Today’s ever-changing landscape in Advancement can affect team success—especially when your teams are small. Balancing increased expectations and limited resources requires skillful juggling to keep programs on an upward trajectory. Join Lipscomb University’s Stephanie Carroll, assistant vice president for annual giving, alumni and parent engagement, and Rhonda Minton, director of strategic communications for advancement, to learn how they have revamped their work and maximized productivity to better position their teams for success. Flying solo or have fewer than five staff members? Join us for a discussion and leave with some ideas to help your small shop reach big potential.

This session will highlight how segmenting data can lead to identifying fundraising strategies that target current and potential donors based on demographics.

In today's ever evolving tax landscape it is important to understand how to properly assess gifts and pledges with appropriate tax implications for gift acceptance and gift processing standards. We will navigate through the matrix of rules that are set for gifts-in-kind, cryptocurrency and other complex donations. We will also explore IRS requirements as well as ethical questions that can arise in the acceptance and processing of gifts and pledges. We will discuss how to handle tax questions while maintaining ethical and common-sense practices that ensure accurate processing for the IRS and your auditors.

Are you looking for innovative ways to engage alumni across the country? Do you want to instill a culture of philanthropy amongst regional alumni volunteers? Join us for an interactive workshop to gain insights from your peers and develop your own practical plan based on guidance from the University of Miami’s best practices and learnings. The University of Miami will share practical ways to strengthen your regional alumni club structure, offer supportive tools and resources to your regional volunteers, and build a thriving alumni network. Learn from our findings with the rollout of our regional ’Canes Community model and how the University of Miami helped their regional communities adjust their focus, align with national volunteers and institutional priorities, and promote a culture of philanthropy for the university.

Data Governance - Why is it so difficult? Learn about the processes, teams, and structures you can leverage to build a culture and organization that enhances and protects the currency of advancement operations - data. If you're trying to: build data literacy, enhance data management, or learn how others have addressed these challenges - this session is for you!

Dr Carter conducted a qualitative collective case study that aimed to explore attitudes and perceptions of alumni engagement. She spoke with baby boomers and millennials to determine: characteristics of alumni by giving level; relationship between involvement as a student and engagement as an alum; perceptions toward giving to the alma mater and toward charitable giving in general; and relationship between recencey of graduation and alumni engagement. In this session, she will present the six themes that emerged in her research and how those can benefit your alumni giving and engagement efforts.

Learn how UCF rebranded and refocused pipeline meetings from reporting and clean up to identifying untapped potential and increasing solicitations. This session will highlight the journey Prospect Development took to benchmark and reformat pipeline meetings to Unit Potential Power Hour Sessions. Hear from the Assistant Director of Prospect Management and the Executive Director for Advancement, College of Engineering and Computer Science on how this new approach has positively impacted the perception of pipeline meetings and major gift fundraising.

Ensuring that your alumni leaders are provided the tools and resources to be a strategic partner is vital to the success of your institution. During this session you learn what it takes to build a comprehensive and captivating training weekend, how to incorporate key campus partners in your program, and how to keep alumni volunteers excited and engaged before, during and after the weekend.

Leadership annual giving plays an essential role in the overall advancement pipeline. In this session, we’ll share how the Georgia Tech Alumni Association is transforming their leadership annual giving program using advanced visualization to drive decision-making and increased giving. With Blackbaud CRM and Microsoft Power BI, we’ll describe how the team is using AI to identify new prospects and improve retention of existing donors. Katie Sclafani, Data Administrator, and Kim Bowden, VP of Annual Giving, from the Georgia Tech Alumni Association and Sara Anne Bennett from Blackbaud to learn will share the strategy and techniques behind this new generation of transformation.

With print prices skyrocketing and budgets tightening, your college magazine must be better than ever. But how do you know if your magazine's content connects with your audience? You've got to ask them! See how Auburn University's editorial team uses flash surveys and pop-up ads after each issue to improve story curation, change their design mix and deliver a more engaging magazine. We'll go through actual survey results and discuss how flash and online surveys lead to fewer email complaints to the staff as well as allow the team to take calculated risks.