Establishing and maintaining strong relationships with various stakeholders within your institution is essential for successful advancement. By cultivating these relationships with institutional leaders and volunteers, departmental heads, faculty and researchers, alumni relations, communications and marketing teams, or student affairs personnel, fundraising professionals can identify potential funding opportunities, secure support from alumni, coordinate fundraising efforts, reach out to potential donors, gain insight into student priorities, and align fundraising efforts with institutional objectives. This session will work on building a collaborative and integrated institutional community that can greatly enhance fundraising readiness and advancement success.

What does the wider Advancement team do? How does philanthropic fundraising fit into the wider advancement ecosystem? Faculty members from a range of institutions will look at the fundamentals for each discipline and how Alumni Relations, Marcomms and Development Services professionals work successfully together and support you and your work. We will cover all of these topics and more in a fast-paced and interactive session – just to make sure you don’t need a post-lunch snooze!

This session will help to raise understanding and awareness of the CASE and CIoF professional competency frameworks, how they work in practice and how the CASE model is reflected in the SIEF programme. Steve will set the scene by looking at organisational culture and values and core competencies for advancement professionals relating to career journey stages. The faculty will then lead and facilitate lively round table discussions on desired behaviours and attitudes, drawing on ‘real life’ examples from a variety of settings, that will help demonstrate ‘know-how’ in key competency areas.

After this session you’ll agree - there’s so much more! This plenary will review the basics of regular giving but also help you understand the vital role regular giving plays in any robust fundraising strategy. In just over an hour, Kurstin will discuss core principles of regular giving, donor motivations, the methodologies that drive gifts, measurement strategies and secrets for success. She will also focus on the importance of data and analytics in regular giving fundraising, highlighting the role of segmentation, donor profiling, and lifetime value analysis in generating gifts. You’ll leave the session able to articulate the purpose and objectives of a good regular giving scheme, with the knowledge and skills necessary to build new or expand an existing programme.

This interactive panel session invites you to explore the ways in which you can be a change-maker. How do we move from saying the right things to doing the right things? What role can you play, no matter what your job is or whether you are an officer or a manager or a leader? We will also explore why approaching our work with an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion lens is the right thing to do AND the key to our success in effectively advancing our institutions. We will do our best to answer any question you have with openness and honesty.

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is a BIG subject. In this elective, we offer extra space and time for questions, discussion and perhaps to continue threads of conversation started in the plenary session. Also, as many institutions are hosting targeted scholarships, we explore the opportunities and challenges of supporting under-represented scholars and their donors.

As Advancement professionals, we can tell incredible stories. Stories of the transformative impact of philanthropic giving; stories of the lifelong relationships forged at university; stories of the extraordinary lives our graduates go on to live. This session will explore how we can turn those stories into compelling content, and how that content can in turn drive alumni engagement and lay critical foundations for fundraising activity and volunteer recruitment. We will shamelessly pinch the most valuable marketing and communications tools – including creative briefs, content strategies and communications plans – and apply them to our work in Alumni Relations, Fundraising and Advancement teams so that we leave equipped to realise the potential of our institutions’ compelling stories.

What is prospect research? How can prospect research help you achieve your targets? What can we learn about potential donors before we meet them? What do we mean by due diligence? Learn about all this and more in an informal session with plenty of hints and tips to take away with you.

Stewardship refers to how we take care of our donors, keep in touch with them, and show them the impact of their giving so that they feel motivated to give again. When we know that it costs five times more to find a new donor than it does to secure a gift from someone who already donates, effective stewardship isn’t just the right thing to do—it makes good economic sense. But in a world of finite resources and complex environments, how do you make sure your donors receive the right interventions at the right time? In this session, we will explore what stewardship is, how to approach it strategically, and how to use the tools at your disposal.

Actually, no. We don’t talk about mental health enough as a sector, especially since this profession can be an incredibly stressful career choice. In this session we’ll cover a range of topics, including the signs of fundraiser stress and burnout, and strategies you can use to build your resilience while continuing your career. We’ll also discuss our role in recognising when colleagues are struggling, and brainstorm ways to create a development workplace culture that prioritises mental health and wellbeing. I’ll also ask you to share (if you wish) your personal strategies for reducing stress and promoting work-life balance.