This session focuses on ChatGPT and the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the field of university corporate and foundation relations. We will explore the advantages and ethical considerations of AI in our work. Attendees will gain practical tips for leveraging AI to streamline the donor relations process and increase engagement with corporate and foundation partners. We will also discuss how to ensure ethical AI practices such as data privacy, transparency, and accountability. Finally, we will provide examples of successful ChatGPT implementations and use cases. Presenter’s note: this was written by ChatGPT. Did it pass the Turing test? Can you? Join this session for an interactive demo where we will pit human development professionals (maybe you?) against AI to test the differences.

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.

In recent years, data published by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that up to 50% of academic scientists will drop out of science within five years of PhD completion. Alongside the difficulty of transitioning to the private sector, this trend is driven by a growing concentration of resources amongst faculty scientists. So what can be done to avoid a dramatic shortening of scientific careers?

In 2018, Momental Foundation launched the Mistletoe Research Fellowship (MRF), an umbrella initiative combining two programs that radically invest in improved career outcomes for early career scientists (primarily postdocs). Each Mistletoe Research Fellow receives our Unfettered Research Grant, a $10,000 unrestricted funding award that encourages independent research, and innovation, even serendipity and risk, in their scientific exploration. The grant is combined with parallel participation in an extracurricular training opportunity - our MRF Startup Collaboration program. In this completely remote program, each Fellow joins a small interdisciplinary inter-institutional team that collaborates with a frontier technology startup building a hardware product with humanitarian potential (think portable infant incubators for refugee camps, 3D printed affordable housing, and drones that fight wildfires!). Participating startups are selected by the foundation through a competitive screening process. Guided by the Momental Foundation's Online Learning Community and unique curriculum, Research Fellows build critical skills in project management, scientific communication, and interdisciplinary teamwork. Today, the Momental Foundation works with thirteen R1 university partners and has graduated over 120 Mistletoe Research Fellows. Our most recent cohort of 32 fellows was selected from a pool of 430 applications. In this session, we will first describe the MRF initiative and explore the outcomes of these programs, including career outcomes and increased funding to these early career scientists. Second, we will discuss the unique contracting structures, including intellectual property considerations, that allow for this radical approach.

Have you ever tried mapping out the engagement of a corporation across your university? Have you looked foolish in front of your corporate prospect because you were unaware of their current engagement with your university? Are you building a new corporate relations team or corporate portfolio? Our presentation will help you build an effective corporate engagement matrix, mapping out where and how corporations are currently engaging your university. This session will provide a roadmap to discover what holistic corporate engagement means for your university, how to capture it, and how that data can be utilized to create forward-thinking partnerships. I

The Women’s Philanthropy Institute, in the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, has conducted dozens of studies examining how and why women and men give. Individually, as well as in the aggregate, the research affirms that gender matters in philanthropy. With the personal wealth of women rising, and women playing major roles in shaping the future direction of the economic, social, and political arenas – not only as individual philanthropists but also as decisionmakers for corporate and foundation programs - the power and potential of women philanthropists is exponential. Join Jeannie Sager, Director, and Dianne Bailey, Council Chair, of the Women’s Philanthropy Institute as we seek to better understand where, how, and why women and men give differently and how you can use the research to enhance and inform generosity.

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.