Volunteers are the heartbeat of alumni engagement as graduates gift their time, experience and expertise to give back to the university, impacting the student experience and enhancing the alumni experience of their fellow graduates. In this session, we will explore what volunteering opportunities work best for your institution and use a tool to establish why specific volunteering initiatives are assisting the volunteers with their own personal and professional development.

Good alumni engagement is key to long-term fundraising success and one of the key measures of impact is the number of alumni who donate to your institution. Alumni engagement would have previously been driven to support and promote philanthropy but with increasing targets on volunteer numbers, how do you balance what you ask for, who you ask and when? Looking at best practise, this session will explore how to create a meaningful relationship between engagement and philanthropy and not a marriage of convenience!

Over the past few years more and more institutions have put more effort and resource into supporting their institutions with reputation raising and advocacy. This includes: • Recommendations from alumni for student recruitment • Completing surveys such as QS, Graduate Outcomes or Financial Times surveys • Providing key alumni in strategic positions with the latest updates from the University • And in some cases alumni have organised their own advocacy initiatives supporting their institution. The ARI Faculty will be speaking about their experiences of this and providing case studies on how their institutions and teams have dealt with these changes.