In October 2025, Georgia Tech successfully launched the Hill Society Brunch, reestablishing a signature stewardship experience for the Institute's most generous donors. The Hill Society represents Georgia Tech's premier community of alumni and friends whose leadership giving advances the Institute's mission to transform tomorrow, elevate its global reputation, and provide an exceptional education to students from across the state, nation, and world. Reactivating a special event for this group of donors after a ten-year hiatus required intentional design, departmental collaboration, and a renewed focus on meaningful donor engagement.

Hosted in the historic Biltmore ballroom, a landmark once celebrated as the South's supreme hotel, a special brunch was crafted to immerse attendees in Georgia Tech's traditions and history. The venue itself (known for hosting dignitaries such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bette Davis, and Charles Lindbergh) set the tone for an elevated and nostalgic experience.

A central feature of the program was a fireside chat with Georgia Tech's current president and two Presidents Emeritus. This choice fostered a warm, candid dialogue that resonated deeply with attendees.

This session will explore how the Georgia Tech Donor Relations team revived a dormant tradition to create a high impact stewardship experience, the strategies used to cultivate intimacy and authenticity among top tier donors, and the lessons learned that can be applied to similar donor relations initiatives at other institutions.

Small teams are often asked to deliver high-impact events with limited time, staff and resources. This session shares a practical, systems-based approach to scaling event impact without sacrificing quality, engagement or team sustainability. Drawing on real-world experience managing complex advancement and alumni event portfolios, participants will explore how strategic resource management--including staff time, volunteers, contractors, reusable workflows and AI-supported tools--can streamline planning and strengthen results. The session will also examine how combining or repurposing events can extend reach and meet multiple institutional goals more efficiently. Attendees will leave with concrete strategies, examples and frameworks they can adapt immediately to design stronger events, manage complexity and deliver meaningful outcomes across advancement, homecoming and reunion programming.

This session focuses on how to intentionally craft events that tell a cohesive story, one that honors institutional heritage, celebrates student impact, and resonates with diverse audiences. Using examples from stewardship, communications, and engagement work, we’ll explore how to incorporate tradition without feeling dated, how to feature students in ways that are ethical and empowering, and how to create emotional through‑lines that guide attendees from arrival to follow‑up. We’ll also discuss how event insights can inform communications strategies, ensuring that the story told in the room continues long after guests return home.

Focusing on the realities of school-based events, we’ll explore how to work effectively across teams, set clear expectations, and navigate the nuances of school culture—including partnering with volunteers and faculty who bring both passion and complexity to the process. Through examples and practical strategies, attendees will leave with tools to streamline planning, strengthen collaboration, and deliver polished, engaging events that align with their school’s goals.
Some topics we’ll cover:
What constitutes a school event? Surprise! All events are advancement events!
Plug and play is your friend; how to stop re-inventing the wheel every year.
Where is your ROI and how can you start to calculate it.
How can you meet your families/alumni where they are and still produce an event that supports your advancement goals?

Reunion years offer a unique opportunity to deepen alumni affinity, energize volunteer/class leaders, and drive meaningful philanthropic touchpoints, yet many institutions struggle to activate class committees or re-engage alumni who haven't connected in years, especially in the post-COVID landscape. This session explores how strategic volunteer management, creative engagement, and data-informed planning can transform reunion committees into powerful ambassadors for participation and giving.

Drawing on examples from Fordham University, Caroline and Neil will share a practical framework for recruiting, training, and motivating reunion volunteers: designing class-based philanthropic challenges, and building engagement initiatives that spark nostalgia and deepen class identity. Attendees will learn how current ideas are modeled and new experiential opportunities, peer-to-peer outreach, mini-campaigns, and personalized committee moments can create that momentum and positive touchpoint even among historically quiet classes.

The session will also highlight the critical role of data in shaping these engagement strategies. Using class behavior trends, communication performance insights, accounting for opted-out alumni and real participation metrics, we will demonstrate how data allows teams to refine messaging, forecast outcomes, and strengthen volunteer impact over time.

What makes a show binge-worthy? Strong structure, consistent pacing, compelling episodes, and a clear season arc-the same ingredients that make donor events successful. In this fun, relatable, TV-themed session, we'll reveal how our Donor Relations team produces 65-75 "episodes" a year using systems designed for consistency, creativity, and just the right amount of drama.


You'll meet the series regulars that keep our production running:


Our Event Details Sheet - the series script where every storyline lives

The RSVP Spreadsheet - our viewership tracker (who's tuning in, who's not, and who might need a teaser trailer)

Affinaquest & Asana - our production crew managing continuity, schedules, and behind-the-scenes logistics

The Budget Spreadsheet - the network accountant making sure we stay under budget

Our Milestone Calendar - the season timeline ensuring every episode lands on time


And like any streaming service worth its salt, we rely heavily on post-episode analytics. We'll show how we take attendance data and transform it into post-event engagement reports that track donor behavior, forecast future involvement, and help determine which "story arcs" deserve a renewal next season.

We're cracking open real CASE files to examine measurable and meaningful aspects of event programming.


In the first half of our investigation, our team will focus on evidence, also known as data! We'll analyze email strategy, audience segmentation, the information you should be collecting at events, and show you how to turn data into actionable next steps.


Now that we've gathered the intel, it's time to build the event. We'll explore the range of event programming we offer, reaching different audiences, ways to be intentional, and the reasons our alumni engage year after year.

As advancement event portfolios grow in volume, visibility, and complexity, many teams find themselves operating reactively - relying on institutional knowledge, informal workflows, and last-minute problem solving. This session makes the case for establishing a dedicated Event Operations role and, more importantly, clearly defines what that role does in practice.

Drawing on a year-long effort to formalize event operations within an advancement events team, this session will outline how an Event Operations position functions as the connective tissue between strategy and execution. Attendees will gain a practical understanding of how Event Operations manages briefings, guest data, budgets, and post-event analysis-driving consistency, reducing friction, and allowing event strategists and frontline fundraisers to focus on relationships and impact.

Participants will leave with a comprehensive framework of how Event Operations supports planners, Development Officers, and senior leadership through structured processes, shared tools, and repeatable workflows that elevate both execution and outcomes.

In a post-COVID landscape, what does an effective and meaningful Homecoming and Reunion program look like? How should success be measured, and which metrics truly matter? Using the CASE Metrics framework as our guide, this session will explore the evolving challenges institutions face across different environments. We’ll share insights from two distinct institutional contexts, highlighting what’s working, what’s not, and why. Participants will walk away with seven practical principles for modernizing their programs, along with dedicated time for small-group discussion to develop strategies tailored to their own institutions.

Campaigns are lived through moments, and many of those moments are events: quiet-phase gatherings, a public launch, spotlight events and salons, signature traditions that suddenly carry a new meaning, stewardship milestones, volunteer convenings, and the closing celebration which signals “we did it, together.” In this interactive plenary, Brent Waugh and Carolina Silva will share a practical framework for mapping campaign goals to event strategy across the full arc of a campaign -- leveraging the open and the close and maximizing what you already have (including pre-existing experiences such as homecomings and reunions). Guided by interactive activities, participants will leave with adaptable tools they can apply to planning events during a campaign.