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.

Learn how to use relationship marketing to focus your message and tell your school's story (and drive admissions, retention, and alumni engagement along the way!). Through this storytelling approach, you'll find effective methods to ensure that your communication resonates with families—past, current, and future. This session will cover everything from social media and email marketing to publications, from strategy to execution.

Every event needs flawless execution but also it needs clear objectives and targets in order to be effective. How so set these and how to collect feedback and act upon it with the right follow-up?

How do you put alumni services on the radar of current students and why should you?

This session will explore the value of developing an on-campus calendar of activity to engage and build relationships with future alumni stakeholders while still students.

Taking our international academic and sports scholars as a case study, find out how to identify a key group of high-achieving students who are particularly warm towards the university and focus on offering them exclusive content, not only to enhance their student experience but also to make them more likely to engage with your alumni team post-graduation.

Hear the story of how we made good on our international student recruitment promises and transitioned student scholars to enthused and engaged alumni, maximising their volunteering contributions.

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. 

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.

The sharp drop of numbers of applicants to international universities at the peak of the pandemic in 2020 and the quick surge in 2021 when China, ahead of the rest of the world, regained normalcy, are telling evidences of how the pandemic made planning for intake and recruitment difficult, if not impossible for universities. Pandemic has also brought about some interesting changes to China’s international education sector. Ranking is no longer the dominant factor for Chinese students when choosing schools. Other considerations such as career support and the university’s brand image are playing a bigger role in the process of decision-making as well. For lesser known universities, this means they now have a bigger chance to stand out against the “big names” who always take the top spots in major rankings. Some of the topics we are going to discuss are for example: How the current political and economic climate in China can impact the number of students studying abroad? How do universities utilise digital channels to establish a distinct branding and to engage with students on a personal level? How important it is to know your applicants? Will tailored educational offerings appealing to a new generation of Chinese students? At this round-table discussion you will be equipped with fresh perspectives towards recruiting Chinese students upon hearing the discussion.