In this interactive event, two teams of experienced fundraisers will tackle a surprise fundraising challenge, live, in a cooking-show inspired competition! They'll accept your feedback as they "cook," and you'll determine their fate over three rounds of surprises. See it unfold live as the teams respond and share their perspectives on today's biggest advancement challenges. You’ll decide what happens each round and who will be crowned the Throwdown! champions. Be ready to offer your take on key topics, including organizing campaigns, balancing revenue and participation, and engaging an inclusive donor base. It's a CASE session like nothing you've seen before!

alumni UBC launched a number of scalable and budget-friendly initiatives throughout the pandemic to engage regionally based alumni in the absence of staff travel and large in person events. From their unique Around the World virtual event series, to a new magazine section featuring alumni living around the world, to the launch of My Town Meetups where regional alumni can host casual gatherings for their location, alumni UBC has been busy connecting their global alumni community in creative ways through the most challenging of times. This presentation will provide specifics about each of these programs, how collaboration has made these pilots possible, what the team has learned - and how these new initiatives have changed the way alumni UBC thinks about regional alumni engagement.

When expertly carried out, developing a program that educates, encourages and empowers donors to give both current and future gifts of assets can be transformative in the life of any organization. Larger gifts come from donor wealth and not disposable income. Developing a robust planned giving program enables your donors from all walks of life to give larger gifts. In this session, you will discover what is needed to start and fine tune your planned giving program efforts. You will learn best tactics to obtain maximum ROI from existing donors who will indicate new interest in learning more about their giving options. With marketing, stewardship, sound policies and an appropriate infrastructure in place, you will find the potential of planned giving to be highly rewarding, as it financially empowers your organization to cast new vision far into the foreseeable future.

An opportunity to onboard five new employees at the same time led to the development of a comprehensive training program providing sessions on advancement, frontline fundraiser work, introductions to key campus partners and much more. This cohort made up of development officers and a research analyst not only learned a great deal to be successful in their roles and hit the ground running but developed strong relationships through this shared experience. One cohort member commented that it immediately created a unified sense of community. Involving our campus leaders provided important information to the cohort as well as highlighted the importance and professionalism within the advancement professions while strengthening our culture of philanthropy. All advancement team members were invited to attend the sessions they were interested in learning more about to support their own professional development. We hope to refine this model and use it as we continue to build our team. In this session we’ll review our collaborative planning process, variety of methods used and successful outcomes. We are not the first to provide comprehensive onboarding to advancement, but this new approach had a tremendous impact on our entire division team that can be modified for schools of any size.

As the OSU Foundation prepared for the launch of the public phase of our campaign, we saw an opportunity to ensure that we were building a robust pipeline of potential board volunteers that reflected our community, promoted diversity, and targeted the skills necessary to be successful in our campaign. To achieve these goals the presenters worked with senior leadership to develop a volunteer profile to model what a strong pipeline would look like. This profile was then used to review the current board member skills and demographic attributes to better understand areas of opportunity and growth. Once new volunteer candidates were identified, we worked with our analytical team to develop a pipeline Tableau dashboard with information regarding candidate education, skills, location, and engagement to better see the pipeline in its entirety. We also created a dashboard that provided current board members a view of how the demographic makeup of the executive committee would change as candidates from the pipeline are added. During our presentation, we will discuss our process for creating our pipeline of candidates with diverse skills and backgrounds and how we have been working with the current board to bring diversity to the executive committee and subcommittees.

The resources and expertise available from outside branding consultants and designers are impressive, but the cost not always practical. Learn how to draw on your own creative power and authentic knowledge to bring even the biggest projects in-house, no matter how small your staff or your budget. ### Nine steps: 1. Be patient. You can’t start your redesign tomorrow! 2. Trust each other. You’ve got this, and you have to believe it. 3. Cross-train. A skills bottleneck spells doom. 4. Know individual strengths, and play to them. Focus on the work your team members do best and like most. 5. Get—or stay—really organized. Systems are another vital time-saver. 6. Let your community do the talking. Invite everyone to tell you what makes your college distinctive—and listen to their answers! 7. Be inclusive, but only work with willing subjects. Prioritize those who have not traditionally been asked to share their experience, but don’t tokenize. 8. When you’re ready to apply what you’ve learned, start someplace big. You can’t do it all at once, so pick a high-level piece and let it trickle down. 9. Trust yourself, and fake it ‘til you make it.

Communication expectations continue to shift among our graduates – meeting those expectations can lead to higher engagement. In this session, we'll share results of our national survey of over 2,000 alumni on areas of interest, expectations, and opportunities to build engagement and support. We'll then share examples of how Washington State University connects with alumni through segmented, targeted communications to further deepen their relationship with the university. Participants will leave this session with concrete ideas to inform communication strategies and next steps to broaden and deepen overall alumni engagement.

Just like us, our alums are humans who crave transparency and realness. As we aim to break through the noise of inboxes and capture the limited mindshare of our alums, your authenticity and relatability will be what draws your alums back into the fold. Personalized videos are a scalable, sustainable, and proven way to build more authentic relationships with your alums. Video stats speak for themselves: Using video in cold outreach increases reply rates by 26%. (Source: SalesLoft) Donor retention increases as much as 65% when donors receive a personalized thank you video. And 81% of donors who made a gift in the last five years and then received a personalized video made another gift. (Source: EverTrue analysis) Humans connect with humans. In this session, we will discuss why video matters and how you can partner with your “campus celebrities” (favorite professors, deans, presidents, long time employees, and student leaders) to bring authentic, fun, heartfelt, and impactful messages from campus to your alums. We’ll break down segmentation strategy for 1:1, 1:few, and 1:many video outreach. And we’ll talk about how tracking video engagement drives more prospects into gift officer pipeline to ultimately build relationships, inspire generosity, and change lives.

Panel discussion will begin at 12:30. Join us to consider trends in perceptions of higher education’s value, explore the root causes of the challenge for our industry, and discover the potential impact of our collective action to change the trajectory. The panel is an opportunity to amplify the voices of leaders and work of institutions in the larger national debate around the value of higher education. Panelists will look at actions that have made a difference in past campaigns that higher education can emulate. The discussion will also focus on how collectively, colleges and universities can create a narrative around the four areas that college alumni, parents, prospective students, and others stakeholders, see as the most tangible benefits of the college experience: • Scientific innovation • Economic advancement • Personal achievement • Community connection

Students are students for a fraction of the time that they will be alumni yet so little work is done with current students to teach them what it means to be engaged and involved as an alum. Most students-alumni-donor pipeline best practices currently in use were designed for a now-outdated constituency. The world has changed. The demographics of students have shifted, including more first-generation and students from underrepresented backgrounds. We now live in a digital world where online and hybrid opportunities for engagement are no longer outliers, they are practically required. A consumerist approach to education points to a more transactional experience rather than an immersive, developmental one. We must find ways to demonstrate the value of engaged alumni and donors and acknowledge that the student-alumni-donor paradigm has shifted. One-size-fits-all approaches are no longer acceptable. Drawing on findings from their research, Drs. Gilbert and Brinton have put together a toolkit that advancement professionals and campus partners can use to teach Alumni in Training not only the “how-to” but also the “why” of alumni engagement. This interactive session will provide opportunities for attendees to explore the toolkit in action and learn ways to jumpstart a student’s alumni role identity.