If you are new to community colleges and/or educational advancement, where do you start? It all begins with solid planning. This pre-conference, designed specifically for people with fewer than three years of community college advancement experience, will give you a solid foundation to help ensure both your success and that of your college. You will learn how to develop an annual plan, key elements of stewardship and – most important – how to build and nurture relationships internally and externally. You’ll leave with plenty of examples, good questions to be asking, and pearls of wisdom from several experienced advancement professionals. Plus, you’ll be connected with a new group of professional colleagues who will be friends and fans for the rest of your career.

Community college presidents face immense pressure to deliver results: Enroll more students, raise more money, engage more alumni, develop more partnerships, get more “good” publicity. Join us for a special pre-conference workshop just for community college presidents. CASE President & CEO Sue Cunningham will lead a series of candid conversations with community college presidents about what is working – and what isn’t – in community college advancement today. We will surface challenging questions including: - How can advancement efforts align to support strategic enrollment management efforts? - How can advancement efforts support workforce development priorities of the college and community? - How much time and effort should we put into alumni relations? - What are the most effective fund-raising strategies (and is my college raising as much as it should be)? - What are the keys to a high-performing foundation board (and staff)? - How can I advance the college’s brand and my personal brand more favorably in the media and with stakeholders? Plus, those who register for the pre-conference will be invited to submit questions and topics ahead of time to be added to the discussion. This workshop, while led by three experienced presidents, will draw on the experience and expertise of everyone in the room, so plan to share your successes (and challenges) as well. Please note that you must be a current or incoming community college president or campus CEO in order to register for this pre-conference. Foundation presidents/CEOs should not register for this event.

The Opening Session will give us a chance to celebrate the successes of our institutions, get our creativity flowing, and connect across all the ways we help champion our institutions. In this interactive session, CASE President and CEO Sue Cunningham will offer her view of advancement and the state of the profession and offer insights and inspiration on why advancement is even more important than ever. Conference attendees will also be joined by members of CASE’s US-Canada Council for this session, enabling the Council to hear about the successes and opportunities community colleges are experiencing.

In April of 2023, Holyoke Community College held its third annual day of giving, #TogetherHCC: Drive to Change Lives, raising over $250,000 from 506 donors. Located in Western Massachusetts, HCC staff set out to raise their giving day game by implementing a donor-centered approach before, during, and after the big day. This session will provide practical steps and strategies for small shops to execute a giving day that both broadens the donor base and fosters a culture of philanthropy.

In this lightning-fast session, I’ll condense 25 years of on-staff and client alumni magazine and higher ed communications experience into 60 ideas that you can use TODAY to make your print publications — including magazines, major anniversary publications, and even campaign materials more read, more loved, and more valuable.

From optimizing your print publications for the coffee table to techniques that can 8x the effectiveness of your headlines, to “engagement engineering” to make stories as feedback-friendly as possible, participants will come away with concrete ideas that they can implement immediately and make a real difference for their publications and communications.

Five years ago, CASE acquired the Voluntary Support of Education Survey (VSE) and introduced new metrics on alumni engagement. What major trends have we been tracking since then? Where are trends for community colleges similar or different than other types of institutions? What do we know and what don’t we know? In answering these questions, we will focus on the unique challenges that Community Colleges have in building sustainable data practices--staffing resources, broad alumni populations, historically low participation in benchmarking, and some pervasive data myths--and ways to overcome these challenges. Regardless of where you are in your data journey, you will leave knowing ways to improve your strategic use of data, track more of what matters, and utilize the resources CASE has to offer to support your efforts.

Communication expectations continue to shift among our graduates – meeting those expectations can lead to higher engagement. In this session, we'll share results of our national survey of over 2,000 alumni on areas of interest, expectations, and opportunities to build engagement and support. We'll then share examples of how some community colleges connect with alumni through segmented, targeted communications to further deepen their relationship with the institution. Participants will leave this session with concrete ideas to inform communication strategies and next steps to broaden and deepen overall alumni engagement.

Develop a women's giving circle full of diverse and powerful women who are committed to raising funds to support and make an impact in the educational goals and dreams of women students. The end result of the giving circle is an event where funds are raised and given away in the form of scholarships all in one night. Event attendees get to vote on the students who they think should receive the scholarships.

Work smart, not hard. In this session, you will walk away with a formula to conduct a Recency, Frequency, Monetary (RFM) score in seconds. We will go step-by-step through using a traditional RFM score to find prospects who have demonstrated a meaningful affinity. We will overlay these scores with an RFM+ approach. The RFM+ approach goes beyond the standard philanthropic indicators to measure additional types of engagement and affinity, such as event attendance and membership data. We will show you how to use wealth screening results to identify prospects with a strong capacity and are giving to like organizations. Lastly, we will share a Community College CASE Study of our work.

Wouldn't you like to boost the philanthropic potential of your institution? If you are a college president, come to this session and grow in confidence around your role as the campus' chief fundraiser. If you are a foundation executive, come to the session and grow your capacity to be your campus president's fundraising partner. An accomplished foundation executive and a seasoned campus administrator take you through the evolution of their work together to begin to install a culture of philanthropy on and off campus.