Learn how a simple social media post asking , “Who has the best burger in Iowa City?” was leveraged into a successful and repeatable content strategy that your organization can (and should) steal for your alumni engagement communications. This CASE Circle of Excellence Award-winning strategy will show you how to listen to your online audiences to identify opportunities to create deeper engagement that achieves your organization’s goals.

In today’s crowded landscape of campus-wide giving campaigns, alumni engagement and advancement professionals often face fierce competition to capture attention and donations. This session, "Standing Out in the Crowd: Amplifying Alumni Engagement in Competitive Campus Giving Campaigns," will give you strategies to help boost your unit’s impact in campus giving campaigns, build stronger connections with alumni and drive campaign participation. We’ll explore unique approaches that will distinguish your department and align your unit’s goals with broader institutional objectives while creating personalized, impactful messaging that resonates with your audience.

At Berea College, ensuring brand consistency across campus is critical to our communications strategy. To address this need, we developed and led Brand Camp, a now-annual internal conference providing comprehensive training for staff and faculty on the College’s brand standards, including effective social media practices, media relations protocols, and digital media templates. In this session, I will share how Brand Camp became integral to fostering collaboration, ensuring consistency, and empowering our community to effectively tell Berea’s story across all platforms to an audience that includes prospective students, alumni, friends, and prospective supporters. This session is designed for advancement professionals seeking to enhance brand education on their campus.

Hosted by Justin Cox, creator of the two-time CASE Award-winning Pod of Orcas podcast, this session will share how your organization can develop its own podcast, and why it might be a great idea. You will learn how to conceptualize your podcast idea, identify and engage your target audience, select an appropriate format, and acquire essential recording, editing, and distribution tools—all while working with a very small team and a limited budget. Additionally, the session will cover strategies for pitching guests (if applicable) and effectively promoting episodes. While sharing how we launched a successful podcast with a one-person team and a tiny budget, we will walk you through the process of doing so with your own organization in mind. Attendees will come away with the foundation for creating their very own. We will invite engagement during the presentation, offer a checklist for attendees to flesh out their idea, and leave room for a robust Q&A at the end.

In just 12 months, the Acceleration Consortium’s LinkedIn audience grew by nearly 150%, expanding from 1,700 followers in September 2023 to over 4,280 in September 2024. This session will explore the key strategies that fueled this growth, focusing on diverse content creation, event-based storytelling, and the development of internal brand ambassadors. Through practical examples and case studies, participants will gain actionable insights on how to amplify their institution's social media presence and audience engagement.

Learn how to engage stakeholders during live events by creating a dynamic social media strategy! This session will cover building pre-event excitement, securing and empowering social media ambassadors, and effective tactics for maintaining energy throughout the event. You’ll walk away with practical tips to maximize audience participation and amplify your event’s impact across social media platforms. Whether you're hosting a small gathering or a large conference, this session will help you engage your audience and drive meaningful interactions in real time.

How do you answer the question, “is that good?” when explaining social achievements? Analytics can be a crucial tool in developing buy-in from stakeholders, supporting strategic creative decisions, and influencing long-term platform strategy. External benchmarks can be misleading, incomplete, hard to come by, or feel irrelevant (whether too high or too low). In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to create and utilize internal benchmarks instead to help generate continuous improvement across your social media channels. Social media is undeniably critical to the digital marketing and PR landscape, but still often treated as an afterthought or secondary consideration by many traditional organizations. Contextualization – being able to answer the question, “is that good?” when explaining social achievements – can significantly shift the conversation about social with key stakeholders, and analytics can be a crucial tool in developing buy-in, supporting strategic creative decisions, and influencing long-term strategy. Finding relevant external benchmarks, however, can be a challenge, as many are either misleading, incomplete, hard to come by, or feel irrelevant (whether too high or too low). In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to create and utilize your own internal benchmarks to help generate continuous improvement across your social media channels, so you can better paint a picture of the value social media provides within your organization. Demonstrating how to access data in both Meta and Hootsuite to download and create an Excel benchmark sheet, Courtney will discuss how to calculate the most important KPIs, the most valuable formula you’ll ever use (percent change), why these metrics are important, and how to frame them with stakeholders so they can see the value of the work you’re doing on social. She will also discuss how to use these metrics to approach platform and content strategy so you can continuously improve your position against your benchmarks, find red flags, and make changes before they become an issue.