New fundraisers, whether new to the profession entirely, new to your organization, or new to a discipline or role, can feel like they don't receive enough guidance, direction, and onboarding from their supervisors, mentors, and peers. This session provides practical, clearly defined suggestions for setting up your new fundraisers for success from Day 1! Learn the most important elements of onboarding a new staff member to ensure that they understand your organization and their role.

Since 2022, the University of Michigan Medical School Communications Community of Practice (CoP) has been successfully navigating the collaboration and support of more than 90 unit-embedded communicators to develop partnerships, ensure access to resources, and embolden a unified voice, brand, and message across the Michigan Medicine landscape. In this presentation, we will use this case study to define a CoP, discuss the challenges of start-up, and walk through the steps toward implementation, success, and lessons learned. Participants will take away practical steps and resources for building a Community of Practice, methodology for connecting your community to the larger centralized communications core, and ideas for scaling communities to all sizes of teams.

It’s been almost nine months since the world’s first fully autonomous fundraiser interacted with its first assigned donor. During that time, 11 higher educational institutions joined together as a cohort to engage donors with an AI-powerered Virtual Engagement Officer (and a second cohort is now live), but more importantly research, develop, and accelerate the deployment of autonomous fundraising for our entire industry.

All higher education institutions can relate to the fact that they have more donors and alumni than they have fundraisers with capacity to build relationships. This is precisely where autonomous fundraising changes what’s possible.

In this session, Susan Lewers, Associate Vice President, Major and Planned Gifts, of Illinois Institute of Technology will present the results her and her team have seen from autonomous fundraising – donors engaged, dollars raised, and pipeline built, in addition to their experience being the first organizations in the world to deploy a Virtual Engagement Officer to a portfolio of their donors.

We’ll present what we learned, what we got right, where course corrections were needed, and how we navigated AI in a field defined by relationships. We’ll share all of our findings including portfolios for autonomous fundraisers, sourcing engagement content independently, accuracy, transparency, ethics, and more.

Finally, we’ll conclude by looking at where we are going, how we can continue to further personalize donor journeys, push the outer limits of technology, and more.

This session will focus on strategies for building and sustaining affinity networks that foster community, amplify alumni voices, and increase engagement across diverse demographics. Participants will explore how to align affinity networks with the institution's goals while ensuring they foster a culture of inclusion and belonging.

Join in a conversation about the context and experiences of women in advancement leadership. Explore research on the field, hear from a panel of women leaders, and explore best practices and resources to encourage and support women’s journeys to leadership. This session aims to motivate, empower, and energize--whether you are looking for networking, planning for career growth, seeking to enhance your leadership skills, or creating organizational environments where women leaders can thrive.

Since the pandemic, more fundraisers do their work remotely. What is the impact on our bottom line? Can anyone work from anywhere? What are best practices based on recent research?