At a recent EPIIC PI meeting, a question surfaced that many awardees are working through: As industry, school, and community partners multiply, how do you keep track of who's who — and how deep each relationship runs? It’s a shared challenge. Several projects have run into the same trap — informal partnerships that tend to fade once the initial energy dies down or communication lapses. The remedy, most agree, is a deliberate system for defining, sorting, and tracking relationships. However, what that system looks like varies widely.
Levels of Engagement
For Andrea Welker, Dean of the School of Engineering at The College of New Jersey, the answer is a five-level framework adapted from the Network of Academic Corporate Relations Officers (NACRO). This framework tracks a relationship from prospect to strategic partner based on the depth and consistency of engagement. Early phases include career fairs, campus interviews, one-off research projects, advisory-council service and ad hoc internships. More developed relationships involve mentoring, recurring internships, sponsorships, research support, scholarships and equipment donations. At the highest level, engagement can include major gifts, named spaces or positions, institutional MOUs, joint appointments and collaboration on external grants.
“This is how we define levels of engagement,” says Welker. NACRO has since pared its own model down to three tiers, but TCNJ prefers the fuller version. Once a year, Welker takes stock: “I look at all of the partnerships we have and decide what activities they have done to determine which level they are.” Her EPIIC project also involves creating boilerplate documents to define partnerships consistently. The framework itself isn’t the hard part. “The biggest hurdle has been our internal processes for Memoranda of Understanding,” she notes. “It takes forever.”
Sorting by Type
Rhonda Glover, Ecosystem Manager at Houston City College and part of the SPECIAL EPIIC project, sorts partners differently — by type rather than depth. “I don’t divide it up ... because everyone enters an agreement with us,” she explains. Her three working categories: industry partners hiring interns, schools receiving AI education, and collaborators who co-host events. “Those are just the three main sections for now, because everybody I’ve met sort of falls into that range so far.” Every Friday, Glover emails a spreadsheet snapshot to a core group of about 10 decision-makers so that nothing slips through the cracks.