Looking to enhance your skills to become the best fundraiser you can? Wondering how to position yourself for the next promotion? Contemplating your next career move? Hear from two of the UK’s senior advancement leaders on the skills and attributes that mark out the fundraising superstars. Kristin and Liesl will offer practical advice from their experiences on what is important and how you can build your expertise and stand out from the crowd.

In a rapidly evolving higher education landscape, alumni relations professionals are uniquely positioned to drive student success beyond traditional engagement models. This session will explore innovative strategies for aligning alumni involvement with institutional priorities that directly benefit current students - academically, professionally, and personally. From mentoring programmes and career networking to real-world learning experiences and financial support, participants will examine how to build intentional, student-centered alumni initiatives that demonstrate measurable impact. Attendees will explore how to foster meaningful, reciprocal relationships that benefit students while deepening alumni affinity and commitment.

Trends in international student recruitment are in a constant state of flux due to shifting policies, evolving perceptions and changing market dynamics. This session will explore what lies ahead for global student flows to the UK - and how institutions can adapt. Andrew will open with a summary of the current policy landscape including key developments across the ‘Big Four’ destination markets and the regulatory trends that are helping redefine the global international student sector. Rachel will then explore what these shifts mean on the ground - from what the changing student perceptions of the UK actually mean, to the growing importance of TNE and branch campuses or what changes in the Immigration White Paper around Basic Compliance Assessment levels might mean for which markets institutions continue to recruit from. To close, we’ll reflect on what this all means for marketing and recruitment teams: How should they respond? What support do international teams need? And what does your CFO need to know as policy, perception, and financial pressures converge? This session is ideal for professionals working in strategy, recruitment, partnerships and planning and will offer sharp, forward-looking insights into the future of international recruitment and tips on how to stay ahead of the curve.

Connect with fellow early-career fundraisers to share lessons learned, compare approaches and build confidence in your professional journey.

New to alumni relations? This informal networking session is a friendly way to meet peers, share experiences, and pick up practical advice from others building their careers in the field.

What would you do with the freedom to build an alumni program from scratch? Just fifteen years after its opening, the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) hired its first full-time alumni relations manager to do just that. With more than 700 alumni with more than 70 nationalities located across more than 40 countries, there is nothing but opportunity. Learn more about ISTA’s alumni strategy development and implementation and what the next three years look like for ISTA alumni. You will hopefully leave this session feeling (re)invigorated about alumni relations work and with ideas about how to tackle any roadblocks you’re facing.

What do students want from your university marketing and brand messaging? We dive into the latest student recruitment trends, drawn from Keystone Education Group's survey of 10s of thousands of students who want to study in the UK (domestically and internationally). We delve into the impact of 2025’s white paper, and how it affected students’ views of the UK as a study destination. Plus, examine the role of university brand in prospective student decision making, as industry leaders lift the lid on what students want from a UK institution, from the number of touch points students need to enrol to the importance of a university’s visual identity. Through an exploration of recent brand transformation projects, Mammoth will highlight the importance of gathering robust stakeholder insights to inform brand strategy and visual identity. A brand project should be recognised as a community endeavour, not solely a marketing task, although the strategic role of marketing in coordinating, convening and delivering a successful project must not be underestimated. Without the voice of the community at the heart of a brand project, how could authenticity be captured? The authentic voice that becomes a powerful gravitational pull for like-minded individuals – be they students, academics, business leaders. It’s real, it’s evidenced, it’s compelling. It’s who the university is and what they stand for, and this increasingly affects GenZ choices in particular - the primary audience for university income generation.

“Which platform do you use?” When talking about CRM (customer relationship management) systems, the discussion is often reduced to technical challenges and comparisons of service providers. Also, this work is often de-centralized and led by interests guided by internal organizational issues or technical solutions instead of a clear vision of what the institution wants. We believe that the successful implementation of CRM is a deeper question of institutional culture: how do we collect, share, and use data on our present and prospective partner for better decision-making – and more importantly: why do we do it? In this workshop, we share challenges and best practices on one organization that has successfully travelled on this data driven road and another in the process of restructuring its CRM approach. We will also discuss the changing landscape of CRM implementation with new AI solutions. In this workshop, we share hands-on how this cultural revolution has taken and can take place, and we invite you to bring your insights and questions to the discussion. Aalto University has gradually, over a seven-year timespan, implemented a ‘one CRM’ policy which integrates not only alumni and donors but also partner companies, externally funded research projects, start-ups emerging from the university’s innovation ecosystem and customers of campus services into a single CRM system. This was the result of several years background work mostly focusing on building CRM culture, ensuring management support and mapping out CRM benefits in terms of maintaining and strengthening the university’s partnership management and fundraising. In Aalto University, new user groups are onboarded to CRM on a project basis with separately defined process and steps. At Chalmers, the entire Chalmers Group – consisting of the University, the Foundation, and the Chalmers companies – is moving toward a single CRM system. Data from the two existing platforms will be integrated and new user groups will be added. At the same time, advancement is looking into more data-driven and AI-assisted prospect analysis and relations management.

BCU’s Alumni Society has become a hugely successful ambassador hub this year. Members inspire current students and fellow graduates by giving back to BCU through events, workshops, campaigns, and more. In this session, the Alumni Team will demonstrate how the relationships they have formed with successful graduates paved the way for the creation of the Society, how embedding a sense of pride amongst alumni has made them key advocates, and why an ambassador hub is vital to centralising and maintaining relationships across the wider university.

From fundraising to social media, student recruitment campaigns to alumni profiles, how are we curating and creating the best content we can? How can we harness authentic voices and experiences to tell the story of our universities and build brand consistently? What content performs best? And how can we maximise the content we have across different channels and purposes?

How do you make an institutional strategy feel relevant, accessible and important to an alumni community who may feel far away, both in terms of distance and years? In this interactive discussion session, Jenn will share examples of how Imperial has engaged its global alumni community with its new Science for Humanity strategy through communications, events and networks, and will invite you to share your own successes, and learning points from the experiments that didn’t go so well. This is a safe space to float ideas and be open about the barriers and hurdles we all face, so we can collectively come up with practical next steps, and answer the question “why should alumni care?”

Endowment fundraising can feel daunting, yet it is one of the most powerful ways to secure long-term financial sustainability for your institution. In this interactive campfire conversation, join Liz Lyle (Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford) and Helen McIlveen (CCS Fundraising) as they share sector trends, practical examples, and tested approaches to identifying and inspiring endowment giving prospects. This session will be a collaborative space for sharing successes, swapping strategies, and learning from each other’s experiences. Together, we’ll explore what works, what doesn’t, and how to craft approaches that resonate with prospective donors. Attendees will leave with practical actions to take back to their own contexts.

Success stories start with a strategy. It might be called a dream or a vision, but added to it must be inspiration, solid thinking and a plan. And you need power, oomph and persistence to make your story stick. This session will cover how this has played out for brands Daryl knows like the back of her hand, like Dove, Cadbury and Vodafone, plus other world class examples. It will stress the importance of creating something lasting, built on solid foundations, with a laser like focus on stakeholder insight, relevance, differentiation and a connection to the wider world combining to create an overarching and memorable theme. She will also demonstrate how she has landed this thinking powerfully with external and internal audiences.