Before arriving for the Institute, delegates will be divided into tutorial groups, each led by a faculty member. These small group meetings are sprinkled throughout the Institute and will serve as touch points to ensure you’re getting what you need out of each of the sessions and the Institute as a whole. These tutorial groups are also an excellent opportunity to share challenges you're currently facing in Alumni Relations and learn from group members how you can address these.

Creating and communicating a strategy for your alumni relations activity is more important than ever. A successful Alumni Relations operation should be tied into the institution's larger goals, and be tangible, measurable, collaborative and ultimately, worth investing in. We'll demystify strategy and show how it can link to institutional mission and values. This session will explore how best to arrive at a strategy: what the components might be, how it lives alongside other institutional partners, how it is communicated and ultimately how it is measured. Participants are encouraged to bring copies of their institution's wider strategic plans as well as their Alumni Relations strategic plans (if they have them).

Continued discussion on challenges currently facing participants.

Comms is the bloodstream of all alumni engagement. There's no event, fundraising campaign or call for volunteers without communications. How well you manage your comms will greatly affect the success of your overall alumni work. In this session, we will look at concrete examples and explore some key questions, including: How do you define your communication goals and align them with your alumni strategy and institutional goals? How do you craft effective, targeted messages for different segments of the alumni community? How do you effectively engage your key stakeholders and maximize your resources? How do you measure the effectiveness of your comms?

Events have always been, and continue to be, a core staple of any successful alumni and supporter engagement programme. However, events have changed forever. Traditional programming has been interrupted by the global pandemic and new and innovative ways of delivery have been learned and embedded. In this session we will discuss events as a fundamental tool for engaging your alumni community. We will cover some of the key elements of an events programme including strategy and design, delivery: virtual vs hybrid vs face-to-face and the use of technology, analysis: measuring success and also how to both gain support from key internal stakeholders and partners and the role of the events manager. We’ll also look at a few case studies of different institutions and how they’ve used events to bring alumni together.