Are they your alumni, or ours? Is their gift in support of athletics or the university as a whole? Is that an athletic event or an alumni event? Managing partnerships across campus that impact the alumni experience are tricky at best. Understanding the relationships that student athletes have with their coaches, teammates, and through their affinities are the foundation to their future relationship with the institution and with the institution's teams. We will explore the different approaches to managing these relationships while they are students and will help to identify how to steward them as volunteers, donors, and engage them as alumni. As potentially your most engaged alumni population, this session will highlight the wins and losses when both advancement and athletics don't have a clear playbook for athletic alumni in their portfolio.

Break out of the silos and join us for "Stronger Together: Uniting Alumni Relations & Annual Giving for Enhanced Engagement," a session focused on maximizing the impact of collaboration between alumni relations and annual giving. Explore successful initiatives like our annual day of giving, reunion program, student and young alumni engagement, integrated communication strategies through e-newsletters and new websites, and the power of personalized outreach driven by data. Discover how leveraging alumni networks and fostering a culture of philanthropy deepen engagement, and learn how metrics and key performance indicators can help measure and refine these strategies. Gain actionable insights into creating a cohesive and dynamic alumni experience that drives both involvement and support.

This session will look at how to apply in house engagement scoring, wealth screening data and other internal information to help create projections that identify gaps in fundraising opportunities. It will also examine how this data can be applied to assess current fundraising staff against projections.

From launch to close, learn how the MIT Resource Development design team approached branding, marketing, digital, events, and thanking donors with memorable experiences, collateral, and gifts during MIT's recent capital campaign, and take home ideas you can leverage for any campaign, whatever your role.

Data storytelling is one of the best ways to empower your organization’s donors to understand the impact of their philanthropy. Join Lynne as she explores effective writing and communication techniques that artfully blend storytelling and data that resonates with your readers and moves them to action. She will cover fundamentals and samples of data storytelling and visualization so that you too can deliver key messages that matter to your donors in a clear, concise, and meaningful manner. Learn how to turn your data into stories and modernize your communications.

The #1 way to ensure your institution's success & your future success as a fundraiser is ambitious, consistent discovery now. But discovery is one of the hardest parts of fundraising! When you're getting in the door with amazing new potential donors, discovery can feel like an adventure. When you're slogging through names in your database and getting zero responses, discovery can feel overwhelming and oppressive. Join this session for tactical discovery tips from sending better emails to cold calling to turning the conversation to money in that first visit.

Babson College prioritizes the importance of affinity groups in our alumni engagement and annual giving. This workshop will focus on Babson’s career and identity-based affinity groups: identifying alumni volunteer partners, the role of passive programming, and how Babson leverages milestone anniversaries to engage alumni.

No, viral dances were not performed to garner views and followers. Learn how harnessing the power of the individuals consuming your content can be transformative for your pages. Impactful organic and authentic content doesn’t need to be overthought. It’s time to lean on those who are consuming as much content as your social media managers. Hidden skill and talent can be found among your institution, and it will cost your department nearly nothing — well, perhaps just the cost of a mini mic.