The US and global economies are going through extraordinary change. Kristina will explain what happened in the past several years that has brought us to this point, and what we are likely to see in the coming year.

This session will follow the evolution of giving a PreK-12 day school located just outside of Boston, MA. Learn what went into taking this school from very little in terms of a culture of philanthropy to having a branded annual fund and yearlong appeal planner. You will hear messaging and timing strategies, view design samples for a planned year of appeals, and see a data snapshot of the outcomes. Leave with ideas and inspiration for curating a culture of giving at your school.

This session will help guide offices that have prioritized overall database health and have formalized campaigns, funds, and appeals. As data and strategy become more important in guiding our work, comprehensive and consistent gift batching will enable you to produce queries and reports to better inform your work. Identifying current data needs while anticipating future needs, gift batching is critical in producing information that identifies strategies and advances your efforts. Learn how to identify your important data points and let your data work for you!

Regardless of school size and number of team members, creating a gift batching process and procedure will enhance all areas of your advancement efforts. This session is geared for all professional levels who work in their institutions advancement database and will primarily focus on Raiser's Edge.

How do our schools center other voices when the focus of our work is on the top of the pyramid, and that skews white? Devon Wilson-Hill (Shady Hill) and Zachary Sheets (Community Music Center of Boston) have held significant tenures at their organizations through a time where the public at large is recommitted to a modern civil rights movement. Progressively White spaces often get in trouble for getting in their own way of progress yet these two century old institutions have been eager and actively working at shifting the conversation. CMCB with a Black director has shifted Board Governance and Composition of leadership while continuing to raise money and increase their individual donor portfolio. Shady Hill School values racially and socially economically diverse presence on the board and has rewritten the Board bylaws to be explicit while launching major gift initiatives. When the question is: how does organization framing center people of color when the majority of your audience skews white? What explanatory commas do you have to make, versus (rightly or wrongly) choose to make." Come learn what these two institutions are choosing to make to be bold, leaders and changemakers.

Working in a small(er) school community has major pluses and challenges. Best practices from larger shops cannot often simply be “shrunk down to size” to work for smaller shops, and the foundation of processes and resources may not have your shop starting from the same place as “peer” institutions. In this session, Phil Consuegra and Jenn Devine will use their experiences in Higher Ed and in larger independent school advancement offices to outline the benefits and challenges they faced when they took over the leadership of younger development programs. Attendees will leave the session with a deeper ability to understand the skills needed to create an advancement-centered strategic plan specific to their institution, how to prioritize needs vs. wants, how to utilize institutional partners, and how to analyze the ROIs on their various initiatives.

An effective partnership between a major gifts team and the research team is essential to successful prospect management. At Phillips Exeter, we have implemented a frequent review of major gift portfolios that includes both the major gift officers and members of the research team. Data is used to identify opportunities within the portfolio and to help prioritize major gift officer activity. Determining who should be removed from a portfolio is often as important as discovering and adding new prospects. A strong collaboration between can and should ensure a strong and healthy pipeline of donors.

Lean into equity while raising more money from more people. Sound impossible? Join us and learn how Thacher School ditched its auction in 2020 and never looked back. It raised 2x the revenue from 5x the constituents, engaging parents, alumni, parents of alumni, grandparents, and friends. Even in a post-pandemic world, this innovative model has continued to work for Thacher. During this session, regardless of the technology used, you will receive the strategies and confidence to rethink traditional fundraising events, and ensure institutional sustainability. This is your chance to strengthen philanthropy while building community.

Powerful things are possible when Advancement Offices and student programming come together. At the Pennington School, this partnership through the Horizon Experience, has provided us the opportunity to navigate the opportunities and challenges of mentorship, to build engagement through alumni and parent participation in on-campus programming, and to co-create experiences that help our seniors reflect on the importance of their high school experience and transition into becoming supportive alumni.

Working with alumni and parents presents both challenges and opportunities. While it can be very fruitful, it also requires careful planning and coordination to be beneficial for students, alumni, and parents. The key is setting the right expectations. During this session, we will discuss how each engagement opportunity can be presented so that it is a good fit for all parties. Conversations about hosting a student is critical because we don’t always have a match for each volunteer. Volunteers coming to campus who are business professionals leading a discussion can have work emergencies arise disrupting plans and backup programming is necessary. Fortunately, the use of zoom can assist in these situations, as well as provide an opportunity to engage alumni who are dynamic but not local and their involvement adds value.

Making sure you are truly ready for a Comprehensive Campaign is vital to the ultimate success of the endeavor. As a development professional what do I need to know before embarking on a 5-7 year campaign? Hear from three seasoned professionals who combined have more than 90 years of fundraising experience both as in house development heads and as consultants. This session will cover, Campaign Success Factors, Assessing the Right Time for a Campaign, Identifying Campaign priorities, Defining the prospect pool, Bridging the Strategic Plan to Campaign implementation, Identifying Campaign Leadership, Role of the Board of Trustees and Governance Committee, Goal Setting, Pros and Cons of Conducting a Feasibility Study, Selecting a consulting partner and RFP process.

Over the last five years, Collegiate School in New York City has made institutional decisions that have been challenging for its alumni community to accept: in 2018, it left its home of 125 years, where alumni "grew up," for a gleaming new building a mile away; and, this past year, it redesigned its long-serving mascot. Add to these the limitations on in-person events imposed by the pandemic, some unwanted publicity, and the way that all independent schools have been caught in the middle of the culture wars, and the result is disruption to the usual means of alumni engagement. In this session, we will discuss we were able to maintain and expand our engagement with alumni through creative programming and by taking advantage of the unique strengths of Collegiate's alumni community.