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.

NMITE is taking a radical approach to their recruitment ensuring inclusivity and diversity in engineering education, attracting more than 50% of women to study with them. A dynamic leadership team, a unique fundraising case for support and the crucial role of donors, they have all the elements to build a successful engagement and fundraising environment. President Elena Rodriguez Falcon is passionate about ensuring diversity and inclusion alongside a desire to create a strong culture of philanthropy, with their pioneer cohort partially funded through philanthropy. They are actively engaging with female business leaders and philanthropists as mentors, ambassadors, and donors. Learn from two inspiring leaders seeking to ensure the diversity of their inaugural cohort and their donors, while forging a new model of Engineering Education.

The European Commission has launched the European Universities Initiative: "The aim of this initiative is to bring together a new generation of creative Europeans able to cooperate across languages, borders and disciplines to address societal challenges and skills shortages faced in Europe." Universities are developing consortiums with the ultimate goal to merge and become large multinational European universities. RTU is part of European University of Technology (EUt) and one of the tasks is creating a Foundation that will support EUt and ensure the involvement of private investors.  How alumni relations and development will be shaped there? There are more questions than answers for now but we all must prepare for this future as European Commission is decisively investing in this idea.

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.

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.

Join Mark Garratt, Angelina Bingley and your UMF peers for an open discussion on hybrid working and what it means for us and our teams. How do you keep your teams connected and creative in the new hybrid work model? How do you navigate new professional and social norms? How do you ensure inclusive experiences with some staff at home and others in the office? What are the challenges for you for post-lockdown ways of working? What do we need as leaders to thrive in this new environment?
 
If like us you have more questions than answers come along to share your thoughts and ideas for making the return to the workplace as positive as possible. Facilitated by Jim Tudor, Future Index, who will share his top tips on how to foster creativity and collaboration in this new norm, this is a chance to discuss and answer the question how on earth do we make it work?

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.

In 2018, the Universities of Glasgow, The University of Edinburgh, and IntoUniversity launched a collaborative fundraising campaign to bring to Scotland IntoUniversity’s proven model of raising aspiration amongst disadvantaged communities, driven by a commitment to serve Scotland’s young people. Donors increasingly expect organisations they support to collaborate rather than address societal issues in silos. Come learn about building a truly collaborative programme that calls on the strengths and insights of different teams (including fundraising, widening participation, and communications), inspires donors, motivates staff, and achieves the desired impact, in this case the opening of IntoUniversity's first community-based learning centres in Scotland. The session will cover both the key strategic and operational factors that were integral to success and recent recognition with a CASE Circle of Excellence Gold Award.

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.

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.