Engaging volunteers as advocates and ambassadors involves fostering connections and relationships through meaningful engagement opportunities. These opportunities can take the form of volunteer boards and councils, advisors, network connectors, mentors, pipeline enhancement, and beyond. Learn how to create meaningful engagement opportunities for volunteers at all levels to support your university's mission, vision, and priorities while creating deep relationships with volunteer individuals. By creating a vibrant and supportive volunteer ecosystem, universities can maintain a strong sense of community, increase fundraising efforts, and provide lifelong value to their constituents.

Once upon a time, a few intrepid communicators at Brigham Young University embarked on a daring journey—one that would lead through thick forests of research, across deep oceans of campus conversations, and over soaring summits of strategic planning. On this journey of discovery, they found themselves listening for clues from consultants, campus partners, audiences, students, online data, and university leadership. In the end, what they learned helped BYU launch its first nationwide marketing campaign, grounded in good old fashioned storytelling and rooted in the institution’s mission and values. Now almost two years into the campaign, with hundreds of millions of ad campaign impressions, they have a quiver full of stories, a backpack stuffed with spreadsheets, and a fanny pack of ideas to share about how you can listen effectively to craft a successful marketing campaign.

Do you approach problems differently? Do you wish more collaboration was happening? Have you ever felt like you’re not a "traditional" fundraiser?
In an ever-evolving philanthropic landscape, the traditional norms of fundraising are giving way to a vibrant tapestry of diverse backgrounds, approaches, and personalities which requires more diverse fundraising professionals.
This presentation aims to celebrate and harness the power of these differences, showcasing how they contribute to the success of philanthropic endeavors. From overcoming Imposter Syndrome to embracing DEI as a guiding principle to bringing your best self to work to being a catalyst for collaboration; our presentation will help you feel empowered because you are YOU!
By highlighting these distinct perspectives, we can create a more inclusive and effective future for philanthropic engagement.
In a world where philanthropy's impact is shaped by the convergence of diverse experiences, personalities, and ideas: this presentation serves as encouragement to challenge the status quo. Through embracing collaboration, championing diversity, and being YOU; we can redefine what it means to be a fundraiser and usher in a new era of meaningful and sustainable change.

Many institutions have models that measure audience engagement. Similar to a Swiss army knife, it is often the case that only one to two “blades” get regularly used. Are there more creative ways to use these models to their full potential?

The University of Calgary strategically embeds depth measures — engagement points that go beyond a passive click or mention — from our Engagement Scoring Model into planning market segmentation, the construction of prospect pipelines, and projecting future and at-risk engagement trajectories. UCalgary’s model is iterative and we are constantly improving it to accurately capture the changing landscape of opportunities and initiatives available for alumni, donors, and community members to engage with the university.

Join UCalgary to learn how we utilize every one of the tools in our Swiss army knife and pave the road to the bold goal of tripling engagement by 2030 as part of the institutional Ahead of Tomorrow strategy.

Private universities have been raising millions of dollars from parents every year for decades, yet many public universities have yet to tap into this oft-forgotten constituency. Parents can be a lucrative source of philanthropic support if approached in a thoughtful, cohesive and consistent way. In this presentation Michelle Glenn, Senior Executive Director of Advancement, Campus Colleges and Schools, University of Utah, will cover the internal obstacles one may need to overcome before starting a parent giving program, the differences between cultivating parents vs alumni, and the key components of a successful parent giving program.

The biggest word in fundraising today is "pipeline." We need to meet immediate revenue goals, but we’re also focused on how we’re accelerating the path to major, planned, and transformational mega-gifts. The structure of traditional advancement doesn’t often support this multi-level focus, but the shops that have a embraced sustainable pipeline strategy are winning both now and for tomorrow. Join this conversation about how annual, leadership and major giving have changed. We’ll share direct examples of success, along with benchmarking data from hundreds of institutions. Answer key questions like: How do you start or accelerate a leadership program, crucial to revenue and pipeline efforts? How can we best support our gift officers with actionable data? And where does all this new tech come in? Join a conversation about how we can tackle these challenges by overcoming key internal hurdles, creating a better donor experience and charting a path to meet our short- and long-term goals.

Celebrating major gifts with a press release is common practice for universities. Using the press release to secure earned media coverage and support donor stewardship can be rewarding and also can pose challenges for the institution and the donor. Learn what works, what doesn't, and how and when to involve comms teams to help make the most of the gift announcement.

Stanford’s Office of Development (OOD) recently hosted its first in-person, multi-day staff retreat to build and nurture our team culture post-pandemic. OOD Connects brought together hybrid and remote colleagues from coast to coast, many of whom had never met face-to-face or been to campus, for three days of festivities focused on strengthening our sense of community, learning together, boosting collaboration, and connecting with the university’s mission. Planned by peers for peers, attendees listened to keynote speakers, participated in breakout sessions, took campus tours, gathered in communities of practice and with teams, and bonded during social activities including a petting zoo and staff recognition awards. Learn about our pitch and planning process, staff outreach, successes, challenges, and outcomes while also gathering ideas to support belonging and connection across your organization. You might even see an alpaca photo or two!

Increasingly colleges and universities are relying on transformative gifts to advance large-scale institutional priorities. We will explore the best practices needed to move from big ideas to big impact. Three senior advancement professionals from UC San Francisco, University of Washington, and Oregon State University will share lessons of working closely with academic and administrative partners and donors to re-envision what institutions of higher education can achieve. Our speakers will share their insights as to what has worked, challenges to be aware of and how to create ecosystems of cultural and operational readiness.

We all know that being aligned around a common goal and working in unison is how you achieve success but what does it look like in a complex university environment undergoing a campaign? In this session, we will explore how the University of San Diego structured its advancement staffing, aligned each department within Advancement around campaign goals and processes, built custom strategies for specific schools and projects within the comprehensive campaign, established a campaign budget, and more. Lessons learned and pitfalls to avoid will also be shared.