Mapping out and understanding your long-term goals can help you chart out the right steps to help you achieve success. This interactive session will kick off the conference with the ins and outs of developing a strategic plan to help you achieve your professional and personal goals. It will also allow you to stop doing things “just because we have always done them before” which is a common theme in alumni relations.

Alumni events have evolved over recent years due to the COVID-19 pandemic and shrinking resources. As we look at the future of alumni events, we should consider what we learned from the pandemic. Valuable tools in digital engagement address scalability and alumni feedback through event surveys can help to inform our strategy. This session will be hands on discussion that identifies trends in alumni events of the future.

If it was just that easy to find an alumni mentor and move on! Mentoring programs can be a very valuable way to engage alumni and help students and other alumni be successful. However, traditional matching programs can be a lot of work and require a large amount of staff time. This session will explore different types of mentoring programs, look at ROI and some of the pros and cons of using a mentoring platform.

Alumni span the state, country, and world for our institutions. A regional engagement strategy is essential in determining how you will bring your institution to alumni wherever they are. Meeting alumni where they live is critical to meaningful and authentic engagement and relationship-building. In this session, you will learn best practices in setting up your institution for success, partnering with institutional colleagues, and regional volunteers to make it a win-win opportunity for both the institution and alumni.

How is an engagement rate calculated? How do alumni engage with your institution? What are the measurable outcomes? What do count now that US News and World Report no longer uses undergraduate giving rates? These are examples of a few key questions you should be able to answer as alumni relations professionals. Five years ago CASE launched a global framework for measuring engagement, resulting in quantitative measures that effectively demonstrate the value of strategically engaging alumni. In this session we will discuss how to measure, benchmark, and make decisions using a common framework for alumni engagement. We will celebrate the benefits as well as share tips for getting started, taking action on the results, and how to avoid analysis paralysis in the process! Most importantly, we will discuss how these metrics can lead to strategies that drive meaningful engagement, not just the biggest number. Come prepared with your own questions and examples to share with fellow attendees.