The "Brag Sheet"

Every development office in the nation has their key statistics: athlete graduation rates, APR scores, annual funds raised, capital campaign dollars raised. These stats are usually your key selling points when speaking with donors, other athletics department personnel, and colleagues in the industry.

At this year’s NAADD Fundamentals of Development session, Whit Babcock of the University of Missouri spoke about what to do with this information and how to use it to your advantage. In what he referred to as the “Brag Sheet,” Babcock suggested that every department spend time to layout, on one sheet of paper, “what they are good at.” This one page document should be well known (even memorized) by everyone in the department and in an easily accessible location.

This document has several purposes. First, it requires departments to focus on and seek out these key pieces of information.  Knowing these statistics and understanding why they are important to the department is essential when speaking with potential donors. Second, it provides consistency. Often times development officers from the same school could give out inconsistent information and statistics simply because they did not have it set on a Brag Sheet, a universally known an agreed upon document. Finally, the Brag Sheet is a selling tool. The multitude of information that can be displayed and relayed to donors is powerful enough, and if just one piece of information encourages them to make a gift then the tool has proved its worth.

The Brag Sheet is a simple concept, but a powerful driver of consistency and knowledge within an athletics department. After hearing so many of the industries leaders reference their Brag Sheet during the informational sessions at the convention, it seems clear that every development department around the country should look into developing their own version. Just remember, this document is constantly changing and should be revised frequently to have the greatest impact.