Culture can be an afterthought in advancement. We hire mission-driven, self-motivated fundraisers for autonomous, competitive jobs and expect them to buy into our existing culture. Yet, in a post-pandemic workforce, culture matters more than ever. To attract, grow and retain top performers, we must build and rebuild a powerful, sticky culture. In this session, you'll learn how and why to foster trust, belonging and celebration to create a magnetic culture where top performers want to stay.

Driving cultural transformation is not for the faint of heart. Developing a workforce that is committed to a set of core values who embrace vulnerability, open feedback, and accountability takes perseverance and passion to achieve your long-term goals. Join this lively conversation to learn how you too can create a paradigm shift in your organization to get back to the basics of a supportive and empowered team who achieve remarkable results

Despite the many benefits diverse voices and backgrounds bring to fundraising teams, universities often struggle finding talent that reflects the communities they serve. While leaders believe it’s critical to encourage diverse, young voices to become advancement professionals, they do not always know the best ways to recruit, retain, or evaluate employees whose lived experiences are different from their own. This session offers a blueprint to cultivate homegrown fundraising talent through fellows’ programs and apprenticeships and provides first-hand advice from young fundraisers on what works and what doesn’t to help them want to join and stay on your advancement team.

The Ask should be a creative experience and journey. We, as fundraisers, are representatives, advocates, researchers, storytellers, guides and connectors who navigate and help shape, mold a sandbox of options for a donor. Preparation and practice as a listener and creative partner, with your organization's priorities in mind, will allow you to a provide be a compass for a conversation about support. This also helps with an approachable and enjoyable solicitation experience. Participants will review the elements of an ask and explore an approach to acknowledge and build as a portion of fundraising through discussions and exercises.

As fundraisers, we are on the precipice of the largest transfer of wealth in human history, with Baby Boomers accumulating over $35,000,000,000,000 in wealth that will be distributed over the coming years. As this population ages, the chances of cognitive impairment, such as Alzheimer's Disease or dementia, in donors also increases, which can create ethical and legal issues for fundraisers. Are you prepared to handle this inevitable scenario? This session will teach attendees about the prevalence of cognitive impairment in donor populations and present strategies on how best to handle these situations through an ethical and legal lens of best practices.

Making it easier for donors to give may just be the most effective strategy in the savvy fundraiser’s toolkit—and we’ve got the conversion metrics (and science!) to prove it. In this session, we’ll show you how applying classic principles of persuasion science to your everyday fundraising challenges can dramatically improve donor engagement and move the needle on dollars raised. Using the Fogg Behavior Model as a framework for understanding donor motivation and ability, Birmingham-Southern College and GiveCampus will share how their partnership, and a few simple strategies, have achieved impressive real-world results.