The history of how universities formed is almost certainly shaping your fundraising programme, and maybe not in a good way. Listen to best practices in Strategic Initiative fundraising and prepare your whole institution to give the donors what they want and achieve the impact you’re really capable of.  Challenge yourself to be a leader and do the evolution of fundraising – because if you want to solve 21st century problems, you might need to break out of some 11th century silos first.

Do you tune out when people are talking? Do you listen without judging? Do you create the space for people to feel heard? The reality is we hear less than 50% of what is being said in any conversation. When we listen and truly hear what is being said we build trust and a safe space for conversations to flourish.

Are these skills inherent or are they developed? How can you develop and enhance your listening skills to engage more effectively with your donors and others? Good listening practices can be learned and are the key to developing fresh insights and ideas that have impact and fuel success.

This session will touch on the theory and practice of effective listening, bust some myths and share some realities, warts and all, and will be interactive with stories and audience participation that will demonstrate how we can create a greater awareness of our own listening skills, through tried and tested coaching techniques.

Whereas theories and practices of fundraising have largely emerged in the English-speaking world, there is no doubt that higher education advancement is now a global phenomenon. Adjustments are made to create relevance and impact in different cultures, and solutions are developed on the go – often with small teams and no previous guidelines. With examples ranging from the governmental matching funding campaign dynamics of Finland to grand challenge fundraising in South Africa, we look at how fundraising is shaping into culture-specific forms that may challenge traditional theories and practices. In this interactive session, you will also be provided with sufficient space to reveal your own creative fundraising on the go! We invite you, therefore, to bring your cultural observations and experiences to the discussion, for the continuous advancement of the advancement profession.

Whilst major donor and regular giving fundraisers are running events or meeting their prospects, trust fundraisers are seen as just working quietly writing applications (and hoping for success). But what can we learn from other fundraising disciplines to enhance our work? With COVID-19 transforming the trust fundraising landscape, building strong and mutually beneficial relationships with your funders is more important than ever.

This session will share advice on how to provide more personal and bespoke cultivation for trusts and foundations, using methods more typically associated with individual major donor fundraising to help break down the barriers of the difficult current landscape. It will also provide an opportunity for you to share your top tips and best practice on how to engage with trusts.

More often than not we push our focus just to our numbers, and we forget that the value of higher education is the power to share inspiring stories. Now what would happen if we balanced our fundraising with some storyraising efforts? Imagine all you can achieve, if your stories would circle back and impact your goals.

Most brands out there are focused on showcasing their values, their communities, and now more than ever we should let our brand's soul to speak for itself. In this session we'll allow your mind to shift; a twist of perspective will be my gift. Go on, take the opportunity to put your community up front and center and see what happens. Will you dare to? That is the question.

Latest statistics show that the UK legacy market in 2030 will be £5.1billion and that higher and private education is in the fastest growing sector in the legacy market today. As we reimagine our philanthropic fundraising programmes and practices, this panel of university legacy fundraisers will answer all questions about fitting out our legacy programmes for the future – where and how much to invest, what to get right in stewardship and acquisition, and how to ensure your institution is top of mind when your alumni make their final will. Come along with your burning questions and hear how to set your institution up for success.

82% of UK universities said their current way of managing awards wasn’t meeting the needs of their organisation when we surveyed them before COVID-19. Siloed data, a lack of ownership internally and issues giving students access to awards are all common challenges.  Join this session as we share best practice advice on expanding student access to awards and removing the internal blockers that make awards difficult to administer

In this interactive workshop Rachel and Margaret will take you from blank page to inspiring and impactful case for support.

Your case is the foundation of your fundraising programme but how often do we rehash the same phrases or copy and paste from old funding bids or direct mail.

Well no more!

Come with a project you’re working on, an open mind and a willingness to ask, ‘why would anyone give to us?’

Mass fundraising programmes often steer clear of complex research, equipment or capital asks. But by finding ways to translate these concepts into accessible and compelling calls to action, we can inspire our communities and engage with new audiences. In this session, Heather and Jemma will share their experiences of successfully fundraising for research within their Regular Giving programmes - and give you the tools to do the same yourself.

