To create a campaign that really lands, it’s important to know your audience. In this session, we’ll look at simple, effective ways to gather information—from talking directly to people in interviews and focus groups to looking at the numbers in your surveys and web stats. By tapping into these different methods together, you’ll learn how to identify what your audience actually cares about and turn those insights into a solid plan.

Great stories aren’t just nice to have, they’re a strategic advantage to better connect with your audiences. This session explores how you can move beyond feel-good narratives to craft purposeful stories that directly support institutional priorities like recruitment, retention, and advancement. Attendees will learn how to identify the stories that matter most, align them with key goals, and deploy them across channels for measurable impact. This presentation will equip you with a framework to turn storytelling into one of your most powerful tools for driving results.

The future is here, but are we ready for it? Digital transformation is all the buzz within the higher ed Advancement industry, but very few organizations are successful in implementing comprehensive digital strategies. Applying a digital lens over traditional development work can help organizations reach further, faster and make donors feel well taken care of. Come discuss some of the industry trends around digital transformation and how this approach can fit into relationship-based work.

In this session, we’ll reflect on the mentors who influenced our paths and the moments where we’ve had the chance to do the same for others. Through these stories, we’ll surface what makes mentorship meaningful, where it breaks down, and how it can accelerate your growth in ways no job title can. Our personal stories, memories, and experiences will help you decide if you would benefit from having a mentor, identify who might serve in that role, talk through how to ask for mentorship, and how to make the most of the experience. And we’ll cover why it is important to also lift others by offering to be a mentor and what serving in that unofficial role entails.