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.

How has the pandemic impacted your scholarship and stewardship practices? In this special roundtable, we’ll be discussing the challenges, trends and opportunities facing institutions, as we shine a light on what’s holding many back from creating impactful stewardship practices and improving student access to awards. Pre-pandemic, 82% of institutions stated their current way of managing awards did not meet their needs, and over half said their processes were not well organised. As a wave of digital evolution sweeps across higher education institutions’ out-dated and inefficient practices, how can scholarship and stewardship follow suit and embrace a digital-first experience?

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.

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.

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

Donor walls are a critical part of successful stewardship that help to build strong connections between you and your most generous donors. Whether you love getting creative to bring these to life or you spend time worrying that you’ll spell a name wrong, there’s no avoiding them.

We're now seeing inspiring examples of forward-thinking design, where recognition is central to capital projects from the start. But what about when you're starting from scratch? This session will share UCL’s journey to the 2019 unveiling of a donor wall recognising its Circle of Benefactors. From running a student design competition, to personally involving each donor in fabrication, hear how Advancement worked with Public Art to create something unique and meaningful for donors, but also authentic to UCL.

For the first 50 days of 2021, Durham alumni, family and friends set out to test their fitness, hang on to those New Year's resolutions, and come together in the name of health and wellbeing in a way, unlike anything we’ve ever done before. As a community, we rekindled our motivation, inspired one another, smashed goals and personal records, lost weight, had a little break in our lockdown routines, and worked out with our Durham friends around the world.

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.

#BumpItForward was created during the second COVID-19 wave - asking donors to pay forward the cost of their vaccine to protect healthcare workers in African countries until the vaccine reached them. Created and launched in less than 72 hours, the campaign far exceeded its funding goal, but also challenged institutional preconceptions about public understanding and engagement with our cause and raised our ambitions about what might be possible for future campaigns.