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.

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.

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.

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.

This interactive workshop will guide you through the strategy, steps and storytelling to coach faculty, researchers and other partners through the development of their ideal "elevator speeches" so that they can bring their life's work to life for any audience.

Donors and alumni see our institutions as one entity, not individual departments, which means our communication strategies need to be unified. Learn how St. Norbert College audited their decentralized communication efforts, aligned departmental objectives, and created department marketing plans that provide needed & impactful communication. Attendees will then partake in a workshop on how to develop their own influencer map and audience personas, a key tool to supplement their own marketing plans.

Recent alumni engagement is critical to keep 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 Knox College 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 next steps to grow recent alumni engagement.

Advancement organizations are increasingly seeking to unlock the potential of engaging underrepresented communities of their alumni bases (BIPOC, LGBTQ, First Generation, etc.). Sometimes, despite best efforts to be inclusive, messages can be interpreted as culturally insensitive and/or tone deaf. It is critical to our organizations to effectively communicate our intended messages, but also understand that words and images have different meanings to varying communities. Session participants will experience and assess examples of such communications, and will develop tools to making outreach strategies more relevant to the intended audiences.

When COVID hit, Miami University decided to help alumni with what it does best: education. The Alumni Association partnered to create an online professional development course free to all alumni: the miniMBA. Conceived and launched in just under two months, the program had more than 7,000 initial registrants with more than half going on to complete the course. The panel will lead you through the process, from conception to marketing to using data to drive future revenue-generating online degree programs.