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Meet NACRO Member: Mauricio ValenciaMauricio Valencia

December 12, 2022

1. Can you tell us about your career in corporate relations?

I’ve been the director of corporate relations at Stanford Engineering for the last eight years. I came to this role after a couple of decades in marketing and business development for high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. I can honestly say that these last eight years have been the most fun and invigorating of my career. The feeling that I am a peg in a wheel whose mission is to make the world a better place is humbling and gratifying.

2. Think about some of your successes at work this year. Can you share one or two of your biggest wins from the past year?

Over the last few years, with help from many, I implemented a Tableau-driven system to track corporate giving throughout Stanford, including gifts, sponsored research, and affiliate program memberships. We use Tableau to combine three databases with different naming conventions into one easily quarriable system. Looking up a corporation’s prior activity with Stanford, a process that could take a couple of hours is now done in a few minutes.

3. What advice would you give to your fellow corporate relations professionals to be successful in this role?

Get to know your faculty. The more you know about your faculty’s interests and ability to deal with the corporate world, the more effective you’ll align corporate research interests with them, and the more successful the collaboration will be. 

4. How long have you been a NACRO member, and why did you decide to become a member?  

I joined NACRO during the pandemic and attended the conference in Minneapolis last summer. It was a great experience to meet so many wonderful colleagues with shared interests, providing numerous learning opportunities.  I joined the Benchmarking committee and look forward to the work there.

5. What’s something about you (a fun fact) that not many people know?

As a young boy scout in Colombia, during a camping trip, my troop found a large snake, killed it and had it for dinner. The taste wasn’t that bad (it tasted like chicken), but I have been afraid of snakes since then.