Welcome to share your ideas and experiences of creating, shaping and measuring the impact of high-quality master data and CRM! At Aalto University in Finland, we have gradually implemented a “one CRM” policy which integrates not only alumni and donors, but also partner companies, externally funded research projects, startups emerging from our innovation ecosystem, and customers of our campus services into a single CRM system. What is the impact of all this on processes, analytics, decision-making, communications, and mindset? In this session, we will share hands-on how this has unfolded, and we invite you to bring your insights and questions to the discussion. CRM for impact- A point of a journey is not to arrive. Pre- assignment questions- please consider these questions before attending this session: Which data is the most relevant for measuring a) Your personal impact at work? b) Your team’s impact on the university? c) The societal impact of a university? d) The global impact of a university?”

Accessible social media benefits everyone. People feeling overwhelmed, people in a hurry, people with visual impairments, people with hearing impairments, people in public without a pair of earbuds… The list is endless. And with 59% of the world now using social media, the need for accessible social media is greater than ever. After all, do we really want our content to be inaccessible to over half of the planet? And the good news: creating accessible social media content isn’t difficult. It just requires us to adjust our thinking, update our learning, and embed some new habits when creating and posting social media content. After that, it comes down to practice. To that end, this session will offer you a few basic lessons that can greatly improve the accessibility of your social media content. Let’s get started. Let’s get accessible. 59% of the planet is waiting.

We will explore together the opportunities, challenges and wonderful impact that come with fundraising campaigns. Nik will present key ingredients for successful campaigns, based on his work with colleagues around the world; and Pia will share lessons from the University of Helsinki’s recent campaign - and ongoing fundraising activities. More than 5,700 donors joined the University’s fundraising campaign to fuel research in groundbreaking fields, supporting talented academics and students. Following over €100m in donations, the University has raised more than €11 million during the government matched-funding period 2020–2022.

The Nordic network CAR was founded in the fall of 2021. The network was established to share experiences and work together towards increasing the knowledge, skills and competencies about Nordic ways to work towards alumni. The participating institutions are The University of Stavanger (Norway), Aarhus University (Denmark), Vilnius University (Lithuania), Linköping University (Sweden) University of Tampere (Finland) and the University of Iceland (Iceland). In this session, we will share how we work together to explore how structured alumni work can enhance the quality of education.

Over the past 20 years, UK higher educational fundraising and wider external engagement functions have seen somewhat of a transformation. Ben started this period as a standalone development officer in a business school, and over 20 years later is a member of the LSE university leadership team, with responsibility for overseeing a £350m philanthropic campaign ‘nibbling at the heels of Oxbridge and the Ivy league’. So, what lessons might be learnt of the past two decades – not only successes, but failures, and the benefit of hindsight? Ben will not only reflect on his service at Warwick, Oxford and LSE in the UK, but through his insight through chairing the Ross Group (the top 25 universities fundraising in the UK and Ireland), his membership of the CASE Europe Council, and his early visits to the Nordic region in the early 2000s, meeting with prospective students and alumni. This closing session will provide a candid discussion about how the UK went about replicating the North American approach, what was relevant, what could have been undertaken differently, and what this might inspire for world-leading colleagues in the Nordic region and those in a wider global context. Ben will pose questions, reflect on the significant role of government commissioned reports, how professionalism, collegiality, expertise and leadership buy-in have been a constant, and how we might re-think the mass alumni engagement model, to one that is more sophisticated, globally focussed and draws upon institutional expertise - to deliver a fundamental shift in cultural, institutional and income success. As the conference draws to a close, this session will impart to us the benefit of looking back, looking forward and what adaptations will work for us in our different organisations, as we seek to create a step change and deliver success, regardless of our current resources.