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.

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.

Social media is essential for reaching our alumni. In 2022, 58% of the planet is active on social media. Younger alumni have always been prolific users, whilst COVID prompted a generational boom across the platforms. As a result, the number of people following our alumni social media channels has grown enormously since the pandemic. But who are these followers? How do they engage? What do they want?

This talk will help answer these questions. It will cover:

• How to find demographic information using in-platform analytics
• The value of qualitative research for investigating content wants and needs
• Understanding how alumni interact with our content
• Creating personas to represent our followers

These insights will provide a valuable foundation for building stronger alumni relations.
 

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.

As we enter post-pandemic life, how do we ensure that we retain the digital skills we've learnt to support our Alumni community online? In this session we outline the steps every Alumni department should be applying to their strategy in order to fully optimise their hybrid and virtual events. Using learnings from Cornell University’s Leadership Week, coupled with key takeaways from virtual educational events that Forumm has hosted, you will leave this session with tangible knowledge and a host of ideas you can apply to your future strategy.

Readability is accessibility.

Written content with high readability greatly benefits our audiences:

• People who are stressed
• People who are distracted
• People with motor impairments
• People with cognitive impairments
• People who don’t speak English as their primary language.

But readability best practice isn't always followed in the education sector. It is a training need often overlooked by universities and colleges.

This talk aims to offer a foundational course in readability. You will discover 22 simple ways to make your website, blog, email, print, and social media more readable and (therefore) more accessible.

We will explore capitals, clauses, and colours. We will discuss sentences, sizes, and sub-headings. We will investigate alignment, acronyms, and alt text.

Let 2022 be your year for readability.

A chance to discuss with your colleagues and peers those topics and themes that are keeping you, as leaders, awake at night. 

These will be selected from the most popular topics shared by you as part of the pre track survey. 

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.

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.