Have you been trying to imagine a new-normal, or just impatient to get back to the old-normal? Maybe you’ve taken some time to interrogate what normal was, and wonder whether Advancement in 2019 was really serving our institutions and our communities - or were we just going through the motions? While the public asks fundamental questions about the value and quality of Higher Education and our institutions are shaken by repeated financial, social, and health crises, can we really keep doing what we’ve always done?

Joshua R. Newton serves as Senior Vice-President, Advancement and Alumni Engagement at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Josh is known for his disruptive approach to fundraising and engagement practices, often challenging long-held beliefs and truisms in pursuit of a better experience for Emory alumni and better results for the university. A champion of people, relationships, and insightful strategy over the traditional Advancement playbook, Josh will share his thoughts and vision for our sector in a post-pandemic world and try to help us imagine: what happens now?   

Whether you are being encouraged to ‘tap the goldmine’ of alumni in the States or you have been fundraising there for years, let’s get together to share our expertise. During the hour, I will open the floor for your questions, share my war (and success) stories and encourage other attendees to make their recommendations too. Whether you want to learn about tax-efficient giving, ask about trip planning, or just hear about an established programme, this session will be a safe space for you to join others and ask anything or share everything related to US Fundraising. Let’s connect and support each other on this exciting mission.

COVID-19 has given HEIs a new urgency to fundraise for health research causes, and with many institutions looking to convert donors onto other causes as the pandemic, questions will start to arise as to where those donors move to. But health research is a tricky area where HEIs need to assert themselves as drivers of research while respecting the roles of charities whose sole focus is health research (and who often provide hundreds of millions of pounds of funding to HEIs). This session will encourage health research fundraisers to come together and network, sharing their challenges and strategies and moving towards a consensus of how HEIs could (and should) work with and around other health research charities in the marketplace.

How inclusive are your alumni activities? Do they reflect the diversity of your alumni and student communities and succeed in holding up positive role models who can inspire and encourage others - particularly those from marginalised groups? These were the questions we set out to answer in our own review of alumni relations activities at Bournemouth University in early 2020. Prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign and a growing understanding of the importance of diversity in all its forms, we analysed our communications, campaigns and volunteering and set out to make positive changes. Join this session to hear about our journey to deliver a more inclusive alumni relations service, including practical tips and insights into lessons learnt along the way.

Do you run a small shop? Have challenging targets, a tiny team, and no idea where to start? JOIN US. Part workshop/part support group, in this practical session, we tackle the real problems we all face and take pen to paper to sketch out the year ahead.

From not enough hours in a day, how to manage expectations, how to find fundraising projects, how to do the stuff that matters, how to deal with people constantly talking about low hanging fruit, or how to build a culture of philanthropy outside of your office doors, no issue is too big or small. Tweet your challenges to @brownrach and we will cover as many as possible.

We can’t promise to solve them all, but we aim to send you on your way with somewhere to start.

GG+A’s SurveyLab team analyses responses from more than 100,000 people every year – through surveys for specific client purposes, and also through our Donor Experience Dashboard (DX) which allows donors to feedback on their experiences of giving. We almost invariably ask alumni, donors, and friends is to tell us how connected they feel to their institutions, and we always see a gap between the pride they feel in these institutions and the level of connectedness they report. What determines who will have a high or low level of connectedness? And most importantly, what action can you take to change it? Join GG+A as they unpack the findings of surveying for institutions large and small, all over the world.

Having no specific PG creative identity for recruitment campaigns for the University of Glasgow was problematic, less impactful, inconsistent and a bit meh! So, we decided to create an identity that our PG audiences could relate to which also meant we could be more consistent with our messaging across the University when fronting a campaign and could stand out from the PG crowd on a webpage or in social space. In the session, we will explain what happened in our journey, why we did what we did and how we feel it’s working, as well as sharing our guidelines and top tips to make sure it's easy for the rest of the UofG community to implement too.

Listen to the hottest debate at the conference! A panel of higher education leaders will debate the motion: “This house believes that fundraising is disconnected from the core mission of universities, ceasing fundraising would have little or no impact on most universities.”