For most of us, the road to fundraising was accidental. We arrive from completely different careers and wildly unique backgrounds. The path to leadership is just as diverse and, honestly, a little mysterious. Join this panel of Vice Presidents to pull back the curtain on what the top job really takes. If you’re a new leader, get advice on how to think big, focus on your biggest value, and inspire a culture-shift not a culture shock. If you’re an aspiring leader, learn what skills, experiences, and opportunities to seek out that will prepare you for your next step.

Starting a new position is intimidating for us all, at any stage of our careers. A solid plan for your first 90 days in a new role makes all the difference in the world. In this session, presenter Ellen Whitlock Baker will walk participants through a tangible plan for how to approach the first three months of a new job with confidence. Topics covered will be who to meet with, what questions to ask, how to write and present your 90-day plan, and how to assess your first 90 days.

This session is appropriate for Advancement team members at any level, as well as for HR/People and Culture team members responsible for onboarding new team members.

Don’t let a milestone anniversary slip by with a simple slice of cake or balloon emoji on Instagram. Take the time to plan out a comprehensive marketing and communication strategy that is intentional and multi-faceted to really leverage the momentum of the big occasion. Share your company’s origin story and lean into all the triumphs and achievements throughout the years. Tap into nostalgia. Nostalgia strengths people’s emotional connection with your company and deepens their loyalty and brand affinity. Your audience will be delighted with special edition product releases and/or retro branding. Infuse all these elements into social media, advertising, PR efforts, design, web content and more. Historical dates and photos can be throwback posts on social media. Create a special commemorative logo that can visually brand the anniversary. Highlight the founders of the past while also celebrating current employees in videos and blog content. Now is the best time to control the narrative, tell your brand’s story by highlighting the past and outlining the vibrant future yet to come.

Ghostwriting, or writing for someone else, can be a frightful journey. In this session, learn top tips for taking a message (e.g. speech or letter) you’re writing for a dean, board chair, or other campus leader from request to delivery. How do you start? Where can you find information and inspiration? How do you capture someone else’s voice — even when you rarely interact with them? What processes can help create structure and momentum in successfully completing the project? We will also meet a few demons that can stand in our way — Imposter syndrome? Eek! Mean responses? No! — and share ways to slay them. To cap off the session, we will brainstorm ideas for messaging a few different scenarios.

Have you ever wanted to engage donors more fully in an authentic and meaningful way with faculty, staff, students, alumni and donors? The Utah Valley University (UVU) Strategic Engagement team’s initiative, the EverGREEN Ambassador Program, was conceived in line with the university’s inaugural comprehensive fundraising campaign. The EverGREEN Ambassador Program was launched to strategically engage with key donors after the formal public campaign launch. As part of the fundraising campaign, the EverGREEN Ambassadors Program invited UVU’s supporters to serve as extensions of the Institutional Advancement Strategic Engagement team. In this session we will explore ways to identify principal-level donors for an integrated influencer marketing campaign. Learn how you can establish and scale an influencer marketing program for your donors and alumni with meaningful and engaging content.

Offering mentorship opportunities for your alumni is the ultimate alumni engagement strategy. Mentorship allows your alumni to connect to students and other alumni, share their insights and resources, make a tangible impact, and develop a deeper bond with their alma mater and community. The value of mentorship is priceless for your organization, students, and alumni, and implementing a success mentorship program is a win-win. The Alumni Career Engagement team at UCLA offers a variety of mentorship opportunities, and this program will share small, mid, and large-scale mentorship programs examples. Attendees will take away program ideas that suit their institutions, staff size, and budgets best.

Inspiring donors and raising philanthropic support for society’s most complex issues — those where tangible outcomes and positive impact may not be realized for years — is a challenge facing nonprofits, including educational institutions, worldwide. From climate change to homelessness to racial inequity to social justice, philanthropy is critical to tackling society’s most complex issues, and institutions that innovate and inspire philanthropic investment are best prepared to achieve substantive, positive change. In this session, we will address real-life challenges encountered when complex social issues are involved and provide creative solutions for addressing them.

Come learn about UC Berkeley's Pipeline Development Program and how we're growing our pipeline with two lead generation strategies; Discovery Journeys and the Bubble Up Initiative. These innovative programs offer a new approach to identifying and qualifying prospects by blending traditional frontline efforts with mass communication outreach strategies. These programs streamline prospect qualification and deliver warm, vetted prospects to Gift Officers. This allows Gift Officers to spend more time building relationships and making the ask, and less time doing cold outreach. This reallocation of resources will empower your advancement department to reach thousands more prospects per year.

Join us for a discussion about how to best integrate private foundations into a comprehensive funding plan. We'll talk about how impactful proposals to private foundations differ from those to other types of funders, how private foundations bridge the divide between individual donors and public agency sponsors, and how Oregon State University supports sponsored research through the Foundation Relations office.

In September 2022, the University of British Columbia launched its latest campaign, FORWARD, the campaign for UBC, with the goal of raising $3billion and doubling alumni engagement. This marked the second campaign for UBC with an alumni engagement goal attached. To help develop the engagement goals, we worked with a series of stakeholders to create a Case for Engagement to mirror our Development team's Case for Support. This Case for Engagement provided the basis for not only UBC’s Campaign framework, but also for our new strategic plan. To get there, we had to figure out where we were, where we wanted to go as an organization, and why. In this session, we will share how we came up with our Case for Engagement as well as walk you through our “shift exercise” process to help identify where your organization is today and the shift you might want to make to achieve your goals.