Join conference leadership to kick off the conference and discuss how to get the most out of your time in New Orleans.

Join conference chairs and faculty in this dynamic conversation about trending topics, lessons learned and exciting opportunities ahead.

Venue location and atmosphere are essential to achieving your event goals. And yet, it often feels like the ideal event location doesn't exist... at least within budget! In the beginning of this session, attendees will learn, through examples, how to navigate space challenges, reuse spaces they return to often while making them new and find creative and unexpected spaces for events. They will also learn how to conduct a site visit, or a suite of site visits, to help with venue selection. And, they will learn, through examples, how to pair a venue with key messages and/or goals so that the venue is a meaningful and intentional part of the guest experience. There will be a brainstorming section in small groups, asking people to name places in their communities where they’d like to have events, what the challenges or limitations are, and then discuss those challenges in small groups to come up with smart ideas to navigate them.

Is your institution home to an alumni author that just had another book listed as a best seller? A Nobel prize winner? A notable athlete? Or a director of a major movie franchise? Whatever exciting moves your alumni are making, let’s talk about leveraging those into signature events that ultimately promotes the powerful foundation of your institution. Bring your questions and ideas, and we’ll discuss examples of telling the stories of aspirational alumni to build unique engagement and inspire our constituents.

Celebrate the data collection and evaluation as a result of excellent events. Come explore the world of ROI as it relates to your event portfolio and how it curates future event strategy. This session will aim to achieve the following: 1) Define ROI and the significant it plays in achieving your organizations mission 2) Review recommended components to include to determine the ROI for your event. 3) Showcase how the ROI can help drive your event portfolio 4) Use ROI to identify strengths and opportunity areas to connect with your donor base 5) Illustrate how ROI process will unify the division as you plan and execute events.

The whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. The Collaborative Event Strategies for Regional Engagement, Stewardship and Philanthropy session seeks to address the growing need to simultaneously meet goals within multiple advancement units. Through this session, advancement professionals can learn about new methods of collaboration and trust building, redefining regional engagement strategies, and meeting stewardship and philanthropic goals. This session not only addresses alumni engagement but how we engage as colleagues in advancement.

So many of the fundraising events we do tend to be more “friend-raising” and it can be hard to quantify your return on investment. This session will highlight several tried-and-true events that you may borrow to engage your donors and help solidify their philanthropic intentions. Please come prepared to share your event ideas, as well!

This session will demonstrate how one can take seemingly disparate or inharmonious elements and create unique and compelling solutions. A piano will be used to showcase how dissonance can be made to resolve to a beautiful and pleasing sound by simple slight adjustments, or by the addition of complimentary voices to complete a pleasant musical thought. Inversions will be utilized to demonstrate the variety of solutions that can be developed by thoughtful reorganization of existing elements. Examples will be shown to demonstrate how these techniques may be applied to event solutions, and in general to any situation where tension and conflict exist that needs to be satisfactorily resolved.