Step into the future and discover how the latest AI-powered advancements can elevate the impact of all your communications, from marketing videos to social media and email campaigns. “Lights, Camera, AI” is packed with practical advice from Stanford senior creative producer Steve Fyffe and University of Oregon senior director of strategic engagement Michelle Joyce that will save you time, money and countless hours of experimentation. It’s designed for anyone who wants to take advantage of AI to work faster and smarter.

Steve will guide attendees through the process of creating captivating and inclusive videos with global reach through AI-powered brainstorming, voiceovers and translation. Michelle will show you how to train your own, customized GPT models, integrate plug-ins, conduct in-depth research and streamline your email management.

Don't miss this opportunity to harness the power of AI and take your university’s storytelling, marketing and communications to new heights.

Ghostwriting, or writing for someone else, can be a frightful journey. In this session, learn top tips for taking a message (e.g. speech or letter) you’re writing for a dean, board chair, or other campus leader from request to delivery. How do you start? Where can you find information and inspiration? How do you capture someone else’s voice — even when you rarely interact with them? What processes can help create structure and momentum in successfully completing the project? We will also meet a few demons that can stand in our way — Imposter syndrome? Eek! Mean responses? No! — and share ways to slay them. To cap off the session, we will brainstorm ideas for messaging a few different scenarios.

Have you ever wanted to engage donors more fully in an authentic and meaningful way with faculty, staff, students, alumni and donors? The Utah Valley University (UVU) Strategic Engagement team’s initiative, the EverGREEN Ambassador Program, was conceived in line with the university’s inaugural comprehensive fundraising campaign. The EverGREEN Ambassador Program was launched to strategically engage with key donors after the formal public campaign launch. As part of the fundraising campaign, the EverGREEN Ambassadors Program invited UVU’s supporters to serve as extensions of the Institutional Advancement Strategic Engagement team. In this session we will explore ways to identify principal-level donors for an integrated influencer marketing campaign. Learn how you can establish and scale an influencer marketing program for your donors and alumni with meaningful and engaging content.

Today’s fundraisers are expected to raise more money than ever for their institutions, yet many frontline staff spends less than half their time cultivating and soliciting prospects. At Caltech, we want our gift officers to focus on the work they are hired to do – raising philanthropic funds for the Institution. During the pandemic, we studied how our development assistants were supporting the gift officers and decided to reorganize the team as an administrative cohort that was built for optimizing fundraising success. Today, our development assistants are critical partners for the success of our fundraisers. Join us for this session and see through the lens of the fundraiser, the manager, and the development assistant. Learn how we transformed the dynamics between fundraisers and development assistants, and how investing resources in this critical support area will boost the ROI of your institution’s fundraising program.

Scholarships That Stand the Test of Time - The Sequel!
Navigating the complexities of donor intent and scholarship criteria is critical to long-term successful administration of scholarships – and easier said than done. Oregon State University Foundation’s Scholarship Task Force, working with colleagues across the Foundation and University over the course of three years, developed and implemented guidelines for working with donors to inspire scholarship gifts that stand the test of time. The Task Force is shifting the culture of scholarship fundraising from one that was almost entirely focused on honoring donor preferences to one that balances donor intent and university/student needs. This session will illustrate the benefits of consistent guidelines for donor conversations, partnering with campus leaders, and use of specific and strategic language in gift agreements. We will share the challenges we faced along the way and the professional satisfaction gained through this work. This session will enhance what we shared at CASE VIII '23, including new lessons learned and strategies employed. Our goal is to help CASE institutions maximize the impact of scholarship fundraising on student success through integrity and transparency with donors.

Offering mentorship opportunities for your alumni is the ultimate alumni engagement strategy. Mentorship allows your alumni to connect to students and other alumni, share their insights and resources, make a tangible impact, and develop a deeper bond with their alma mater and community. The value of mentorship is priceless for your organization, students, and alumni, and implementing a success mentorship program is a win-win. The Alumni Career Engagement team at UCLA offers a variety of mentorship opportunities, and this program will share small, mid, and large-scale mentorship programs examples. Attendees will take away program ideas that suit their institutions, staff size, and budgets best.

This session will teach you how to grow and run a successful Give Day program at your own institution through the lens of Western Washington University's FY23 Give Day--one of the largest in District VIII, raising over $1.1 MM from over 3,100 donors--and how an Annual Giving team of just two people leveraged their relationships with peers, colleagues, campus partners, and external constituents to pull it off.

In particular, we'll discuss strategies to:

1. Plan and launch your Give Day successfully
2. Identify, prioritize, and build relationships with campus partners who will help your Give Day be most successful. Western has hundreds of people across campus participate in planning and fundraising on Give Day every year; it's quite unique and we'll tell you how to do it, too!
3. Leverage relationships with third-party vendors to help supplement the skills on your own team
4. Use Give Day to build your talent pool in Advancement, especially among young professionals
5. Use Give Day to build relationships with external stakeholders
6. Elevate your campaign with hero student stories told throughout your print, digital and social channels to reflect your university's values and culture.

We welcome discussion, so bring all your questions!

Inspiring donors and raising philanthropic support for society’s most complex issues — those where tangible outcomes and positive impact may not be realized for years — is a challenge facing nonprofits, including educational institutions, worldwide. From climate change to homelessness to racial inequity to social justice, philanthropy is critical to tackling society’s most complex issues, and institutions that innovate and inspire philanthropic investment are best prepared to achieve substantive, positive change. In this session, we will address real-life challenges encountered when complex social issues are involved and provide creative solutions for addressing them.

Naming recognition requires more than calculating appropriate gift thresholds. Naming recognition is an expression of the university’s values and can become a reputational issue. The panelists will share best practices in the development of naming policies, how to express naming recognition in gift agreements, and protocols to consider should your institution be faced with a demand to remove a name.

Get ready to chart your course for success in building impactful volunteer relationships and unlocking the full potential of your organization! This session will take you along with Mount Saint Mary's University on their journey to develop a comprehensive volunteer engagement plan. The learning objectives are: develop strategic relationships with key internal and external stakeholders to create cross-campus alumni engagement opportunities that meet alums' various talents and affinities; strengthen your skills to synthesize, process, and prioritize multiple viewpoints and programmatic needs into a holistic volunteer engagement plan; learn how to create an effective alumni survey process; and create a roadmap to design your own volunteer engagement plan.