The work of Advancement teams is ever-changing to meet the needs of those we seek to engage with our institutions – and the needs of our institutions themselves. How can you diagnose when a change to a process, a role or a function is needed and collaborate across your team and institution to deliver it? Fran Sponsler, Executive Director of Proposition Development and Campaign at London Business School will share a case study on how to approach change management based on the lessons learned from setting up a new proposition development function over the last year.

Join this workshop to explore and try design thinking tools for solving real challenges. A theme coming out of the last conference, was a shared struggle with helping internal clients to ask better questions and engage effectively with your data. We'll tackle this together, using design thinking to generate fresh solutions. Interactive, practical, and designed for real impact!

Back in Autumn of 2019., Kings, Warwick and Southampton explored working together to design and implement a MS Dynamics CRM solution. They have been sharing their stories with the conference since that time. Kings proceeded with the MS Dynamics project, whilst Southampton and Warwick decided to implement BB CRM. Now will all three universities having completed their migrations, in this final chapter of the story, Jennie Moule, will explore with Jenny, Andrea and Dan what they have learnt along the way.

Durham University's gift submission process previously involved an email sent from fundraisers, with subsequent conversations seeking and/or clarifying information. This session covers our journey of building a process within Microsoft 365 that captures all information upfront and has made gift administration at Durham more efficient, collaborative, and transparent.

Participants will explore how to ensure your culture and processes are optimised for campaign. Through the University of Warwick examples attendees will be guided through critical process's that ensure readiness and alignment with goals. You will gain insight and tools to bring your teams on a journey to Campaign readiness. Intermediate Level CASE Career level: 3 - 4

We recently launched our first philanthropic campaign. In this session we will share how we prepared for a successful campaign launch event. We will cover what worked, what didn’t work and how we will do it differently next time. We will discuss data segmentation, data quality, sourcing a diverse range of known and new invitees, planning for and producing the event briefing, and working with teams across the office in a high pressure situation.

We are delighted to present a panel session of (relatively) new managers who will share their experiences of stepping up into roles with management responsibility. What have they learnt? What did they wish they’d known beforehand? What advice would they give to others who are looking to progress in their career? This session will give those who are new to management or who would like move into a management role an insight in to what it’s really like!

In July 2023, the University of Manchester lost access to its fundraising and engagement database following a cyber incident. The database returned in March 2024. This session will cover how we reacted in, responded to, and recovered from a business continuity environment to keep our fundraising, engagement and volunteering programmes going.