Designed for educational advancement professionals with fewer than two years of professional advancement experience, this workshop is designed to explore the fundamentals of advancement and lays the groundwork for a successful career in this exciting profession.

There is no "one size fits all" definition of a successful alumni relations program, but most effective alumni offices do well in 10 key categories, each of which will be discussed in this session. This session will help those who are new to alumni work (or wanting to assess an alumni shop) think through the breath of key indicators and elements of good alumni work.

Attendees who are new to the alumni relations field or new to their position in the field will leave with a renewed and clarified understanding of the breath of what is "alumni relations" work. Leaders in alumni relations will be equipped to evaluate their own teams or departments based on industry best practices and "tried and true" elements of highly effective alumni work.

Does the amount of time and energy you put into recruiting and supporting Giving Day ambassadors leave you feeling overwhelmed? Empowering volunteers to be your best brand advocates is easier than you think. Learn how Southwestern University recruits, engages, and supports its ambassadors as they take Giving Day to the next level. With a thoughtful, well-designed toolkit and clear expectations, this determined and motivated group helped exceed goals in 2021 and plant the seeds of success for Giving Day 2022.

Why should we focus on planned giving when we need cash in the door now? Where do we even start when developing a planned giving program? These are all questions that Jeff Grandy, M.Ed, Associate Vice President of Catapult Fundraising, will answer in this presentation. Planned gifts ensure the future of your organization, so develop a thriving program TODAY that will lead to your organization’s prosperity tomorrow.

This innovative session brings marketing professionals and frontline fundraisers together. With a combined experience of 19 years in university advancement, Christina Smith – a frontline fundraiser-- and Carrie Phillips – a marketing director—are uniting together to use their expertise to help these groups understand and learn from one another. During this session they’ll present 10 tips to help fundraisers and marketing teams collaborate and unite around the goal of advancing higher education. This fast-paced session will have you chatting, learning, listening, and applying these tips. All within an hour. Are you ready? Let’s talk.

Join a panel of women in advancement leadership as they share from personal experiences about challenges and opportunities experienced over their careers. How does a woman learn to own her strengths and best utilize them for effective leadership and management? Have you recruited a personal board of directors? When is female mentorship important, and how does one identify a mentor and foster that relationship? How has the pandemic affected women leaders and how have women been especially effective during the pandemic? Come for strategies, ideas, discussion and debate with this panel of female leaders and your colleagues.

Discover the latest trends that impact advancement within your district, across the country, and around the globe. The CASE AMAtlas team will share recent findings from our benchmarking surveys, including the Voluntary Support of Education and Alumni Engagement Metrics. You will also get a sneak peek at data from our Core Metrics pilot (focusing on creating global metrics) and new Campaign Survey.

Carrie Phillips at ATU is a self-proclaimed print perfector, while Trey Laverty at Slate Group is an ideas guy. Together—they’re solving marketing problems one print piece at a time. And doing it on-time and on-budget. This session is packed with tips about working with a budget, finding inspiration, design alternatives, and assessing work.

Plus, we’ll unite to solve print challenges we’ve all faced. We’ll bring tape, glue, and scissors. And you’ll leave with loads of ideas to enhance print marketing.

We know alumni want to mentor. But how do we create a meaningful and scaled approach? The Jindal School of Management (JSOM) at UT Dallas, in partnership with Graduway, has secured a historic number of virtual engagements with their solution, Meteor Mentoring!

In this session, the Jindal School Alumni Relations and Graduway teams will discuss how to create, measure, and scale digital engagement using a digital-first approach. We will share best practices for recruiting mentors, creating personalized marketing, connecting alumni to their peers, current students, faculty, and more!

At a loss for words in solicitation calls? Reframe your thinking about "the ask" and turn your call reluctance into major gift acceptance. Learn how good planning, a positive attitude, practiced technique and realistic expectations contribute to fundraising success. Oh, and we will discuss what to say and when to say it, too.

So you’ve been handed a list of prospects, most of whom have potential but there’s been no outreach to speak of yet. How do you get in the door for that initial visit and start a conversation that will lead to a gift? This session will provide you with practical strategies that will help you overcome objections, establish rapport, and reach those elusive prospective donors in an efficient and meaningful way. Equip yourself with useful tips and tools to find new philanthropic opportunities through this engaging and informative presentation.

As colleges look to stretch ever scarcer resources, the need for purpose-driven programs and events has become more important than ever. Events can be a high impact way of engaging donors, showcasing your institution and its programs, and communicating important stories about donor impact.

Events can be transformational, but it takes intentionality. Events need to happen on purpose: we have to make events matter. This session will explore best practices of refining strategies for more strategic engagement, using data to discern the who and what of your event schedule, minimizing cost without cutting impact and developing an event framework.

For most academic leaders, fundraising is a foreign language. It's up to you to arm your deans and directors with practical, specific tools they can use to truly boost your fundraising results. This is not easy! Join us for proven advice and steps you can take immediately to strengthen your partnership with your academic leaders, to elevate yourself as a fundraising expert, and to train your academic leaders to have more productive donor conversations at any stage.