Photo by David Ellis
Director of Events and Conferences, Augsburg College
By Paul Nolan
In retrospect, it seems inevitable that when Jodi Collen left her events coordinator position at Augsburg College in 2006 for the corporate world of Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, she would one day return to campus. She just didn’t realize that day would come so soon.
Collen, 30, a high-powered and efficient events specialist, helped her former Augsburg colleague David Warch develop the model for a completely rebuilt, three-person events staff last spring, and only then realized that she had created the job that would entice her back to the liberal arts institution that sits snugly off of Riverside Avenue and Interstate 94 in the heart of Minneapolis.
“They were starting from scratch. I gave them the plan, which was similar to something I had tried to accomplish [during her first stint at Augsburg from 2002 to 2006]. When they told me they were going to follow it, I realized I was interested in the position,” Collen says.
The position is director of events and conferences, and her first day back at Augsburg was June 23, which happened to be commencement day for weekend and evening students. “Trial by fire,” Collen says, but the smile on her face reveals she wouldn’t have it any other way.
Warch, the school’s assistant vice president of marketing and communications, stands by his claim that he called on Collen earlier this year purely for advice. The school was shifting its Events and Conferences Department away from the Finance and Administration Department and aligning it instead with Marketing and Institutional Advancement, a move that both he and Collen had endorsed a couple of years earlier.
“I wanted the department to be more than just an order taker,” Warch says. “Jodi was a star when she was here before who just didn’t happen to be in a leadership position. I wanted her thoughts on what it would take to bring events to a new level at Augsburg.”
She drafted the complete plan for a new three-person department and things just fell into place from there.
“I had an intimate knowledge of how the campus functioned and an awareness of the institutional needs from an events perspective. I knew where we’d need support and I used a lot of the processes that I had learned at Thrivent,” Collen says.
“It was a well-thought-out proposal,” Warch says. “I knew she could take this opportunity and run with it.” And so an offer was made.
Despite her love for campus life, Collen says it wasn’t an easy decision to leave Thrivent, where she served as senior event planner. “There are things about Thrivent that I really liked. I had the opportunity to help drive drastic change there, and I didn’t want the people to feel that I was jumping ship.”
But the opportunity to lead the department that she essentially designed proved to be too enticing to pass up. Collen hired an events and conferences coordinator at the end of the summer and the remaining position—an event operations coordinator—was expected to be filled by early fall.
The Events and Conferences Department stages all of the events that occur on campus. Three-fourths of these involve school groups, including alumni and other potential donors, and the remaining one-fourth are groups not connected to the college.
“We talk a lot about reinforcing ‘Brand Augsburg,’” Collen says. “There is a uniformity to infusing the college’s brand that should be part of everything we touch.”
She speaks enthusiastically about having her team meet regularly with the school’s marketing team to bounce ideas around. (Collen majored in marketing at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, and completed her master’s of tourism administration from George Washington University in 2004.)
“We’re very strategic about what we’re doing. We’re creating objectives and thinking clearly about the end result as opposed to what’s easy or how we’ve always done it,” she says. “My fondest memories of college were the events that I attended and it’s amazing that I get to play a role in making those memories for these students.”
As if the demands of running this new department aren’t enough, Collen continues to be a significant figure on the local and national level in the International Special Events Society (ISES), an industry association that promotes continuing education and serves as a networking outlet for event planners around the world.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter of ISES was founded in 1998. Collen has served on a slew of the local chapter’s committees and was its president in 2005-2006, which happens to be the year that the Minneapolis-St. Paul chapter was named the International Chapter of the Year. She currently serves as vice president of the ISES International Midwest Regional Chapter, which oversees seven Midwest chapters. And in August she spoke at the annual ISES Eventworld gathering in Montreal.
Collen credits ISES for allowing her career to blossom and continuously invigorating to push herself. In 2003, the ISES international conference was held in Minneapolis and as a result of unforeseen circumstances, Collen found herself (with little advance warning) in charge of staging the conference’s welcoming party. Following the event’s seasonal theme, she planned a Spring Break celebration that involved turning Peavey Plaza into a beach (complete with trucked-in sand) and transformed Orchestra Hall into a swanky,
Cancun-style nightclub.
“It launched my career,” she says now. “It was a confidence-builder. I had the support of a great group of like-minded people.” Those same people flooded her e-mail box with messages of concern when this summer’s I-35 bridge collapse made worldwide news. “I’ve made friends from all over the world,” she says. “It’s humbling to discover that in a situation like that.”
Collen says she made sure that her commitment to ISES wouldn’t be a sticking point for her new supervisors at Augsburg. She hopes to eventually serve on the association’s board of governors. “I was upfront with them that they needed to support my ISES commitment. It makes me the employee that I am.”
Warch says he’s happy if she’s happy. “Anything that gets her energized is beneficial for the college.” And with Collen, just about anything is liable to get her energized.
