With legacies being the fastest-growing charitable income stream in the coming decade and bequests to Higher Education being at the forefront of this growth, the potential for our sector is significant. This session will address how a legacy gift should not be seen as an alternative to lifetime giving, instead of working to grow and complement each other, and will cover topics such as:

• Why HEIs should be investing in legacy giving
• How to engage your loyal supporters in legacy giving and create a legacy campaign
• How to talk about legacies and how to ask for them
• How to engage your legacy pledgers to increase their lifetime giving too

The global pandemic affected us all substantially and our events programmes especially. However, it also created opportunities for better engagement and more impact.

During this session Ieva Ose and Tom Blansjaar will share their experiences on events before the pandemic, the opportunities which were created during the pandemic, and also what benefits have presented themselves for the future of our events.

Ieva will share her best practice and success story – an alumni event “RTU Grand Graduation” for more than 9k participants, how that was created and then modified due to pandemic situation. While Tom will talk about online event opportunities and how these later strengthened his post-COVID / hybridevents models for the future.

During this session you’ll see real examples and learnings from delivering alumni events which we hope you will be able to take away and inject into your own events management processes.

We’ll also look to find answers to questions around: ‘whether online events deliver the same kind of value to in person events’; and, ‘how to deliver value in today’s challenging events environment’.

Also during the session you’ll have an opportunity to share your experience and best practices with each other, as well as have an ongoing discussion about the future of events after the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced UCL to completely re-think its strategy for engaging the graduating class of 2020 and 2021. With physical graduation ceremonies on hold and finalists facing huge concerns about the graduate labour market, the Alumni Relations team sought to implement a new virtual programme that aimed to recognise the immense achievements of our students, aid their transition into employment, and lay the foundations of a long-term relationship with UCL. This session will explore the many facets of the new graduate welcome campaign, which brought together an all-star video and advice mosaic with highly segmented communications and a dedicated professional development offer, and ultimately resulted in an engagement level equivalent to that of pre-pandemic communications.

Are you using LinkedIn to its best advantage? Is it predominately used for tracking down alumni in certain locations, or for sharing your university’s latest ranking position? If so, register for this session and pick up tips on how to become more proactive and creative with LinkedIn, so that it becomes an invaluable tool, helping you develop an engaged community of passionate and eager supporters.

Taking the form of an informal workshop, the topics covered will include:

• Personal vs professional
• The power of nostalgia
• Generating pride and celebrating success
• Getting to know your alumni better
• Supporting recruitment, student outcomes, fundraising & research
• Future-proofing
• Reaching a larger audience

CASE Circle of Excellence Award winner - Learn how University College Cork, successfully created a unique and vibrant brand identity for Alumni and Development while simultaneously creating value for the overall brand of the University.  Watch the innovative ways that the ‘Connecting You’ visual identity uses the key motif to connect alumni back to their alma mater on both a metaphorical and literal level. You will be taken on a highly visual and creative journey outlining the steps taken to develop a new brand identity - focusing on the power of symbols, effective storytelling, compelling multi-media content and emotive design that evokes a sense of connection and opportunity with the University.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Stori have been amplifying and telling the stories of universities across the UK reading and reviewing 100s of pieces of content. In our Q&A with an education news and media journalist, we will discuss how the pandemic has driven change in HE content, what worked, what didn’t and how we can build for a better future.

We will cover; how to make the most of your existing content, the stories that work and how to make sure you reach as wide an audience as possible.

High-quality data and the ability to use it analytically is crucial for successful partnership management. At Aalto University, we have gradually implemented a “one CRM” policy which integrates not only alumni and donors, but also partner companies, externally funded research projects, start-ups emerging from our innovation ecosystem, and customers of our campus services into a single CRM system. The list of user groups is growing, and the journey has led us to a critical re-examination of our ways of working beyond the CRM system itself. This, in turn, has helped to enhance synergy across our units, break silos and streamline processes. In this session, we will share hands-on how this has unfolded, and we invite you to bring your insights and questions to the discussion.

Post-COVID budgets are tight, and we must show how we have achieved the best VFM. One effective way we can do this is through the Leaky Hosepipe.

Imagine a garden hose that has punctures along the way. No matter how much you turn the garden tap, there will always be a loss of water at the end of the hose. The result? Little more than a trickle of water at the end.

Most universities unwittingly operate their student recruitment function exactly like a leaky hosepipe, spending many thousands of pounds to source leads that are ultimately lost.

Hear about our work to date with university clients on the main leak trends and how we can all use this intelligence to prove excellent Value for Money.

In a new campaign to tackle the lack of diverse academic voices in the media, University Alliance and its member universities are taking practical action to double the number of Alliance experts, particularly those from diverse backgrounds, participating in media opportunities by 2024.

This is a cause that those working in higher education marketing and communications can learn from, as we all work to generate a more balanced profile that reflects a multi-diverse community on our campuses, and that serves our beneficiaries. This session will explore why we need to tackle diversity in our media strategies, the barriers we face when encouraging diverse academics to seize the potential of media opportunities, and how to enable change in projecting our academic voices externally.

Many of us come to the philanthropy sector without a significant background in the financial or business world. For the most part, we make do, learning bits 'here and there' or rely on inherited practice passed down from fundraiser to fundraiser. Yet there are times where we feel that just knowing that bit more will go a long way. Come to this session for a 101 in the financial & business world, learn tips that will sharpen your engagement with senior prospects and uncover myths that have been holding back the sector for some time, missing significant amounts of untapped potential.