Chalmers is committed to igniting curiosity for STEM from an early age through hands-on school activities that bridge educational gaps and inspire future scientists and engineers. Our alumni play a key role in this mission. By sharing their expertise, enthusiasm, and real-world experiences, alumni become powerful role models who can spark a lifelong passion for STEM. Whether through mentoring, volunteering or simply sharing their journeys, their involvement creates lasting impact. Engaging alumni also presents challenges as societal trends shift. Join this session to explore our initiatives, share best practices and lessons learned, and uncover new strategies for enhancing alumni engagement and inspire the next generation.

Higher education rankings have become a fixture of the academic calendar. They help sell newspapers, promote consulting services and provide great PR for the institutions that do well in them, but do they add value to your institution or encourage distortions to game the system?

Social media empowers higher education institutions to achieve broad visibility, even with limited budgets. By sharing meaningful, authentic content, institutions can foster engagement and trust. Practical examples include student ambassador programs, social media takeovers, and influencer collaborations. New experiments on platforms like TikTok highlight innovative ways to connect with younger, digitally native audiences.

Due Diligence and related data have been one of the focus points in higher education area during the last years. High-quality data and the ability to use it analytically to support this is crucial for successful fundraising and agile alumni relations. The importance of centralized and structured process and CRM Master Data is also at the core. In this session, I'll share hands-on how this has unfolded in Aalto University and invite you to bring your insights and questions to the discussion.

Are you navigating alumni relations and fundraising with a small team? Do you have creative strategies or challenges to share? Join this interactive campfire discussion where we’ll explore AI as your team member, micro-communities, crowdsourcing engagement, gamification, subscription-based giving, alumni as influencers, reverse fundraising, guerrilla marketing, and corporate collaborations on a budget—all through a Nordic perspective. If you have experiences or insights on these topics, we’d love to hear from you! If you’re looking for inspiration, come listen, learn, and take away practical ideas to apply in your own work.

Creating, building and sustaining relationships with your alumni around the world is challenging, but can also be very rewarding. How much should be done at the individual level (i.e. contact with regional representatives, like an alumni ambassador programme) versus organised groups (aka “chapters”)? What are the pros and cons of each model? How much time should be invested, and what is the ROI? What communications prove to be most valuable and effective? What metrics are worth measuring (or possible to measure) in terms of engagement within international networks/groups? Does this vary from metrics for engagement at the national level? What are some future trends within this area?

We discuss how to bridge the gap between studies and work by using alumni as a resource in showing the relevance of the education. By showing our current students what our alumni works with, we give them concrete examples of how their competence can be applied in the work force.

Collaboration across level in a university can already be in formal structures or you may need to develop the format our self. In this campfire session we will share best practices for how to organize the structure for the division of responsibility for task/activities between university, faculty and department levels.

Development Offices usually work with limited resources and we have to prioritise daily. We often have to choose between handling stewardship to existing donors and to spend important time approaching new donors. Both tasks takes time, and we have to balance our efforts to have a good portfolio of donors in the long time perspective. In this Camp Fire session we will discuss how we can work more efficiently by partnering with stakeholders, for example Advisory Boards. We look forward to listen to your experiences and to have a discussion with a great learning and sharing moment!

Do we need CRM systems when we work with alumni and external relations? If we work with a CRM system we need a god practice to handle all the data. How do we handle GDPR? How do we structure data about alumni and external relations? How do we work with fundraising processes?. How do we integrate to student service systems and other systems? During the discussion we will look answers to all these and other related questions. We will share our experience and reporting good practices.