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A Match Made in Heaven: Gaining Legacies from Supporters & Growing Lifetime Giving
With legacies being the fastest-growing charitable income stream in the coming decade and bequests to Higher Education being at the forefront of this growth, the potential for our sector is significant. This session will address how a legacy gift should not be seen as an alternative to lifetime giving, instead of working to grow and complement each other, and will cover topics such as:
- Why HEIs should be investing in legacy giving
- How to engage your loyal supporters in legacy giving and create a legacy campaign
- How to talk about legacies and how to ask for them
- How to engage your legacy pledgers to increase their lifetime giving too
Increasing Connections with Diverse Audiences
How inclusive are your alumni activities? Do they reflect the diversity of your alumni and student communities and succeed in holding up positive role models who can inspire and encourage others - particularly those from marginalised groups? These were the questions we set out to answer in our own review of alumni relations activities at Bournemouth University in early 2020. Prompted by the Black Lives Matter campaign and a growing understanding of the importance of diversity in all its forms, we analysed our communications, campaigns and volunteering and set out to make positive changes. Join this session to hear about our journey to deliver a more inclusive alumni relations service, including practical tips and insights into lessons learnt along the way.
The Feisty 50 Fintess Challenge: Engagement in The Name Of Health And Wellbeing
For the first 50 days of 2021, Durham alumni, family and friends set out to test their fitness, hang on to those New Year's resolutions, and come together in the name of health and wellbeing in a way, unlike anything we’ve ever done before. As a community, we rekindled our motivation, inspired one another, smashed goals and personal records, lost weight, had a little break in our lockdown routines, and worked out with our Durham friends around the world.
How the Pandemic Helped a University Work Better Together
Marketing in large, devolved universities has always been a challenge. Reaching diverse audiences through multiple departments and marketing teams can too often mean siloed working, duplication of effort and confusing messages. Taking in-person offer holder events off the table and adding Covid to the mix could only make matters worse, right? Well, what if it had the opposite effect? This is a tale of how a pandemic allowed a team to bring departments and resources together, usher in a spirit of cross-college collaboration, accelerate the development of our first uni-wide Offer Holder Hub and take Offer Holder Days online, delivering over 200 online sessions. Find out what we learned about influencing, pivoting, problem-solving and fudging it to get a happy ending for our future students.
#BumpItForward: How a Campaign Challenged Our Fundraising Status Quo
#BumpItForward was created during the second COVID-19 wave - asking donors to pay forward the cost of their vaccine to protect healthcare workers in African countries until the vaccine reached them. Created and launched in less than 72 hours, the campaign far exceeded its funding goal, but also challenged institutional preconceptions about public understanding and engagement with our cause and raised our ambitions about what might be possible for future campaigns.
Building an Equitable Student and Donor Culture at NMITE from Day One!
NMITE is taking a radical approach to their recruitment ensuring inclusivity and diversity in engineering education, attracting more than 50% of women to study with them. A dynamic leadership team, a unique fundraising case for support and the crucial role of donors, they have all the elements to build a successful engagement and fundraising environment. President Elena Rodriguez Falcon is passionate about ensuring diversity and inclusion alongside a desire to create a strong culture of philanthropy, with their pioneer cohort partially funded through philanthropy. They are actively engaging with female business leaders and philanthropists as mentors, ambassadors, and donors. Learn from two inspiring leaders seeking to ensure the diversity of their inaugural cohort and their donors, while forging a new model of Engineering Education.
Events Management through a global pandemic lens
The global pandemic affected us all substantially and our events programmes especially. However, it also created opportunities for better engagement and more impact.
During this session Ieva Ose and Tom Blansjaar will share their experiences on events before the pandemic, the opportunities which were created during the pandemic, and also what benefits have presented themselves for the future of our events.
Ieva will share her best practice and success story – an alumni event “RTU Grand Graduation” for more than 9k participants, how that was created and then modified due to pandemic situation. While Tom will talk about online event opportunities and how these later strengthened his post-COVID / hybridevents models for the future.
During this session you’ll see real examples and learnings from delivering alumni events which we hope you will be able to take away and inject into your own events management processes.
We’ll also look to find answers to questions around: ‘whether online events deliver the same kind of value to in person events’; and, ‘how to deliver value in today’s challenging events environment’.
Also during the session you’ll have an opportunity to share your experience and best practices with each other, as well as have an ongoing discussion about the future of events after the pandemic.
How to Close the Insight Gap & Embed Experience into Your Marketing & Admissions
You’ve got a problem. No, really. It’s costing your institution hundreds - possibly thousands of ideal-fit students every year. That problem is the Insight Gap - the chasm between what it's really like to be part of your institution and what a prospective student perceives it to be from your website and communications channels. None of them can authentically replicate the feeling, sense of identity, or inclusiveness that makes your institution unique. Told you it was a problem. In this session, you’ll appreciate why the experience of being part of your institution makes you stand out, understand why the Insight Gap is potentially a problem (even if you’ve only just heard of it), and hear how some leading UK institutions are embedding experience into their strategies, with the help of their student ambassadors.
Small Shop Support Group
Do you run a small shop? Have challenging targets, a tiny team, and no idea where to start? JOIN US. Part workshop/part support group, in this practical session, we tackle the real problems we all face and take pen to paper to sketch out the year ahead.
From not enough hours in a day, how to manage expectations, how to find fundraising projects, how to do the stuff that matters, how to deal with people constantly talking about low hanging fruit, or how to build a culture of philanthropy outside of your office doors, no issue is too big or small. Tweet your challenges to @brownrach and we will cover as many as possible.
We can’t promise to solve them all, but we aim to send you on your way with somewhere to start.
European Universities Initiative - What Changes Will It Bring to the Development?
The European Commission has launched the European Universities Initiative: "The aim of this initiative is to bring together a new generation of creative Europeans able to cooperate across languages, borders and disciplines to address societal challenges and skills shortages faced in Europe." Universities are developing consortiums with the ultimate goal to merge and become large multinational European universities. RTU is part of European University of Technology (EUt) and one of the tasks is creating a Foundation that will support EUt and ensure the involvement of private investors. How alumni relations and development will be shaped there? There are more questions than answers for now but we all must prepare for this future as European Commission is decisively investing in this idea.