Your next wave of volunteers, ambassadors and lifelong supporters are in your admissions pipeline now – are you engaging them with the big picture in mind? Parent involvement at school is critical to your institution’s enrollment and development goals, and building a culture of parent participation starts with every family’s first inquiry. In this session, learn how Penn Charter cultivates relationships with new parents, beginning with the application process and continuing throughout a family’s first year. We’ll discuss the ways we’re building a solid partnership between our Admissions and Development teams by centering the needs of incoming and new families, leading to increased parent giving and continuously strong enrollment and retention rates.

Mindset impacts EVERYTHING from shaping your reality to influencing your decisions to determining your success. What’s going on in your head has a significant impact on your major gift closures. The positivity or negativity of your thoughts, emotions, and actions around money, philanthropy, prospects, and your institution form the mindset and lens through which you see and do your work.

In this session, we will investigate what makes up your Major Gift Mindset and how it influences your performance. You’ll identify your mindset, ways to recognize how your inner monologue supports or sabotages your work, and learn actions to align your mindset with your performance goals. The conversation will help you develop heightened self awareness by understanding where your relationship with money falls on the scarcity - abundance scale and how your perceptions of wealth influence your thoughts, emotions, and actions during your major gift work. By the end of the session, you’ll recognize the role your mindset plays in frontline fundraising, understand your feelings about money & wealth, and how your inner monologue supports or sabotages your outcomes.

Advancement practitioners, globally, are experiencing more complex philanthropic barriers and looking for ways to prepare themselves. At the center of many challenges in the advancement profession is the practice of implementing diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging. Gather with fellow practitioners as this session will address power dynamics and conflict themes.

Go big or go home! That was how Syracuse University's team approached how they'd bring attention to the annual “Boost the ’Cuse” Day of Giving in 2023. The best way to do it? A full-day LIVE broadcast featuring a big-name host, live hits from across campus and the country, and more than 75 featured SU guests.
In a post-pandemic world, SU saw a need to make folks feel engaged and part of the action. Using a live broadcast, including guests in the studio, in the student center, all over campus, and remotely, SU used the “Boost” broadcast as a way to ensure its Day of Giving didn’t exist in an advancement vacuum, but instead included a celebratory vibe from all over campus and beyond.
In this session, the Syracuse staff responsible for the Boost the ’Cuse Broadcast will walk attendees through the process - from concept to completion - of how this ambitious project came to be. The session will include tips and tricks about tactical planning for a live broadcast, ideas on leveraging existing relationships to help build out an interesting show, ways to use a live broadcast as a vessel to showcase great content from across your institution, and lessons learned to save you time in your own efforts.
Whether you work at a large university or a small independent school, you’ll leave this session with concrete next steps to integrate rich media and an element of live engagement into your institution’s next fundraising drive.

Every year our Annual Giving team partners with our University Athletics Department and Major Gifts team to create a multi-channel campaign to solicit student-athletes’ friends and family. Join members of West Chester University Foundation’s Annual Giving team to hear how we engage with our internal and external partners, increase dollars and donors for Athletics programs, and teach the importance of philanthropy to current students (and build relationships with coaches along the way!). We will walk you through it all …our annual process, how we identified ways to improve each year, how we used the framework to expand across additional departments and share best practices for implementation.

As our sector struggles to retain advancement professionals, more organizations are following corporate America's lead by offering better professional development as a key element of retention planning. AJ Bauer and Dean Castaldo will share how they have benefited from the investment that the United States Naval Academy Foundation has made in their development, as well as how they are now carrying the torch for the organization as they step into new leadership roles.