Blackbaud is undergoing an evolution with how it delivers Customer Success. What we deliver day-to-day is in a constant evolution. Chris delivers the Voice of the Customer as a new Customer Success Manager and will demonstrate the tailored and unique ways Customers can engage and partner with Success. It takes a while for the machine to work optimised for you. Let’s tweak the model together to bring massive value to you. Listen for what to expect from software providers, understand the data you hold, how to become digitally ready to advance and what impact we can make together on reporting, staffing and employee engagement.

From what on earth to use Google Analytics for (what's a UTM link anyways?!) to how to disrupt your audiences inbox with compelling emails, join Jonathan May and Kat Carter from Hubbub as they take you through the weird and wonderful learnings of online giving.

In 2020, the VU Amsterdam, was the only university in the Netherlands not actively engaged in Fundraising. Surprisingly, since it has a long tradition in philanthropy, being the first Dutch university to be founded with a philanthropic gift and being home to the first academic research center in philanthropy in Europe since 1990.

When the Executive Board decided to bring philanthropy back to the heart of its organisation, they realised it would take more than just to start raising funds again. We will share experiences from VU’s journey of re-introducing fundraising and more-over, integrated advancement. From the initial vision to the managerial and operational challenges in bringing together internal stakeholders and aligning their activities with VU’s external stakeholders as they re-shaped VU’s tradition of philanthropy.

Many fundraising offices in Europe, are surprisingly small or young or have experienced a significant break in fundraising operations.This workshop is designed to map the challenges of colleagues from various organizations, countries, and backgrounds in HE institutions. We believe that some of the key problems are comparable – as are lessons and solutions. Such a discussion would provide fertile ground for peer learning and the development of scalable and adaptable solutions.

We propose an interactive workshop with break-out working groups ensuring active participation to explore the top 3 to 5 issues mapped in the preceding plenary discussion. This will draw out some generalizations and potential ideas and will map out the issues experienced in different contexts as well as the actual job of fundraising itself.

Globally, changes over the past couple of decades in both the distribution of wealth and in demographics, linked to the significant transfer of intergenerational wealth, have increased the importance and impact of principal gifts. In recent successful higher education campaigns, up to 97% of the campaign gifts came from as few as 3% of the donors, and principal gifts accounted for over 60% of the overall campaign total. So, who wouldn’t want a principal gits programme? However, where do you start or, if you’ve already started down this road, have you thought of everything? This session will give practical insights into the fundamentals that should form part of any properly structured principal gift programme from how you define a principal gift through to the identification and allocation of prospects, building your pipeline and choosing which projects might be suitable.

There are plenty of opportunities to advance fundraising and philanthropy in higher education in Spain. The concept of institutional readiness proves useful to unveil them. This session will present different strategies to enhance fundraising from two higher education institutions from Spain:, UIC Barcelona and Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

What do we mean by Advancement, Development, and Fundraising – and why should it matter to me anyway?

What do Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and your institution have in common? Each has received private donations – solicited and secured by someone – to fund their mission.

Our chosen career of seeking financial support for schools, colleges, and universities is a long-established profession, indeed—yet there’s no doubt that the Antiquity version of LinkedIn had as much confusion about the terms of ‘advancement’, ‘development’, and ‘fundraising’ as there is today.

But who cares, really? Don’t they all just mean roughly the same thing? In this session, we’ll dive into a rich discussion on how we can understand and use these terms to frame our work as frontline fundraisers, development officers, and advancement professionals. You’ll come away with practical insights to help you in multiple contexts: building your career trajectory, advocating for resources for your department, and even securing support for your institution.

So you're a small shop, with super limited resource and a teeny tiny budget but you've got big ambitions! Join a sharing session to explore some examples from a School environment of how getting creative, collaborating with other teams and engaging your community members can help you create a bigger impact. We will also explore the need to be tough - resisting distractions, marshalling effort and saying 'No'. Breaking into small groups we'll then work together to help each other look for opportunities for the little fish to make a big fundraising splash and create positive change in our communities.

Why is it that the alumni that have the most affinity for your institution are often the hardest to reach? Let’s discuss tactics for engaging new graduates, capturing valid contact data, and leveraging the excitement of graduation into alumni engagement

Many major gift fundraisers are looking forward to returning to elements of pre-pandemic fundraising. However, there is a new generation whose primary experience is working in the new ‘hybrid era’, who have been successful in building and cultivating relationships to gift outcomes purely in this environment.

