In one year, Tulsa Community College’s internal giving campaign saw a 30% increase in employee gifts—without last-minute scrambles or desperate pleas. While past campaigns met goal, those campaigns didn't thrive amidst challenges such as turnover in fundraising staff and time-consuming event planning.

In 2024, the long-standing “Believe in TCC” campaign, was reimagined with a fresh approach and a NEW strategy. The TCC Foundation team overhauled every touchpoint of the campaign—from communications to campus connections—streamlining operations, deepening impact, and blowing by previous years' fundraising performance.

This session will share how that success was not only achieved but repeated in 2025. You’ll learn how we moved from "just squeaking by" to leading with intention, creativity, and data. We'll also explore the power of cross-campus collaboration, repurposed content, and donor-centered messaging in reviving an established campaign. We’ll also show you how to increase your impact and engagement.

Whether your employee giving campaign feels stuck, just needs a spark or you need to build one from the ground up, you’ll leave with practical strategies that drive results and energize teams.

Tired of running from your marketing analytics? Quit avoiding and start analyzing! In this session, we’ll show you how to stop hiding from your social media analytics reports and start making them work for you. Learn how to decode the numbers, build presentations and one-page reports that don’t put your audience to sleep, and actually enjoy the process. No more avoiding the spreadsheets. Let’s make those numbers your new best friend!

34% of faculty and staff in higher education are engaged at work, lower than for most industries in which Gallup measures engagement. Yet we constantly scratch our heads and bust our guts to determine why employee engagement and retention are so low.
The Answer is OTBC: Onboarding, Team Building, and Coaching. In this session, two very different but equally engaged CASE advisory board members share their tried-and-true strategies, exercises, and processes for strengthening teams and building leaders.
Participants will receive an "OTBC" kit adaptable to their own staffing needs and discuss why this hard work is work worth doing.
All sessions should be designed with audience interaction, engagement, and outcomes. Please describe the format for your session and how you plan to engage your audience.

Fundraising for community colleges requires a unique and compelling case—one that goes beyond alumni appeals and focuses on the transformative impact these institutions have on the broader community. In this session, we’ll explore how to identify, attract, and steward donors who are passionate about education, workforce development, and economic opportunity.

Hear from three community college perspectives—a district, a foundation, and an individual campus—as they share actionable strategies, lessons learned, and standout examples of recent campaigns that galvanized local support. Whether you're building a case for support, designing stewardship plans, or launching a new campaign, you'll walk away with practical tools that can be scaled to your institution to drive fundraising success in the community college context.

Grants and fundraising are often siloed efforts, but when strategically aligned, they can create powerful funding opportunities for community colleges. This session explores how to integrate grants, corporate sponsorships, and philanthropy into a unified advancement strategy that maximizes resources and impact. Learn how to leverage partnerships, align funding priorities, and build internal collaboration between development and grants teams. Through real-world case studies and interactive discussions, discover best practices for securing multi-faceted funding, crafting compelling impact narratives, and navigating donor and grant restrictions. Walk away with actionable strategies to break down silos, strengthen institutional partnerships, and secure more sustainable funding for your college. Whether you're a grant writer, fundraiser, or advancement leader, this session will equip you with the tools to create a cohesive, high-impact approach to institutional funding.

One of the most important aspects of grant development and management that many overlook in the establishment of their systems is the tracking, monitoring, and reporting out of grant activity and outcomes. This can be particularly difficult in a large, multi-college district, but it can be equally challenging in a small one-person grants office. This workshop will include an overview of the data to collect, the reason for collecting it, who may benefit from this collection (from the President/Chancellor to grant managers to business officers and the RCCD Foundation), and how it might be collected. Participants will walk away with examples of the reports that the Grants and Sponsored Programs Office at Riverside Community College District generates, as well as tools that can be used to track data and generate reports.

Beginning with a modest $10K grant in 2020 to support costs for Career and Technical Education students beyond tuition and fees, learn how the Roundhouse Foundation partnered with Central Oregon Community College to pilot and then scale up a transformative funding model which now serves 13 Oregon Community Colleges and has contributed over $1.25M to more than 4700 students to date!

Everyone's a Fundraiser - Focused Discussion on Collaborating with Academic Partners and Key Volunteer Leaders to Expand your Fundraising Capacity

Building a Culture of philanthropy is a multi part recipe, but the secret ingredient is a collaborative, effective and productive working relationship between the foundation team, academic partners and key volunteers. In this focused discussion explore how colleagues at San Jacinto College embrace the College values to form strong and strategic internal relationships to build robust partnerships with new and existing donors resulting in innovative and transformational gifts in support of College priorities ultimately enhancing programmatic and student resources and changing the fundraising trajectory of a small fundraising shop.

Many advancement teams - especially at community colleges - feel they lack the tools, resources, or staff to perform in-depth prospect research. However, most institutions already possess the key data needed to identify new donors and deepen relationships with existing ones. In this interactive and practical session, attendees will learn how to organize, analyze, and act on the data they already have - without needing advanced software or external consultants.

Attendees will explore:
- What types of data are often overlooked but highly valuable
- Simple techniques for segmenting and scoring donors
- How to begin prospect management even with a lean team
- How to engage faculty, volunteers, and internal champions in donor discovery
- Real-life examples from community colleges

Each participant will leave with a four-step action plan to immediately begin finding and qualifying their next donor using nothing more than a spreadsheet

Community colleges face a common challenge: there will never be enough fundraisers to personally engage all donors with the relational fundraising that we know inspires giving. Most donors receive only 1:many segmented communications, creating a gap in personalized engagement that affects retention and meaningful connection.


Gaston College is the first community college in the world to pioneer a solution by adding trusted digital labor to its team, via Autonomous Fundraising. Earlier this year, Gaston introduced Oliver, a Virtual Engagement Officer (VEO) powered entirely by AI to its community, tasked with deepening relationships and generating gifts as natural outcomes of these engagements.