How do you tell an authentic story that is moving, impactful and succinct? What are the techniques you can use with your team to create moving imagery that demonstrates the value of your unit and supports your fundraising? What is the most important part of crafting a video with high-production value?

In just under a year, Central Washington University (CWU) has reimagined its approach to donor engagement. Working in collaboration with Fundmetric to use AI to target effectively, personalize at scale, and bring teams into closer alignment. This session will share the strategies, structures, and culture shifts that fueled CWU’s success, scaling heights beyond their size. From cross-team collaboration to data-driven decision-making. We’ll explore how predictive analytics, personalized content, and efficient segmentation are driving stronger relationships and better results, with their engagement series, serving as one example of many. Attendees will leave with a high-level framework for leveraging AI in advancement that is scalable, sustainable, and adaptable to any institution’s needs.

In just a few years, National University’s Speaker Series has evolved into a powerhouse of engagement—spanning over 60 virtual events and earning a CASE Silver Award for alumni relations. This free, accessible series inspires, elevates, and mobilizes alumni, current students, and community partners by featuring meaningful storytelling and expertise that spans career trajectories and institutional priorities.

Moreover, the Speaker Series raises the university’s profile by fostering visibility and collaboration with community leaders—expanding institutional reach and reinforcing NU as a connector within its broader ecosystem.

This session will reveal how to replicate NU’s model—from building sustainable processes to measuring impact, engaging alumni volunteers, and aligning content with career relevance and institutional branding. Attendees will walk away with actionable strategies to launch or scale a speaker series that inspires, elevates, and mobilizes while advancing institutional visibility and community partnerships.

Culture is more than a buzzword—and it shouldn’t come at the expense of results. When understood and intentionally shaped, culture becomes an advancement shop’s competitive advantage, accelerating performance and creating a foundation where everyone can succeed.

This session will walk through USC Advancement’s ongoing journey to redefine its culture in support of the university’s aspiration to raise significantly more support ($1B+) year over year. We’ll explore how talent management and open communication are driving USC’s advancement culture, along with strategies for assessing progress. Regardless of where you sit in your shop, you will leave with practical ideas that can be applied to your own advancement team.

Discover how volunteer committees can transform donor engagement and dramatically expand fundraising capacity. Using case studies from Hartnell College Foundation, you’ll see how the Panther Athletic Committee grew annual giving from $15,000 to $160,000, and how the Agriculture Steering Committee galvanized more than $19 million in public and private support. Learn practical strategies for recruiting and engaging volunteers, creating meaningful connections with alumni, and fostering community pride through events and storytelling. Walk away with a clear framework you can adapt to build strong volunteer committees that fuel philanthropy, cultivate champions for your institution, and deliver measurable impact.

In an era defined by fiscal volatility, the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence and a complex political landscape, university leaders must act as both anchors and architects for their communities. In this special session, presidents and chancellors will discuss their role as both a stabilizer and a catalyst for growth and how colleges and universities remain essential to economic mobility, civic life, workforce development and the generation of new knowledge. Panelists will discuss how to foster a culture of resilience that empowers the entire campus community to remain focused on the future. The ability of institutional leaders to clearly articulate and steward this mission is central to sustaining trust and ensuring higher education continues to serve the nation’s long-term needs. Panelists will also offer their perspectives on how clear communication, decisive action and visionary planning can help navigate uncertain times, creating thriving campus environments and demonstrating the value of higher education.

Parenting and caregiving while working in advancement can feel like a high-wire act with no net – unpredictable travel, evening events, fiscal year-end pushes, and donor deadlines often compete with family milestones, school pickups, and sick days. Caregiving responsibilities for children and other family members only compound the challenge. Yet, open conversations about how professionals navigate these realities are rare. This session offers a candid, reflective, and (hopefully) humorous conversation featuring advancement colleagues sharing their personal experiences as parents and caregivers in the field. Together, we’ll explore the pressures, compromises, and creative strategies that help sustain both career and home life, and foster a supportive professional community for those balancing it all.

Do planned gifts ever seem to just appear at your community college foundation? While it might feel that way, these gifts are usually the result of intentional relationship-building, thoughtful donor conversations, and strong connections to your college.

In this session, we’ll go beyond the handout or signature line and explore how to grow your planned giving pipeline with the help of your entire team. You’ll learn how to build a collaborative strategy that includes everyone—from college and district leadership to the communications designer and the staff member sending gift acknowledgments.

Together, we'll demystify planned giving, practice techniques for guiding donors through the moves management process, and discuss how to steward and engage donors long after the gift is made. We’ll also share examples of successful legacy societies that you can adapt to inspire long-term support.

By the end of the session, you'll have the tools to help your donors invest in your students’ dreams—for generations to come.

Today’s students live in a world where TikTok is the new search engine, and higher education institutions must adapt.

This session will explore how brief and authentic short-form videos can be a powerful tool for connection. Drawing from recent student engagement data and examples from the University of Utah, participants will learn why short-form video resonates with Gen Z, how to identify content that matters to students, and practical steps for creating effective videos.

The session features a live editing demonstration and interactive discussion, giving attendees practical tools to immediately incorporate short-form video into their communication strategies.

Claremont McKenna College runs more than 100 alumni events each year—from regional meetups and GOLD programming to flagship weekends with 800+ attendees. With such a full calendar, the challenge became: how do we measure what truly matters and turn events into sustained alumni engagement?
In this session, you’ll hear how CMC reimagined events as data points in a larger alumni story. By combining event attendance with email engagement and engagement scoring, the team uncovered which segments respond best, identified highly engaged alumni for leadership roles, and strengthened turnout through peer-to-peer outreach. Along the way, they piloted new event formats tied to campus developments and tracked measurable impact.
Attendees will leave with a framework to move from “more events” to “smarter events,” using data to personalize outreach, prioritize resources, and create alumni experiences that build lasting connections.