What can we learn from these class of 20/21 fundraisers? Which aspects of their approaches can be utilised by experienced fundraisers, and how can we incorporate individuals into the area, and work in teams with a blend of experience?

This session will provide personal insight into starting in this new environment, share key takeaways for individual practitioners, managers, and teams, and provide an opportunity to share experiences of joining the profession at this time or working with new fundraisers.

Delivering excellent customer experience is important in building brand differentiation, appeal and connection - all of which contribute to recruitment performance. But it’s also critical in ensuring student retention, success and advocacy. This session will explore the core components of developing and implementing an effective customer experience strategy, focused on meeting audiences’ needs to improve institutional performance. We’ll share examples from the University of Wolverhampton’s recent work on improving the customer experience that they deliver. We will also draw on recent syndicated research conducted by SMRS, working with 47 universities who are part of the CASE Universities’ Marketing Forum, to understand the behaviours of over 34,000 future undergraduate students.

Now we have your attention: - this is a very practical session for any institution with foreign alumni which will address such things as: Do we need to set up our own legal entity in another country to accept tax-effective donations or would an Intermediary work just as well; my US alumni want Planned Giving – what is it; what is this US/UK dual benefit for my donors; is Transnational Giving Europe still working, is fundraising in Hong Kong still possible and so forth.  Mary Emerson, Executive Director of American Friends of Winchester College, Arnaud Marcilhacy, French Major Gift Fundraiser and Nancy Bikson, lawyer and expert in tax-effective giving worldwide will talk you through your international engagement, post-pandemic, during a cost-of-living crisis, war in Ukraine and as climate change hits!  No matter where your institution is located we will help you ensure you are maximising your time and energy whilst minimising costs and headaches.  Practical, real help and advice from skilled practitioners who have lived international fundraising for education for decades.

Can philanthropy and alumni engagement transform entrepreneurship in higher education? What role does philanthropy play in start-ups and social venture philanthropy?

Over the past few years, advancement has fuelled a huge transformation in Durham University’s work in entrepreneurship. The impact of this work has been significant; twice as many students engaging with innovation and entrepreneurship activity, the number of startups emerging from programmes has almost trebled and four ventures have now raised over £1 million in external funding.

This session will showcase how the Durham Inspired Campaign has and continues to raise ambitions for entrepreneurship at Durham University and will help you consider how you might engage with entrepreneurship at your institution.

There is a rise in female philanthropists and women’s wealth, indicating that changes to the gender balance of the major gift prospect pool are on the horizon. To maximise the opportunities this change presents, event managers should consider taking a fresh, proactive approach; evolving their event design to better cater to the distinct requirements of female philanthropists. Join this fireside chat to explore how with the right event experience design, events could play a vital part in discovering and developing the female major gift prospect pool.

Western, Eastern, Southern and Central Europe District Cabinet members want to bust a few myths on the advancement profession in continental Europe. Join this expert panel for an enlightening and hopefully amusing session discussing and busting a few myths on what works and doesn’t in fundraising, alumni engagement, and advancement leadership. The session will be open to audience interaction in order to gather as many examples as possible of how Continental Europe gets things done, similarly or differently to our neighbors in the north or across the sea. Our team of busters will take on a few myths such as:

• FUNDRAISING MYTH: This may all work for the Anglo-Saxons, but rich people don’t make large gifts in continental Europe.
• LEADERSHIP MYTH: Our rectors and presidents don’t believe fundraising and alumni relations will make a difference
• ADVANCEMENT PROFESSION MYTH: It’s not in our culture to ask / give back
• ALUMNI MYTH: We’ve built strong relations with our alumni, asking them for money will spoil the relationships

Panelists will share their case and explain how their example busts the myth and invite the audience to share theirs. We are sure this lighthearted myth busting process will bring you energy, ideas and some great stuff to copy and share.

We all have ‘connectors’ in our portfolios – people who aren’t going to support our institution philanthropically for now, but who are willing to help our institutions in other ways. Sometimes, we can be guilty of giving these valuable relationships lower billing as we work on our prospects who are likely to make a gift in the short term. This session will look at how we can make the most of our connectors, taking a deep dive into the science of network mapping as our speakers share success stories and tips on maximising these important relationships.