higher education, the stakes can be especially high.
With a focus on each team’s particular goals, we design and guide high-impact workshops for boards, cabinets, and leadership teams across practically every campus portfolio.
We create the conditions for candid discussion, frame outcome-oriented questions, and guide the dialogue that turns candor into alignment and practical action.
Whether the challenge is strategic prioritization, a major announcement, financial or structural change, crisis readiness, or communicating with greater confidence, our workshops build the skills, knowledge, and strategic thinking that lead to meaningful results.
OUR WORKSHOPS AT A GLANCE
Storytelling for Fundraising Success
Turning everyday campus moments into donor-ready narratives. • What: Building actionable skills that activate the why, how, and what of effective fundraising. • Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. • Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising. This workshop helps fundraising officers move beyond anecdotes to telling honest stories built to connect emotionally, clarify the value of investments, and inspire generosity. Having helped educational institutions raise billions of dollars, we build this session around a practical, repeatable approach to storytelling. This includes guiding participants through real examples and showing them how to identify the essential material of a strong fundraising story, structure the narrative for donor audiences, and translate institutional priorities with compelling details. Participants leave with skills and tools they can use immediately in donor meetings, proposals, and campaign communications, along with a deep sense of what makes a story resonate. Why: Strengthen the abilities, knowledge, and confidence of fundraisers and fundraising communicators. Who: For advancement, communications, academic, and administrative personnel engaged in fundraising.
Prioritization for Institutional Effectiveness
What: Teaching our proprietary method for focusing time, talent, and resources on work of greatest strategic value. Why: Empower leaders and teams to make the hard but necessary choices that boost reputation, recruitment, fundraising, and finances. Who: For executives and staff in any administrative unit.
Expedited Strategic Planning
What: Guiding leaders through our customized process for making thorough and strategic institutional decisions in as little as 24-48 hours. Why: Create sound and comprehensive plans efficiently to meet times of rapid change. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Making Difficult Leadership Choices
What: Moderating intensive discussions that help cabinets adjust to hard choices, from budgetary changes to emerging institutional dilemmas. Why: Generate clarity, candor, and decision-making true to an institution's goals. Who: For presidents and cabinets as well as college deans and their executives.
Crisis Prevention and Mitigation
What: Using our comprehensive premortem process to help institutions prevent, mitigate, and handle both predictable and unpredictable crises. Why: Ensure strength in planning and response that protect institutions, communities, and reputations. Who: For boards, cabinets, communications offices, and operational teams.
Maximizing Major Announcements
What: Developing detailed plans that achieve the full potential benefits of major announcements. Why: Deliver the full value of emerging news to institutions. Who: For boards, cabinets, and senior administrative teams.
Media Training for Public Influence
What: Preparing faculty and cabinet members for media engagements. Why: Advance reputations and news reach with deft, confident media skills. Who: For presidents, cabinet members, institutional spokespeople, and faculty.
Faculty Op-ed Training
What: Teaching faculty in small groups the structures, language, and arguments that lead to published op-eds. Why: Expand faculty influence in public dialogue, raise faculty profiles, and boost institutional reputations. Who: For faculty interested in sharing expertise widely and growing as communicators.
Public Speaking & Presence
What: Building confidence, clarity, and presence for every setting, from admissions presentations to donor meetings to faculty forums. Why: Equip institutional representatives with the psychological and professional techniques to speak with poise and handle even the hardest questions. Who: For admissions and advancement leaders, frontline recruiters and fundraisers, and other professionals speaking on the institution’s behalf.
Customized Workshops
What: Delivering workshops tailored to specific goals and team dynamics, covering topics from crisis readiness to board-administration alignment. Why: Meet tough leadership challenges with a program designed to incorporate and address highly specific contexts. Who: For boards, executive teams, or departmental teams.
Looking for a personalized leadership experience?
The Future Sessions offer rare time and space to step back from daily demands, reconnect strategy to purpose, and think clearly about action steps for success.
Looking for a personalized leadership experience?
The Future Sessions offer rare time and space to step back from daily demands, reconnect strategy to purpose, and think clearly about action steps for success.
Looking for a personalized leadership experience?
The Future Sessions offer rare time and space to step back from daily demands, reconnect strategy to purpose, and think clearly about action steps for success.
Looking for a personalized leadership experience?
The Future Sessions offer rare time and space to step back from daily demands, reconnect strategy to purpose, and think clearly about action steps for success.
“I have been part of many excellent programs like this during my career in both higher education and public service, and I found Pete Mackey’s workshop on strategic change management as valuable as any I have encountered.”
— Blake Thompson, President, Mississippi Christian University
“I have been part of many excellent programs during my career in both higher education and public service. I found Mackey Strategies’ customized workshop on strategic change management as valuable as any I have encountered.”
— Blake Thompson, President, Mississippi Christian University
“Pete Mackey led a leadership workshop that spoke directly to our biggest headwinds. His thoughtful, practical approach is helping us navigate the challenges we and so many institutions of higher education face about cost and relevance.”
Bill Heyman
Gettysburg College Trustee
Contact Us
We tailor our services to produce the work that moves your mission forward.
Contact Us
We tailor our services to produce the work that moves your mission forward.
Contact Us
We tailor our services to produce the work that moves your mission forward.
Contact Us
We tailor our services to produce the work that moves your mission forward.
Whether the challenge is strategic prioritization, changing a brand, confronting financial or structural predicaments, or strengthening how teams communicate and lead, our workshops are built to prioritize clarity, confidence, prioritization, and meaningful results.
© 2025 Mackey Strategies. All Rights Reserved.
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© 2025 Mackey Strategies. All Rights Reserved.
Our site uses cookies and similar tools that may connect your activity with your email to deliver relevant communications. To opt out, visit: https://app.retention.com/optout.
© 2025 Mackey Strategies. All Rights Reserved.
Our site uses cookies and similar tools that may connect your activity with your email to deliver relevant communications. To opt out, visit: https://app.retention.com/optout.