Establishing and maintaining strong relationships with various stakeholders within your institution is essential for successful advancement. By cultivating these relationships with institutional leaders and volunteers, departmental heads, faculty and researchers, alumni relations, communications and marketing teams, or student affairs personnel, fundraising professionals can identify potential funding opportunities, secure support from alumni, coordinate fundraising efforts, reach out to potential donors, gain insight into student priorities, and align fundraising efforts with institutional objectives. This session will work on building a collaborative and integrated institutional community that can greatly enhance fundraising readiness and advancement success.

What does the wider Advancement team do? How does philanthropic fundraising fit into the wider advancement ecosystem? Faculty members from a range of institutions will look at the fundamentals for each discipline and how Student Services, Alumni Relations, Marcomms and Advancement Operations professionals work successfully together and support you and your work. We will cover all of these topics and more in a fast-paced and interactive session – just to make sure you don’t need a post-lunch snooze!

This session will help to raise understanding and awareness of the CASE professional competency frameworks, how they work in practice and how the CASE model is reflected in the SIEF programme. Fiona and Antony will set the scene looking at organisational culture and values and core competencies for advancement professionals relating to career journey stages. Faculty will then lead and facilitate lively round table discussions on desired behaviours and attitudes, drawing on ‘real life’ examples from a variety of settings, that will help demonstrate ‘know how’ in key competency areas.  

Join us for an engaging plenary session that goes beyond the basics of regular giving, delving deep into its pivotal role within a robust fundraising strategy. This discussion will unveil core principles, donor motivations, and the driving methodologies behind regular giving in just over an hour. We’ll also look at the significance of data and analytics in shaping a strong regular giving programme. Through insights into segmentation, donor profiling, and lifetime value analysis, you'll gain a profound understanding of how data fuels effective fundraising efforts. By the end of the session, you'll be equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to articulate the purpose and objectives of a stellar regular giving scheme, empowering you to either launch a new initiative or elevate an existing programme to new heights.

An interactive panel discussion looking at ED&I within our Higher Education Institutions and exploring the progress made since 2020. The session will offer an overview on how the HE sector addressed EDI, Belonging and 'the Anti-Racist Institution' work in the five-years since the pandemic, and briefly reflecting on the early impact of new leadership in the White House, USA. Together we will explore what EDI&B is, who it matters to, and how it might matter for you as Advancement professionals and future leaders. The session will look at systems change, Advancement recruitment, retention, progression and culture, alumni engagement and philanthropic practice. You can directly shape the session by being courageous and asking the questions you've always wanted to ask. There will be protected time to share questions with the panel for discussion in the plenary or later, in the elective.

Equity, Diversity, Belonging, and Inclusion is a BIG subject. In this elective, we offer extra space and time for additional questions, courageous discussion and perhaps to continue threads of conversation started in the plenary session. We will do our best to answer any questions you have with care, kindness, openness and honesty. Chatham House Rules apply.  

Volunteerism is a key pillar of successful alumni engagement and fundraising, with volunteers giving their “time, talent, and treasure.” The treasure part – making a philanthropic gift – is straightforward enough, but what about this “time and talent” bit? In this session, we’ll explore some best practices in alumni volunteer management, looking at a variety of volunteer types from boards and campaign committees, to class and reunion volunteers, and more. When volunteers are not well managed, the consequences – and your headaches – can be painful. But when they are carefully recruited, guided, and stewarded, their gifts of “time and talent” can increase your organization’s impact and generate exponentially more “treasure” in support of your school.