How can we empower faculty to meaningfully participate in the grant process? As a small team in a large university, how can we maximize support for all campus partners while remaining true to the core mission and priorities of our institutions? "Assembling Your Toolkit" will explore the power of resource-building throughout the grant lifecycle, from concept development to post-award and beyond, as well as strategies for managing internal stakeholders with multiple priorities. In the first half of this session, presenters will share their own experiences for managing stakeholders across their institutions, while the second half is designed to be a generative, interactive Q&A where audience members will be invited to raise their own questions and encouraged to brainstorm and share their own strategies for addressing the challenges and opportunities we face in working with internal stakeholders.

Esports/E-gaming has caught fire on Universities across the country and offering competitive space for student gamers has nearly become a “requirement.” Hear from UT Austin and Dell/Alienware leaders on how they collaborated to open UT’s first dedicated Esports space for students over the summer of 2022 and lessons learned along the way. Today, the Alienware Longhorn Esports Lounge is one of the most notable student spaces on campus, giving the Longhorn Gaming team a home, offering highest-end technology for UT’s Game Design and Development Department to teach in, and fostering a tangible bridge between industry and UT.

Want to learn how to identify “big ideas,” maximize funding impact, and accelerate change with the right partners? This panel session, featuring the Medical University of South Carolina’s Office of Corporate and Foundation Relations, The Duke Endowment, and CaroNova, uses real-life examples to illustrate how “big ideas” can be created, amplified and accelerated through academic, foundation, and non-profit partnerships. What are funders looking for in big ideas? And how can CFR professionals and academic leaders attract foundations and non-profits as acceleration and innovating partners? Participants will learn how to take an initial funding concept from idea to execution and develop their own action plan for engaging the right partners and funders. Featuring an interactive Q&A, this session incorporates group brainstorming and strategy development with the goal of increasing funding potential for innovative models.

University-based projects have been finalists and awardees in recent competitions for large grants. What was their experience before, during and after the competition? Would they do it again? We will hear the perspective of a development officer, principal investigators, and the CEO of Lever for Change which manages competitions for individual and institutional donors.

Launched in 2022 with philanthropic gifts of $8 million-plus, IU Health’s Mosaic Center for Work, Life, and Learning offers a “mosaic” of individualized and intensive services to help individuals chart pathways to meaningful careers. This innovative approach to healthcare workforce development required going beyond the usual community partners to identify collaborators who contributed different specialties and attracted a diverse pool of funders. Learn how this work involved IU Health Foundation’s grants team and community partners focused on housing, financial literacy, education, substance abuse recovery and more, plus IU Health departments including Human Resources and Government Affairs. This session will focus on best practices in complex collaboration, with recorded testimonials from partners in Government Affairs, Workforce Development and Training, and the Director of the Mosaic Center.

Selecting candidates for limited submission opportunities presents a unique opportunity for Foundation Relations officers to cultivate strong relationships with prospective funders, organizational leadership, and faculty of all career levels. In this session, we will discuss how to develop and implement best practices into your organization’s limited submission program to maximize your team’s value-add in the quest to nominate the most competitive applicants and ultimately increase revenue.

Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) have not prioritized developing equitable and effective long-lasting partnerships with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), instead “partnering” when convenient and seeing HBCUs primarily as providing access to underrepresented students. Taking a holistic approach by involving faculty, staff, and students at both institutions, as well as corporate and foundation partners, Virginia Tech and Virginia State University are laying the groundwork for a truly equitable partnership designed to improve resources at the HBCU, form peer-level partnerships, increase opportunity for underrepresented students, and increase diversity in the workforce.

It isn’t always clear which team should manage certain gifts or which team is credited for securing them. The world of corporations and foundations is not cut and dried. Ann, senior director of the Voluntary Support of Education (VSE) and the Alumni Engagement surveys at CASE, and Jonelle, executive director of foundation relations at the University of Texas at Austin, will explore examples of transactions in which the path and category of a gift is not crystal clear. Ann will bring the data, and Jonelle will bring her extensive experience. There will be opportunities for audience participation via interactive polling.

Our work as CFR officers is often most visible at the level of the transaction, and perhaps too often how we are measured. There is some underlying truth in the notion that the more letters of inquiry, proposals, grant agreements, and master agreements we produce, the more money we will raise for our institutions. However, most CFR officers understand that our work is deeply relational—even if we also know that our work should probably not share the metrics associated with fundraising success for individual gift officers (e.g., number of visits). CFR work is a complicated dance of meeting the guidelines and transactional rules of various foundations and corporations while simultaneously assessing and appreciating the human element within those organizations to deepen and broaden those relationships. In our work, we build relationships not just with executives, program officers, and grant administrators but also with faculty and institutional leaders. This relationship building work is especially important during fundraising campaigns. This session will begin with a case study of how one institution built strong relationships with foundation and corporate partners, ultimately resulting in deep engagement during a campaign while not losing site of their identity and vision to “serve a philanthropic agenda”. We will also look at how to manage institutional leaders’ expectations around giving to campaigns from corporations and foundations, and we will talk about the importance of “educating up” and building relationships internally with leadership, deans, chairs, and faculty.

Your institution likely has many amazing faculty, staff, and impactful programs with a spectrum of fundraising experience. In this session, you will learn to harness these talents and empower your campus partners to think beyond budget deficit fundraising to develop an exciting philanthropic vision. You will build skills to coach campus partners to work with corporate and foundation funders toward co-creating fundable projects and learn how to identify ideas with potential and build innovative concepts.