At Manchester Metropolitan University, we have grown our volunteering programme to include over 2,000 alumni volunteers, impacting more than 10,000 students by their involvement every year. The programme is fully collaborative, reactive to change and sits at the heart of our organisation’s mission. At this interactive session, we will share our learnings and send you away with our top tips to grow your volunteer programme and place your volunteers at the heart of your organisation, whether you are small or large, new or established.

Curious if your fundraising strategy could benefit from a mid-level philanthropy stream? Join the London School of Economics (LSE) for a case study on the transformative journey from ‘Inception to Impact’ as they revisit the first year of growth, success and challenges in its mid-level giving programme. Delve into the strategies that propelled the programme and hear how LSE successfully collaborated with colleagues from regular giving, major gifts and philanthropy research to identify five-figure opportunities. Find out what they have learnt so far, what their future aspirations are and glean impactful insights to apply to your own programmes.

It can be challenging to capture the attention of our alumni audiences. In a ‘show-me-you-know-me’ era of personalisation, nurturing affinity at faculty level just might make the difference. Faculty-based alumni engagement initiatives consider the unique experiences of smaller cohorts of graduates to personalise, encourage involvement and meet strategic priorities. But we can’t do it in isolation. This session explores the University of Edinburgh School of Chemistry’s journey to creating a faculty-based alumni relations programme, with examples of how close collaboration with the central advancement team amplifies alumni successes and adds value to the graduate experience.

CASE is excited to introduce our new Global Framework for Brand and Reputation Metrics in Education: the first-ever framework for performance measures and benchmarking in education marketing and communication. This has been a global collaboration by senior marcomm leaders led by CASE and addresses a critical need. The Framework encompasses three levels of measurement in six key categories of activity, including brand development, recruitment and retention, strategic communications, alumni engagement, philanthropy, and external engagement/public affairs. Each category addresses specific aspects of marketing and communication performance, providing institutions with examples of actionable metrics to guide their strategies. Two CASE leaders, both education marketing and communication leaders with global reputations, will host this session. They will invite your feedback on the new framework, encourage you to share measures you use that fit within the Framework, and preview next steps towards the goal of industry-wide collection and reporting on these measures.

Can you deliver bankable success for your institution, even as the world, education, and economic context gets more and more challenging? And can you persuade decision makers to focus on the true priorities, rather than symptoms of dysfunction? Recruitment, Advancement and wider Marketing functions need to be consistently successful in a highly turbulent environment. A fit for purpose operating model is essential to deliver this success, but all too often pressure is put on teams to tackle symptoms of issues rather than root causes, or to simply ‘do more with less’. Explore this challenge through a case study from the University of Leeds. Together Martin and Antonia will unpack the challenges and opportunities all institutions face, drawing on their experience of working together to strengthen the operating model for Marketing at Leeds.

This session will focus on the transformative journey of the International School of Prague as we revamped our annual giving program. Discover the secrets behind our award-winning Giving Week campaign, recognized with the prestigious CASE Bronze Award. Through innovative storytelling techniques and effective 'giving days' campaign strategies, our ISP FUND Giving Week significantly expanded our donor base and drove meaningful change in our school. We will unpack these strategies and share lessons learned, offering actionable insights to elevate your own annual giving initiatives.

Accurate data and concrete metrics are essential for the success of EDI strategies. They can help us identify sources of inequity in our organisations, test whether our EDI initiatives are working, and ensure that our EDI strategies are sustainable and agile. In this session, we will discuss practical ways of embedding data collection in EDI strategies and defining metrics for testing the effectiveness of “bold experiments” in EDI. We will track the life cycle of an EDI initiative and reflect on critical points at which evidence and metrics can strengthen the business case for these initiatives. Through a UK-based case study, we will also explore ways of collecting this essential data in the context of GDPR.

Join the data-analytics team of Erasmus Alumni Relations Team as we deep-dive into automating and digitalizing our alumni engagement efforts and initiatives. In this session we will share our story of how we implemented various volunteering-related automations and alumni customer journeys in our CRM system that enables our team to effectively engage with our global alumni community. At the end of this session you will have learned how we tackled this project and what it took to implement digital innovation processes within alumni relations. We aim to inspire you to do the same.

Whether you attend the University of Helsinki’s session on Tuesday or not, join us for a session which will build on their insights but will also provide specific answers and practical applications for your international fundraising.  Experts Nancy Bikson & Heather Hill will discuss setting up and managing your own dedicated legal entities (such as a US501(c)(3)) or using an intermediary foundation (such as the Chapel & York foundations worldwide); current legal, tax and regulatory issues for international donors; how to cultivate and steward your alumni when you’re not there;  and fundraising from grantmaking institutions, Donor Advised Funds and companies. We will use a combination of real life case studies from our 450 clients worldwide as well as experience gained over the past 25+ years.  Don't miss this golden opportunity to gain valuable insights from industry experts Chapel & York.