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.

In management literature there are a wealth of good practise models available that underpin successful strategy development. During such periods of intense competition and uncertainty taking a systematic yet dynamic approach to strategic planning is critical. This session will share some of the core aspects of these models as well as demonstrating how they can be practically applied in a HE context for maximum impact. Themes will include broader strategic alignment, key stakeholder engagement, cultural transformation and change management, and effective target setting and performance metrics. Learning objective: Understand the fundamental building blocks of effective strategy development and have the confidence to put them into practise.

For many institutions, fundraising, alumni relations, and marketing & communications operate in parallel - but not always in partnership. This session is will help participants understand how these functions can align to create stronger engagement, clearer messaging, and greater impact. This session will explore what “integrated advancement” means in practice. We’ll look at how shared strategy, consistent storytelling, aligned data, and collaborative planning can transform disconnected activities into a cohesive institutional approach.

This presentation unpacks what really goes into building a compelling brand strategy, breaking it down into clear, practical steps for early-career marketers. It explores how strong brands are rooted in smart research and sharp insight, shaped by a clear narrative and purposeful storytelling, and strengthened through effective stakeholder alignment. From defining positioning to guiding creative execution, the session connects strategic thinking with real-world delivery—showing how each element works together to create brands that are coherent, distinctive and built to last.

Comms is the bloodstream of all alumni engagement. There's no event, fundraising campaign or call for volunteers without communications. How well you manage your comms will greatly affect the success of your overall alumni work. In this session, we will look at concrete examples and explore some key questions, including: How do you define your communication goals and align them with your alumni strategy and institutional goals? How do you craft effective, targeted messages for different segments of the alumni community? How do you effectively engage your key stakeholders and maximize your resources? How do you measure the effectiveness of your comms?

Events have always been, and continue to be, a core staple of any successful alumni and supporter engagement programme. However, events have changed forever. Traditional programming has been interrupted by the global pandemic and new and innovative ways of delivery have been learned and embedded. In this session we will discuss events as a fundamental tool for engaging your alumni community. We will cover some of the key elements of an events programme including strategy and design, delivery: virtual vs hybrid vs face-to-face and the use of technology, analysis: measuring success and also how to both gain support from key internal stakeholders and partners and the role of the events manager. We’ll also look at a few case studies of different institutions and how they’ve used events to bring alumni together.