Board members should be your institution’s most passionate ambassadors—but how do you inspire them to lead with both influence and investment? This high-impact session shares lessons learned from real campaigns and institutional transformations where Board engagement became a catalyst for launching a successful capital campaign. Discover strategies for setting clear giving expectations, activating peer-to-peer fundraising, and building a Board culture rooted in philanthropy. Walk away with practical tools and inspiring examples to move your Board from passive oversight to powerful partnership.

Faculty Involvement: Igniting Lifelong Learning and Alumni Engagement

Join the University of Virginia’s Lifetime Learning team to explore how they energize constituents with a thought-provoking Saturday morning lecture series. This session will share insights into engaging faculty presenters in your alumni outreach efforts. Learn how to develop educational offerings using your all-star faculty to foster meaningful connections, boost engagement, and inspire philanthropic support. Discover how academic excellence and school spirit can team up to deliver a victory for your institution.

The UVA Lifetime Learning team will share with you the history of their popular 20-year-old program, which has been engaging alumni, parents, and friends with compelling topics such as politics, cutting-edge health research, history, architecture, near-death experiences, electric vehicles, and more. Receive insights into the challenges and rewards of partnering with schools and units across campus for these programs. Return to your institution with a model to create a successful faculty speaker series for your constituents.

For generations, American higher education has been the engine behind the nation’s progress, driving our economic prosperity, building a skilled workforce, and nurturing a vibrant democracy. But colleges and universities are experiencing a growing crisis of confidence. Once respected institutions whose importance was assumed, they have suffered a steady decline in perceived value. Just ten years ago, 57% of Americans expressed significant trust in higher education. Today, that number has plummeted to 42%. This isn’t just a concerning trend—it’s a wake-up call. There are many reasons this is happening, but a core part of the problem is the narratives used to describe the value of a college degree, which too often focus narrowly on student recruitment and the job-market return graduates receive on the cost of tuition. Left out are countless ways higher education benefits everyone, whether or not they have earned a degree. To combat this erosion of trust, CASE has partnered with marketing firm BVK to create a public service campaign to promote the value of higher education, utilizing research on how to successfully change minds and shaped by the perspectives of those who most benefit from the work that higher education does. Called “College: Proud Sponsor of America at its Best,” the campaign seeks to remind Americans that college is a public good that uplifts every facet of our society, from creating a skilled workforce and fostering economic prosperity to improving our health, promoting democracy, and protecting our national security. This session will introduce participants to the campaign and the various ways their institutions can join the movement.

The Leadership Programs team at Vanderbilt will present a pioneering model for high-end volunteer engagement and cultivation. Vanderbilt has uniquely dedicated an office to elevate and coordinate advisory councils, volunteer leaders, and strategic alumni and parent partnerships. They have developed a robust infrastructure that not only deepens institutional impact but also creates bespoke opportunities for volunteers to contribute meaningfully to university priorities. At a time when institutions are seeking innovative ways to engage their most influential supporters, Vanderbilt has a centralized, strategic approach to cultivating long-term, mission-aligned volunteer leadership. Sharing our model offers valuable insights into how higher education can transform engagement to drive outcomes in philanthropy, strategic advising, partnerships, and institutional reputation.

What if every fundraiser—regardless of role, title, or portfolio—had the confidence, tools, and support to close a $1M+ gift? At the University of Georgia, that vision is becoming a reality through a bold, university-wide initiative to elevate principal gifts. This session will explore how UGA is building a collaborative professional development program that empowers both central and unit-based fundraisers to think strategically, collaborate with each other, work donor-centrically, act in alignment with institutional priorities, and embrace all aspects of the advancement division in their work.

Through strategic coaching, shared prospect planning, and targeted skill-building, fundraisers across campus are refining their approaches to qualification, cultivation, solicitation, and stewardship of the university’s highest-capacity donors. The objective: a strengthened culture of transformational philanthropy and a robust, multi-year principal gift pipeline built on

shared goals and collaborative execution. Attendees will gain actionable insights into how to leverage existing talent, foster cross-campus alignment, and grow big-gift capacity across their advancement of teams.

What happens when you stop designing tools for fundraisers and start building them with fundraisers? At the University of South Carolina, we reimagined advancement reporting by collaborating closely with frontline fundraisers, prospect strategy teams, and leadership to create a dashboard that delivers clarity, consistency, and actionability — all in one place.

By eliminating the need to navigate multiple systems, we built a tool that enhances prospect and portfolio management, clarifies which metrics matter (and why), and fosters trust in the data. The result? A dashboard that empowers users to focus on what truly drives success: building relationships and advancing the capital campaign.

In this session, we’ll share the technical challenges we overcame — and the unexpected benefits of starting fresh with a purpose-built data source. Whether you're refreshing a legacy report or launching something new, you’ll leave with practical insights and real-world lessons to help you co-create tools that work. Attendees will learn how thoughtful design and metric transparency can drive engagement, improve pipeline development, and support campaign goals.

In today’s fast-paced digital environment, brand perception can make or break an institution’s ability to recruit students, engage alumni, and garner public support. But what happens when your institution needs a brand refresh — and your budget barely covers the basics?

This session shares the bold and strategic journey of Virginia State University (VSU) — a historically Black university — as it successfully rebranded itself with limited staff and financial resources. Led by Gwen Williams Dandridge, VSU’s Assistant Vice President for Communications, the rebrand was not just about a new logo or tagline. It was a comprehensive and intentional effort to shift perceptions, engage internal and external stakeholders, and amplify VSU’s unique story in a competitive higher education landscape.

The world of college athletics is undergoing a profound transformation. This session dives into the primary factors contributing to this new reality, exploring how recent shifts are redefining roles, responsibilities, and expectations across the board.

Planning and executing an impactful alumni affinity-based conference without a budget may sound daunting—but with the right strategy, sponsorship support, and volunteer power, it can be transformative. This session unpacks the real-world blueprint behind successful, volunteer-led conferences that create meaningful experiences, foster deep professional connections, and move affinities forward—all while maximizing limited financial resources. In looking at two case studies from Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, attendees will learn how to build a motivated volunteer team, creatively engage sponsors for monetary support, and design compelling, high-value experiences that resonate with attendees and partners alike.

University development officers are creative and strategic, but they often lack the communications resources to bring big ideas to life. At many institutions, school-based fundraisers are supported by comms staff whose time is spread thin across recruitment, internal, student, and executive comms. Development communication is often just a sliver of their responsibilities. The MCV Foundation, an independent foundation supporting VCU’s health sciences campus, saw an opportunity to solve this challenge. It built an in-house creative agency dedicated to fundraising and stewardship communications. The foundation now offers free, high-quality video, photo, writing, design and other content services to development professionals across campus. Since launching, the program has supported communications tied to more than $40 million in philanthropic contributions. This session will explore how the model works, what makes it successful, and what lessons might be applied at other institutions.