Since the beginning of the pandemic, the number of highly engaged employees has decreased. Why do we care? Highly engaged teams outperform the rest in outcomes critical to the success of your organization. Salary and benefits account for most of our budgets, so our competitive edge is based on the success of our people. Research shows that engaged employees have higher productivity and wellbeing, better retention, and lower absenteeism yet we spent little as leaders engaging staff in meaningful ways. This session will explain the competencies important to employee engagement and share tools you can use immediately.

Learn from the award winning “Only in Nebraska” campaign what to do and not to do to make your next campaign a success. With a university system that has four unique campus brands, we still wanted everyone to share a single, unified message. In this session we will share how we started with a systemwide visioning day with top campus influencers and then developed campaign priorities for each campus and individual unit. Next, we used that information to build a comprehensive communications plan to publicly launch the campaign while considering all possible audiences from students to faculty and campus leaders to trustees and major donors to alumni of all four campuses.

As we share our “Top Five Lessons Learned from a Campaign Launch,” we will explain how we partnered closely with our campus partners to ensure that everyone felt they could see themselves in this campaign. We will also discuss how adding an engagement goal to our normal fundraising goal has rallied everyone around the campaign. Publicly launching a campaign is so much more than a cool logo and a catchy tagline – let us share with you how we approached it, Only in Nebraska.

Time is valuable, and that is what makes volunteering such an impactful component of alumni engagement. Creating volunteer opportunities for alumni to connect with students, the university, and each other is the ultimate win-win proposition. Over the past year, the Colorado School of Mines (Mines) has grown participation in its volunteer program by more than 70%. This growth in volunteerism can be attributed to increased access to opportunities, establishing expectations, tracking participation, and consistent stewardship. Mines is a mid-sized university with around 8,000 students and 40,000 alumni. The Mines Foundation and Alumni Engagement shop align with the university in both size and budget. To optimize for our size and staff bandwidth, we have developed techniques that increase our impact while maintaining a small to mid-sized team. Developing a robust volunteer offering has improved our collaboration with university partners and elevated the Mines signature student experience. Volunteerism has cultivated stronger alumni connections with the university and advanced individuals through the donor continuum.

Let’s be honest – managing and reporting on donor funds is no small feat and advancement teams cannot do it alone. We rely heavily on our systems, processes, and organization partners to help us create the best donor experiences we possibly can. But if you ask yourself: Are our donor funds being utilized? Are they being used correctly and timely? Should we be worried when we send out our annual donor fund reports? And if you've shared some of these concerns, you're not alone. In recent years, many organizations have grappled with similar questions, finding little guidance on this vital aspect of any advancement operation. Join us in this session as we look at several case studies on how organizations like yours built the case for support to create and grow a fund management program. It's time to bring the discussion on funds management challenges out of closed-door conversations and begin an industry dialogue to identify what tools, resources, and standards need to be in place to successfully manage and steward donor funds. Whether you are new to funds management or seasoned in the field, come prepared to share your experiences and glean insights from others in this collaborative space.

This is our story about a unique partnership between two university centers and how, by celebrating alums over the age of 80 who are optimally aging, we have created an extraordinary avenue of engagement. Through the Eight over Eighty Award Program, we are connecting, and at times, reconnecting extraordinary alums with the University of Iowa Center for Advancement. By partnering with the Csomay Center for Gerontological Excellence, we have provided both centers the opportunity to collaborate in a myriad of ways over the simple fact that our alum is an octogenarian! Our perspective on what collaboration looks like has expanded. We view our deepening relationships potential as endless. Join us as we share how this unique partnership has led to win-win-win situations for the Center of Advancement, the Csomay Center, and for the nominated alum.