How do you prioritize your time as a major gift officer? Who do you plan to contact today, this week, and this month to maximize the potential of your assigned prospects? As frontline fundraisers, we are pulled in many different directions. Each day we need to decide how to focus our time on the cultivation steps that will result in the highest impact for our prospects. In this session, we will discuss ways to use your portfolio list to help you manage your time and efforts in the relationship management of your assigned prospects.

In any philanthropic fundraising campaign approximately 75%-85% of your goal will be made up of leadership gifts. At the University of South Carolina, we have refined the leadership gift moves process and created a new position focused entirely on engagement with the top tier of donors capable of making a campaign leadership gift; tracking of their moves; effectively utilizing the President, Vice President of Development, Cabinet Members, and Deans to move these donors through the pipeline; and add new high wealth capacity donors to the mix. With this model, we have found an increase in ROI not only through fundraising numbers, but also in collaboration between units and central offices, and well-cultivated donors enthusiastic about the future of our university.

Crafting a gift strategy that begins before a gift officer’s first outreach and continuously improves and evolves throughout the donor cycle amplifies asks and results. Moreover, a gift strategy that infuses gifts of assets and gift planning builds intentionality and helps donors understand how they may be able to commit more and feel joyful about doing so. This session will provide practical steps for building a strategy throughout the donor cycle including tactical pre-work and the using donor cues and clues. Learn how to craft your donor centered strategy using frameworks based in donor motivations. Complete with real life case studies from the presenters’ combined 40+ years of major gift experience, this session will help operationalize moves management through strategy building.

In this interactive presentation, learn how Gift Officers at Georgia State University have leveraged outreach cadences and go beyond the traditional email outreach. The presenters will share insights, strategies, and tools to support increased engagement through a multi-channel workflow, booked meetings, and giving through the use of turnkey questions.

How can – and how should – higher education development approach fundraising opportunities within diverse communities? This session offers some ideas on how fundraisers and institutions can reflect on their practices, content, and outreach to respectfully and effectively engage donors whose philanthropy may be consciously informed by race, gender identity, orientation, able-bodied status, and a range of other identities. After reviewing some examples, participants will also have the opportunity to share challenges and successes, in the spirit of a candid dialogue aimed at helping our work reflect our personal values and institutional missions, and the diverse constituencies we serve.

Building holistic industry/university partnerships can benefit students, faculty and industry, but they are complex and take preparation, strategic thinking and thoughtfulness. After attending this session, participants will be able to plan and execute a successful industry visit to campus, learn how to move a partnership forward and understand potential challenges.

The ability to cultivate a personal relationship is the key to getting someone to give—and it’s something artificial intelligence (AI) knows NOTHING about. So why is AI all up in your business? The short answer is that AI is everywhere, in every industry, including the most human of endeavors—fundraising. Join Evan Lichtenstein who is the Assistant Vice President of Development for Schools and Academic Initiatives at William & Mary and Felicity Meu from GiveCampus as they discuss how to leverage this emerging technology while preserving and enhancing the most important aspect of the work you do—meaningful human-to-human engagement. Session includes an interactive design thinking workshop.

Electronic screening, giving habits, and prospect research tools help identify potential donors. Now, how do we get them to engage? This session explores how to uncover connections that generate prospect response, helping you secure more initial individual meetings and build relationships that draw your constituents closer to your institution. The presenters, who have more than 40 years of combined major and planned gift experience, have each joined a new organization within the past year. They will share perspectives on outreach techniques that are effective across institutions and ones that are unique to their current campus, as well as to facilitate idea sharing among attendees.

We want donors to give to capacity, but sometimes programs across campus aren’t ready to implement a major gift level of investment. Fundraisers will learn how to: build the runway beyond an annual fund gift with prospects to get to those major and principal gift opportunities; embrace expertise as a generalist who brings together donors with programs that support university fundraising priorities; manage up, down, and across to move the program forward to meet donors where they can see the most impact; and increase collaboration with development colleagues to amplify smaller programs and maximize dollars raised.