Have you inherited an alumni program that needs resuscitation or a shot in the arm? Are you a small shop that needs to leverage the strengths of your volunteers to stop your program from circling the drain? Let's explore collaboration techniques between your alumni relations office and board to avoid D.O.A. and return your alumni program back to health.

Highlands University alumni board presidents, current and past, and alumni director will share their work-in-progress best practices for building a thriving, engaging alumni outreach, which in turn creates a pipeline to the foundation board and inspires greater giving to the university.

Donors want to feel special. We want to recognize them. What happens when recognizing the elite among our donors is in direct contradiction to our commitment to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion? How can we say we’re committed to inclusivity when we have giving societies based solely on a donor’s capacity to give large amounts of money? What do giving and recognition societies look like in light of our commitment to DEI? Join us for the rethinking of donor recognition. How do we balance the need to recognize donors while understanding innately that the way we currently do this alienates others?

Corporate & Foundation Relations (CFR) Officers serve as a master coordinator and translator, finding areas of alignment between company/foundation priorities and university areas of excellence. University Presidents, VP’s and Deans play an integral role in CFR work. Geared towards fundraising leadership, this session provides an update on the CFR landscape, best practices, and strategies for engaging university executives with companies and foundations. Among the areas covered: how and when to engage university leadership in CFR, managing prospects for leadership, and reflection on successes and challenges.

Recent alumni engagement is critical to keeping this key group engaged with their alma mater. In this session, we'll share results of our national survey on how recent alumni expect to engage and discuss the link between involvement in student organizations and engagement after graduation. We'll then share examples of how the University of Oklahoma engages students while on campus and connects with recent graduates to foster and grow their engagement and support. Participants will leave this session with data to inform their strategies and ideas of next steps to grow recent alumni engagement.

While we strive to inspire external constituencies to philanthropically support our institution’s work, we cannot forget our internal community. Employee giving campaigns provide a unique opportunity for advancement professionals to engage their fellow staff and faculty across the college, school or university in the joy of giving. This session takes a deep dive into two, successful employee giving campaigns at two very different institutions: a small, public university and one of the nation’s largest community colleges. One campaign is 16 years old, and one is newer, but both present a wealth of lessons in growing your donor base from within.

An interactive session showcasing the importance of blending the art and the science by first focusing on bridging the gap between two different worlds within philanthropy; Development Officers and Prospect Management. This engaging and lively session will dig into the benefits and challenges of how a strong relationship can quickly bring in resources, but a failed partnership can cripple an organization just as fast. Join us as we share successes and failures, pose hypothetical situations, and learn how to implement these skills into your organization. This workshop is geared towards all of the artists and scientists out there in philanthropy.

Generating and maintaining corporate and foundation partnerships, while coordinating outreach efforts with many motivated players on campus, is a challenge. Corporate and Foundation Relations (CFR) Officers negotiate the varied goals of their university, corporate, and foundation partners, while serving as a master coordinator to develop comprehensive and mutually beneficial strategies for engagement, support, and partnership. Led by two Executive Directors of CFR, this session focuses on both internal and external best practices: (1) building and supporting campus CFR champions and (2) corporate and foundation outreach strategies.

Special events are fundamental to advancement work. Also foundational to advancement is data, both quantitative and qualitative. How can we envision, plan, execute and extract maximum value from our events by using data better? From lunch with a prospective donor to a black tie donor gala, events of all shapes and sizes need to be informed by data. While we are usually good at counting data (quantitative), there is often the most room for improvement in listening to data (qualitative) and the story it tells. We have to effectively engage data both before and after events to maximize advancement outcomes.

Growth. It's what's on every fundraising leader's mind. We're already pretty good at securing the gifts we already have asked for, but how do we fill major gift pipelines with proposals? In this session, Taylor Buxbaum will present how he used personal donor engagement to turn a cold portfolio into a high-producing portfolio while completing discovery work on 800+ more donors by learning new tools that increased his capacity as a giving officer.

Connecting alumni with students has driven new donor acquisition, via the telephone, for decades. The trouble is, the traditional “phone” as we know it, no longer exists. But the alumni to student connection is still important and can still drive significant fundraising activity. In fact, schools that have shifted from traditional phone to multichannel, video-driven, student-led engagement are seeing increases in alumni participation.

In this session, learn how “Student Engagement Teams” are revitalizing annual funds by rethinking the traditional “phone” model and meeting alumni and donors where they are – on their smart phones.

Whether you’re a seasoned fundraiser or new to the profession, we’ve all found ourselves in situations where we’re just not quite sure what to say during a donor solicitation. Diane answers all these questions during her presentation and walks the audience through different scenarios that ALL development professionals encounter at some point in their careers.