This session will look at the changing face of the student experience as we move from in-person to more blended approaches and its effect on affinity, pride, and connection for those students when they become alumni. As alumni were somewhat disconnected from institutions physical environments – how do we strengthen their connection with this in mind?

How does London’s global university facilitate meaningful connections with prospective students worldwide during the COVID-19 pandemic? Can virtual initiatives bridge the location gap and what’s next as the world opens up?

There’s no doubt that the pandemic has changed the way in which universities engage with their global audiences. During this showcase, UCL’s Alumni Relations team will demonstrate their innovative virtual event series. Responding to an institutional challenge, UCL looked to their alumni community for support - facilitating connections between alumni and prospective student offer holders, inspiring the next generation.

Through this case study, UCL will disclose how and why they developed a worldwide virtual event series - exploring the student recruitment journey, looking at where alumni can influence and discussing what’s next in their plans.

Marketing in large, devolved universities has always been a challenge. Reaching diverse audiences through multiple departments and marketing teams can too often mean siloed working, duplication of effort and confusing messages. Taking in-person offer holder events off the table and adding Covid to the mix could only make matters worse, right? Well, what if it had the opposite effect? This is a tale of how a pandemic allowed a team to bring departments and resources together, usher in a spirit of cross-college collaboration, accelerate the development of our first uni-wide Offer Holder Hub and take Offer Holder Days online, delivering over 200 online sessions. Find out what we learned about influencing, pivoting, problem-solving and fudging it to get a happy ending for our future students.

You’ve got a problem. No, really. It’s costing your institution hundreds - possibly thousands of ideal-fit students every year. That problem is the Insight Gap - the chasm between what it's really like to be part of your institution and what a prospective student perceives it to be from your website and communications channels. None of them can authentically replicate the feeling, sense of identity, or inclusiveness that makes your institution unique. Told you it was a problem. In this session, you’ll appreciate why the experience of being part of your institution makes you stand out, understand why the Insight Gap is potentially a problem (even if you’ve only just heard of it), and hear how some leading UK institutions are embedding experience into their strategies, with the help of their student ambassadors.

Taking stock in Lockdown the University of Glasgow put their current students at the centre of their recruitment campaigns. Promoting user-generated content and peer to peer opportunities resulted in focussed and relevant campaigns that offered support and advice at specific touchpoints on the student journey.  Find out how we have grown our digital ambassadors- both current students and Alumni to almost 200 and generated over 90 student blogs and vlogs to support recruitment marketing activity and help prospective students make an informed decision on their choice of University.

Campus closures, cancelled programmes and careful messaging just to name a few C words…We’re going to look at how ‘the big disruptor’ changed the way we look at alumni volunteering programmes and how it has very quickly modernised the way we run our programmes.

We will take you on our journey, discussing the biggest challenges we’ve faced, our biggest wins and how what we’ve learned will shape the new normal of Manchester’s alumni volunteering programmes.

After hearing about our journey, we will invite the audience to join small groups to share your stories and how your institutions have changed for the better.

In July 2010, Lisa and Josh Greer went from 'living paycheck to paycheck to the 1% literally overnight'. They set about acting philanthropically but found themselves met with obstacles, 'formulaic chuminess', and dinners that amounted to 'being [publicly] strong-armed' to give. In short, Lisa felt like she and Josh were being treated like walking ATMs.

With her time dedicated to philanthropy, Lisa set to investigate and change big philanthropy so that other new donors wouldn't be put off giving in the way that she could have been. In this conversation, Lisa will share her findings and give us fundraisers a chance to listen to a donor's views - without also thinking about how we're going to ask them for money.

Now more than ever, we are tasked with creating innovative, engaging and strategically important alumni volunteer programmes and initiatives that are not only scalable and sustainable, but contribute to increasing our institutions global reach whilst encouraging collaboration internally and externally. This requires a high degree of flexibility and ability to adapt to ever changing situations and an ever changing world!

Join us to hear thought-provoking discussions around key themes facing us as we navigate our way through a pandemic, backed up by real-life case studies demonstrating how these themes can be applied at your institution. We’d love to hear from others and invite participants to not only ask questions but share their stories and experiences to really embrace this year's CASE 'Connected' theme.

As fundraisers, we can quite often find ourselves scrambling to find suitable student content that best illustrates the impact of our donor’s gifts. But what if we put the decision-making power back into student’s hands to create content that they feel is best representative of their own experience? In this session, Supporter Engagement Manager Analiese Jackson will talk about the Royal Academy of Music’s endeavour to launch a bespoke student ambassador programme that was specifically designed to authentically convey the student experience to donors.

A global celebration, in the middle of a pandemic, with 25+ volunteer-led virtual and live events all happening on the same day. Join us as we share our experience with creating, marketing, managing, and evaluating #RSM24 - 24 hours of alumni events. As part of Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University's 50th Anniversary celebration we wanted to find an exciting way to engage our global community of alumni.  This session will cover the entire process from relationship management, marketing and communication, event execution logistics, post-event follow up and how to project manage and work productively as a team to put on 25 (nearly) simultaneous events while still working from home.