This session will look at the changing face of the student experience as we move from in-person to more blended approaches and its effect on affinity, pride, and connection for those students when they become alumni. As alumni were somewhat disconnected from institutions physical environments – how do we strengthen their connection with this in mind?

Alumni relations and fundraising are universal. It may take different forms and it will be constantly evolving, but they are common to all cultures.

Culture is real. Navigating your way through different cultures is complex and challenging. Yet, cultural literacy is a must-have not a nice-to-have. You will be a better person – as an individual, as a member of your community and as a professional, if you develop your cultural literacy.

This session will focus on cultural competence with the emphasis on cultural intelligence and understanding bias, looking at these through the lens of advancement. Flo and Maarten will address questions such as: how to be an active, attentive and authentic listener; starting with curiosity and humility, understand and be comfortable with your own culture; use it as the platform to understand others. The session will be a presentation liberally interspersed with a mix of video and real-life examples from the speakers and an invitation to all participants to share theirs.

Join Blackbaud’s customer success managers, David Upcraft and Rebecca Williams, for a session packed with insights and best practices to help your institution better leverage technology and data to achieve core business outcomes. They’ll share advancement trends and innovations for identifying and stewarding key influencers, embedding integrated supporter journeys, harnessing rich data from across the institution, engaging new audiences and networks, and ultimately growing your philanthropic income – backed by practical examples from other universities.

Taking a collaborative approach can add tremendous value to alumni relations and development - whether that collaboration is between the two functions, or with the wider institution. This session will explore collaboration ‘best practice’ from MTU Munster Technological University and from the University of Oxford.

Developing capacity across the University is key to delivering an alumni engagement programme.  Whether you have a one, two or 10-person alumni function, you are eventually going to run out of capacity to support the tens of thousands of alumni, unless you collaborate. 

Glynis Gardiner from MTU Munster Technological University will share how she developed alumni engagement programmes by collaborating with colleagues and units across the university. The initiatives and programmes that were developed will be discussed and the impact of these programmes will be shared. 

From an advancement perspective, the move to online events and engagement over the past 18 months has brought many challenges, but has also created unprecedented opportunities to connect with our alumni audiences. How can we ensure we are making the most of these?

Reflecting on her experience of joining Oxford's Department of Physics six days before the start of lockdown, Lisa Willmot will share how she leveraged its alumni relations programme to create space to talk about development - across major gifts, legacies and individual giving. She will explore how, by connecting different teams and activities across the department and wider University, an alumni relations programme which traditionally has never had advancement as part of its remit can be adapted to create opportunities for philanthropic gifts.

How inclusive are your alumni activities? Do they reflect the diversity of your alumni and student communities and succeed in holding up positive role models who can inspire and encourage others - particularly those from marginalised groups? These were the questions we set out to answer in our own review of alumni relations activities at Bournemouth University in early 2020. Prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign and a growing understanding of the importance of diversity in all its forms, we analysed our communications, campaigns and volunteering and set out to make positive changes. Join this session to hear about our journey to deliver a more inclusive alumni relations service, including practical tips and insights into lessons learnt along the way.

For the first 50 days of 2021, Durham alumni, family and friends set out to test their fitness, hang on to those New Year's resolutions, and come together in the name of health and wellbeing in a way, unlike anything we’ve ever done before. As a community, we rekindled our motivation, inspired one another, smashed goals and personal records, lost weight, had a little break in our lockdown routines, and worked out with our Durham friends around the world.

The global pandemic affected us all substantially and our events programmes especially. However, it also created opportunities for better engagement and more impact.

During this session Ieva Ose and Tom Blansjaar will share their experiences on events before the pandemic, the opportunities which were created during the pandemic, and also what benefits have presented themselves for the future of our events.

Ieva will share her best practice and success story – an alumni event “RTU Grand Graduation” for more than 9k participants, how that was created and then modified due to pandemic situation. While Tom will talk about online event opportunities and how these later strengthened his post-COVID / hybridevents models for the future.

During this session you’ll see real examples and learnings from delivering alumni events which we hope you will be able to take away and inject into your own events management processes.

We’ll also look to find answers to questions around: ‘whether online events deliver the same kind of value to in person events’; and, ‘how to deliver value in today’s challenging events environment’.

Also during the session you’ll have an opportunity to share your experience and best practices with each other, as well as have an ongoing discussion about the future of events after the pandemic.

NMITE is taking a radical approach to their recruitment ensuring inclusivity and diversity in engineering education, attracting more than 50% of women to study with them. A dynamic leadership team, a unique fundraising case for support and the crucial role of donors, they have all the elements to build a successful engagement and fundraising environment. President Elena Rodriguez Falcon is passionate about ensuring diversity and inclusion alongside a desire to create a strong culture of philanthropy, with their pioneer cohort partially funded through philanthropy. They are actively engaging with female business leaders and philanthropists as mentors, ambassadors, and donors. Learn from two inspiring leaders seeking to ensure the diversity of their inaugural cohort and their donors, while forging a new model of Engineering Education.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced UCL to completely re-think its strategy for engaging the graduating class of 2020 and 2021. With physical graduation ceremonies on hold and finalists facing huge concerns about the graduate labour market, the Alumni Relations team sought to implement a new virtual programme that aimed to recognise the immense achievements of our students, aid their transition into employment, and lay the foundations of a long-term relationship with UCL. This session will explore the many facets of the new graduate welcome campaign, which brought together an all-star video and advice mosaic with highly segmented communications and a dedicated professional development offer, and ultimately resulted in an engagement level equivalent to that of pre-pandemic communications.

Campus closures, cancelled programmes and careful messaging just to name a few C words…We’re going to look at how ‘the big disruptor’ changed the way we look at alumni volunteering programmes and how it has very quickly modernised the way we run our programmes.

We will take you on our journey, discussing the biggest challenges we’ve faced, our biggest wins and how what we’ve learned will shape the new normal of Manchester’s alumni volunteering programmes.

After hearing about our journey, we will invite the audience to join small groups to share your stories and how your institutions have changed for the better.