With more than 50,000 living alumni and just four frontline fundraisers, the Fowler College of Business at San Diego State University faced a clear challenge: how do you meaningfully connect with thousands of potential prospects when time and resources are limited?
Our answer was a strategic, data-informed drip marketing campaign designed to re-engage top-rated, unmanaged alumni—especially those who had drifted away from the university. The result: renewed relationships, warmer qualification calls, and a stronger major gift pipeline.

In this session, you’ll:
• Learn what drip marketing is and how to adapt it for higher education advancement.
• Explore our criteria and methodology for selecting alumni to target.
• See how we developed a timeline and message sequence to steadily build engagement.
• Discover ways to partner across campus and leverage existing resources to amplify results.

Join us for a practical, interactive session and leave with a clear blueprint for using drip campaigns to deliver key messaging at scale, re-engage disconnected constituents, and surface new major gift prospects at your institution.

How do rituals contribute to team culture? And how do they keep employees engaged? When done well, rituals can be a powerful way to reinforce team values and strengthen relationships. In this session, we’ll dive into what makes rituals work, share examples from our teams, and practice activities that will help you build your workplace community. You'll walk away with practical tips to help foster a sense of belonging, cultivate a shared identity, and inspire your teams to do their best work.

Centennial Giving Challenge: How One College Sparked a Culture of Employee Philanthropy

When San Bernardino Valley College launched its Centennial Giving Challenge in fall 2025, the goal was simple: rally employees around the college’s 100th anniversary with a bold, time-bound giving campaign. The result? Record-breaking participation, strengthened cross-campus partnerships, and a renewed sense of pride in giving back.

Join SBVC Foundation staff as they share the strategies, tools, and lessons learned from this high-energy employee giving initiative—from crafting the campaign theme to leveraging friendly competition and campus champions. This interactive session will feature a dynamic PowerPoint presentation, candid discussion, and practical takeaways you can adapt to your own institution. Bring your questions and ideas for a lively Q&A!

What if you could unlock the expertise of your alumni network to benefit your students, without the usual hurdles of a formal mentoring program? At Western Washington University, that question led to Ask A Viking, an easy-to-use tool that connects students with alumni for real-world advice in just a few clicks. In this session, discover how a simple idea grew into a thriving resource that’s helping students find their path, alumni give back on their own terms, and advancement staff deepen engagement with minimal overhead.

What happens when Advancement Services leaders from different campuses with different systems, cultures, and challenges join forces? At the Claremont Colleges, collaboration is not just a strategy; it’s a leadership pipeline, a culture shift, and an innovation lab. This panel shares practical ways to build inclusive environments, streamline operations, and turn a multi-campus model into a driver of innovation, efficiency, and team growth.

The first wave of transformation at the University of Manitoba focused on automation and scalable infrastructure — essential wins that delivered efficiency but also surfaced important cultural realities. With that foundation established, the next phase integrates applied and agentic AI, introduced with greater organizational readiness and cultural alignment. This session explores how a disciplined bottom-up approach can move institutions beyond isolated efficiency gains to sustained, enterprise-level impact. Whether you are building your automation base or preparing to layer in practical AI applications and agentic workflows, you will leave with field-tested strategies to build a durable data-driven culture and position advancement services as a long-term strategic driver.

With federal research funding facing steep cuts and growing uncertainty, the question is no longer if but how institutions will adapt. This session dives into emerging fundraising strategies to bridge the gaps left by lost grant dollars—or, at minimum, to shield students and researchers from the worst impacts during this uncertain time. Hear how UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health is tackling this challenge through creative collaborations with faculty and leadership, targeted donor engagement, and new opportunities to spotlight research for donors and the public. Join us to discover fresh ideas, exchange strategies, and explore what it takes to sustain research beyond the grant.

What happens when alumni relations leverages "careers" as a significant engagement strategy? For a decade, alumni UBC has looked for innovative ways to connect alumni with students dynamic partnerships with existing programs. This session will explore how career-focused initiatives can serve as a conduit for deeper alumni connections, sparking fresh ideas to elevate your programs or launch new ones—using “career” as a powerful bridge to connect students and alumni in meaningful, lasting ways. Our presenters will share some of the trials, tribulations and successes of creating opportunities and partnerships across campus which allowed us to strengthen our relationships with our alumni--capitalizing on their expertise to develop a broader scope of career education for our students.

In the face of looming funding cuts and increasing distrust of science, our ability to communicate the power of fundamental research is more important than ever. We also need a low-cost, high-impact way to engage our donors near and far with campus. Our answer? "Basic Science Lights the Way," a virtual event series now in its twelfth season, that gathers an audience of alumni and friends monthly over Zoom to hear from a panel of brilliant researchers about the most exciting, curiosity-driven science happening on campus. Across over 50 events so far, the series has welcomed over 3,000 unique participants - a significant contribution to our alumni engagement metrics, and the numbers continue to grow. From events such as “Mass Extinctions and Ancient Climate Catastrophes” to “The Science of Aging”, this series emphasizes the critical role of basic science in sparking the most consequential breakthroughs of tomorrow, and has become a hit with our constituents in the process! These events are low-cost, scalable for any institution, connect the community directly with our faculty and their research, and serve as a high-level engagement and prospecting tool. Join us to learn what has worked, what hasn’t, and get tips on how to adapt this model to fit your institution’s needs.

How can advancement professionals use data from CASE Insights to respond to emerging issues and build a data-informed strategy for success?  This session presents key data points drawn from CASE Insight's regional and global data on philanthropy and engagement, recent research into topics ranging from artificial intelligence to giving days, and current analysis of headlines and societal trends. This session will help you understand the underlying data, follow trends, and take informed action in response.