Learn how Grinnell College built a bridge between its admission and communications offices by creating new marketing-focused, enrollment-aware positions; reimagining longstanding committees, protocols, and conventions; building pathways to cooperative conversations throughout the creative process; and having cross-departmental colleagues present in each other’s virtual spaces. The result has been a welcomed culture shift among team members who now share a greater appreciation for each other’s challenges. In this year of remote work, the two offices developed collaborative relationships that enriched and streamlined admission marketing efforts, leading to record-setting enrollment metrics.

What does making a pisco sour, reviewing scholarships scholarship, and writing postcards have in common? They’re all ways that alumni and friends were successfully engaged virtually that can be easily transitioned into a plan to engage constituent both virtually and in-person. Attend this session to learn how to create a flexible engagement plan that will cater to both in-person and virtual attendees. Participants will also be invited share their successes and failures via virtual engagement.

 

The launch of the alumni affinity network program at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management came at a difficult time and yet is building the most important relationships we can have with our diverse alumni populations. During a time of virtual work and racial discourse centered in Minneapolis, the Carlson School’s alumni decided to come together to build the community they needed. The program includes unique networks for women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ individuals. Learn more about the importance of a volunteer-led program, successes and challenges, and next steps.

At Ohio State, engagement professionals and Business Intelligence/Data Science partners have developed a new tool to analyze engagement data that we believe will benefit the engagement industry. Successes from this work include: an inclusive, stakeholder-centered definition of “meaningful engagement” that reflects our diverse and digital world; improved data measurement consistency among engagement professionals across the organization; a key performance indicator process that can be applied to other projects (to ask “Why?” and not “What?”); and a dashboard that provides real-time engagement data to analyze impact. Attendees will learn how to apply a Key Performance Indicator method to determine measures of success at their home institutions, plus gain ideas into tools they might want to build or refine at home to help provide real-time data and insights related to measuring the impact of engagement efforts.

Your giving day just broke another record. Time to do it again. So, what’s next? How do you amplify engagement and excitement for something we’re all doing every year? Join us for this panel discussion of how to “level up” your giving day with things like social engagement, new giving methods, multi-tiered challenges, competitions, and elite level volunteers to keep excitement high. We will also share key pivots and changes institutions made during the pandemic- and what worked. And, we'll take a look at data on over $500M in results across higher education to see key benchmarks, metrics, and new tactics are as you take your giving day to the next level.

Movies have a way of bringing people together and broadening our perspectives which is why they can be an incredible tool to engage alumni, students, faculty and staff in important conversations. This presentation will outline how a movie club centered around DE&I and social justice topics can add value to any alumni strategy looking to reach disengaged alumni. By the end of the presentation, participants will learn how to implement an online social justice movie club with zero cost and only a few hours of staff time each month.

Your institution has great stories to tell. You might even be telling those stories. But chances are, your content isn’t getting the kind of exposure that it should be getting. This session will teach you the strategies that major institutions are using to get unprecedented exposure for their brand’s stories across multiple channels.

We've all got important stories to tell in our publications: new presidents, new campaigns, new strategic plans, big anniversaries. But we might only be telling these stories once a decade. So how do we make sure we're making the most of these opportunities and ensuring that they're compelling to our audience? In this session, we'll talk about distilling these stories to their essence, using creative packaging techniques to draw your readers in, and finding the human elements that help make "must-do" stories into "must-read" stories. In addition to lots of real examples from schools across the country, we'll also go through one of these stories from concept to completion. I'll share some of the common pitfalls and challenges of these projects (including how to avoid them) as well as how to take advantage of unexpected opportunities.

Alumni Volunteer is a cross-campus initiative connecting alumni with volunteer opportunities, hosted by University of Michigan affiliated groups, that honor alumni’s interdisciplinary expertise and general passion for volunteerism. Beginning with a vision to create a marketplace allowing campus partners and clubs to post opportunities, our business model has expanded to include community organizations that sometimes are run by U-M alumni. Since the launch of Alumni Volunteer in January 2021, we have received positive feedback and a growing number of alumni eager to support opportunities benefiting our University and the community.

In March 2021, the Eastern Michigan University Foundation publicly launched its Give Rise Campaign, a comprehensive campaign focused on raising over $100M for student, program, and beyond-the-classroom support. Our event set multiple institutional records in attendance, giving, and campus engagement. How did we do it? While public phase kickoff events have become commonplace in the advancement world, our approach was not. Rather than attempting to host an in-person event, we opted for one that was fully virtual.