Learn how to break away from the routine and reshape the way you think about work. With the simple implementation of some proven strategies and techniques, you can increase your productivity, elevate your impact and promote self-accountability while building trust and confidence within your team, division, and the broader community. Organize yourself and your team to be the best versions of yourselves.

Nothing about Annual Giving is simple in the modern area. Do you have an idea for a campaign or a strategy? Are you struggling with an aspect of Annual Giving? Or just looking to steal good ideas from peers?

Join the experts that have grown and built Annual Giving programs to engage in fun conversations around your topics! You bring the ideas we will brainstorm approaches as a group to tackle those ideas. What's that crazy idea you have been thinking about that you want to dig into with your peers?

This session will focus on Berry College, a liberal arts college of 2,000 undergraduate students. Overall, college enrollment dropped 1% at four-year nonprofit colleges over the last two years. Berry College increased enrollment during this time by 12% after implementation of a brand campaign. Formative work on the campaign began in 2017, with campaign roll-out beginning in 2019 using the four value pillars of campus life, mentorship, student work, and preparing students for life after college. Objectives of the campaign aimed to increase prospective parent and student awareness of the college, and to increase the number and diversity of students.

Hear from two universities that implemented a new strategy for increasing leadership annual gifts and major gifts. Donor Experience Officers manage portfolios of 1,000 prospects they primarily engage with digitally. They are responsibly for highly personal outreach to 50+ prospects every day. Western Kentucky University and the University of Memphis launched their DXO programs a couple of years apart and have implemented in ways both similar and different. Hear from staff at every level of the program - VPs, a program manager, and a practicing DXO about the program and the results.

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.

We created an aggregation of different dashboards that get delivered to the development officers by email with analytics, reminders and highlights of areas needing attention related to their assigned prospects. This dashboard provides the DO with key information so they can be proactive and take actions based on the items displayed. For example, birthdays, pledges due soon, pledges past due, recent write offs, gift from their prospects coming from any source online, an event, etc.), actions entered to someone in their portfolio by another development officer, prospects attendance or registration to an event. Details on prospects in the solicitation stage.

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.

Today donors want to give with a single click of a button. Annual Giving teams are working to meet donors where they are. As such gift processing teams find themselves supporting several giving avenues across various platforms including traditional donation pages, social media, gaming systems, and much more. Plus they must be able to accept the traditional gift and the new age gift, from checks to cryptocurrency. What impact does this have on a Gift Processing team? How can you support your giving teams and donors but still keep high rates of efficiency?

To ensure successful branding of an institution, capital campaign, recruitment initiative or athletics program, a strategic message, followed by relevant positioning, must be developed first. This vital step is called brand development. It’s the deep, strategic pre-work and planning often missed by educators and leadership—an inside-out process of discovering who you are, what’s different and why stakeholders should care. Such work should begin with the President or Head of School, not with communications and marketing, which is an outside-in approach. Brand development also considers the hidden aspects to make any initiative wildly effective—virtually eliminating the costliest pain points.