Gather ‘round the campfire, friends, because every project has its share of ghost stories. No matter the size or scope, projects have a way of creaking in the night. Team members disappear into the mist of competing priorities. Unexpected “phantoms” of resistance, emotions, and external pressures rattle the windows. And sometimes a single mistake can feel like a sudden chill down your spine.

But fear not! These bumps in the dark don’t have to haunt your project. In this lively session, Robyn Doughty (UC Berkeley) and Kate Nimety (Zuri Group) will share their best flashlight tactics for spotting trouble before it prowls, taming the jump scares, and keeping your team safe through the long night.

You’ll leave with practical ways to:
- Sense when conflict is lurking and bring it into the light.
- Calm the restless spirits of change fatigue before they spook your team.
- Build psychological safety so everyone feels brave enough to speak up, even when things go bump.

Settle in for real-world ghost stories, proven strategies, and a few campfire thrills to help you lead projects through the "tunnel of darkness" and back into daylight. Closed captioning available for this session, bring your own fully charged phone, tablet, or laptop to access the captions.

In advancement services, gift and records management is at the heart of everything we do. When we are efficient and accurate, the donor continuum runs smoothly. A single mistake can severely damage our team’s reputation. We are human, we make mistakes, and we do not want to be unfairly judged! We also want to limit errors and delays as much as possible. Using a case study from the Gift Services team at the University of Wisconsin Foundation, we’ll examine how SLAs and metrics can be developed to tell the Real Story of the value our teams bring to our organizations. You'll learn how to separate the “nice-to-know” numbers from the ones that give you the insights you need to improve your processes and make smarter decisions.

This session is designed specifically for Advancement Services professionals involved in technology decisions that support fundraising and alumni engagement. If you’re evaluating a new CRM, considering artificial intelligence, modernizing data infrastructure, or trying to improve reporting and analytics, this session will help you step back and build a clear, defensible plan before committing resources. We’ll walk through a case study and examples with our presenting partner, Adriana Bitoun, and we will demonstrate practical, step-by-step framework for creating a technology roadmap that aligns fundraising strategy, operational reality, and institutional priorities. You’ll learn how to define the outcomes that matter most to advancement teams—such as revenue, donor retention, campaign performance, and staff efficiency—and use those outcomes to guide technology choices and sequencing. For those early in the process, this seminar also provides the foundation for a strong business case. You’ll learn how to frame technology investments in terms that leadership understands, using metrics grounded in your own advancement operation rather than generic benchmarks or vendor promises. By the end of the session, you will be able to: ▪️Define the steps for creating a roadmap that will guide your journey from where you are now to where you want to go ▪️Estimate the benefits and costs of your journey ▪️Have the foundation for a business case you can take to leadership Stick around for the interactive Q & A portion, and be prepared to download takeaway templates to get you started on your journey.

Most advancement organizations carry invisible baggage: old scripts, manual workarounds, and legacy integrations that quietly erode performance and morale. This session explores how technical debt accumulates across CRMs, analytics platforms, and engagement tools, and why it’s the hidden barrier to innovation. Drawing from real-world university case studies, we’ll map practical methods to identify, measure, and prioritize debt reduction without disrupting fundraising operations. Attendees will learn how to make technical debt visible to leadership, translate it into business impact, and build a sustainable cycle of cleanup and modernization. Closed captioning available for this session, bring your own fully charged phone, tablet, or laptop to access the captions.

Effective system optimization requires more than just technology; it requires collaboration across units. This session explores how cross-departmental teamwork at Loyola University Chicago drove the integration of our event management, email marketing, and CRM platforms in order to break down silos, align goals, and leverage expertise across the organization. As a result, we've streamlined data flows, improved event management, and created a more personalized constituent experience.

Attendees will gain insights into both the technical and cultural strategies that made this work possible, and how similar approaches can be applied in their own institutions.

As more institutions adopt autonomous fundraising, a key question arises: Which donors respond best to AI-powered fundraisers? With more than 100,000 donors currently managed by Virtual Engagement Officers (VEOs), the industry now has the data to move beyond anecdotes and answer that question with clarity. This session will share insights from the top-performing donors in autonomous fundraising portfolios—those who consistently drive revenue, reengage after lapsing, graduate into major gift pipelines, or respond at high rates to AI-powered outreach. Using real portfolio data, we will highlight four categories of top performers: High-Value Givers: why recency of giving predicts outcomes better than historic capacity. Graduated Donors: how to recognize readiness for gift officer handoffs. Re-Acquisitions: why lapsed donors within 1–2 years represent the highest-return reengagement opportunities. Highly Responsive Donors: how engagement behaviors signal donor potential regardless of gift size. Participants will see how these insights apply across advancement contexts. The session will also provide recommendations for tailoring portfolio design to different advancement goals, including immediate revenue generation, pipeline building, and reacquisition strategies. By examining the donors who thrive most under autonomous fundraising, attendees will gain a data-backed framework for scaling fundraising strategies across more of the 97.5% of donors who are typically unmanaged.

This interactive session will showcase collaborative partnership to illustrate how analytics informed critical campaign decisions, from analysis to campaign execution. Attendees will walk through the lifecycle of the campaign strategy process, highlighting turning points where data shifted the conversation, influenced leadership buy-in, and shaped actionable strategies. Audience members will engage in guided discussion, offering opportunities to compare their own institutional practices against the case studies provided and leave with practical applications.

At Purdue for Life, event data is more than numbers in a spreadsheet—it’s the engine behind our strategy. In this session, you’ll see how we categorize attendees, follow their post-event journeys, and track the metrics that matter: first gifts, repeat attendance, donor counts, and dollars raised. We’ll show the dashboards that connect events to fundraising outcomes, share the tools that power our backend analysis, highlight key performance indicators that guide decisions, and explore the donor lifecycle from RSVP to ROI. Closed captioning available for this session, bring your own fully charged phone, tablet, or laptop to access the captions.

What happens when six advancement organizations take on CRM transformation—and reimagine their reporting environments in the process? This session distills insights from a cross-institutional market assessment focused on advancement-specific CRM implementations. Learn how each organization approached data strategy, reporting architecture, and governance to drive decision-making, foster cultural change, and improve fundraising outcomes. Whether you're planning a CRM rollout or optimizing post-launch analytics, this session offers practical lessons, strategic frameworks, and real-world examples to elevate your advancement reporting.

Welcome to our three-part culinary adventure through the world of data and reporting!

Imagine your reporting environment as your home kitchen — a place where ingredients (data) are prepped, cooked (transformed), and served (reported) to hungry guests (stakeholders). In Part 1, we’ll explore how running a reporting environment is surprisingly similar to managing your own kitchen — from pantry organization to cooking the perfect dashboard.

Then, in Part 2, everything changes. A migration to Salesforce wipes the slate clean — it’s like moving into a new house with an empty kitchen. No pots, no pans, no recipes. We’ll share how we rebuilt our data warehouse and reports from scratch to keep feeding our data-hungry customers.

Finally, in Part 3, we go beyond the kitchen. We roll out food trucks — bringing data closer to our end users through self-service tools and a thriving community of practice. We’ll show you how we built it, what keeps it running, and how it’s transforming the way we serve data.

So grab your apron — it’s time to cook up some insights!