Registration for Conference Participants

Conference Introductions and Opening Remarks

Understanding Transition: Ensuring Engaged Students Become Engaged Young Alumni

You've worked hard at engaging your students - providing opportunities for them to increase their involvement, educating them about the importance of giving back, and investing in their personal growth. If, however, you haven't considered the considerable effect of the student-to-alumni transition, you'll likely lose your most valuable resources - your already-loyal representatives. In this session, you will look at the developmental issues young alumni face and learn how to weave consistency into your programming in order retain their loyalty.

Conducting a Gap Analysis for Your Current Programming

What are you doing already to cultivate engagement, giving, and leadership? In this working session, you'll gather in small groups to identify where you're currently offering programming related to these three building blocks and see which areas could use some improvement. You'll use this analysis to direct your conference experience and to ensure that your focus is directed to the right areas for your institution.

Afternoon Break

Understanding What Your Alumni Want

As has been widely documented, Millennials are markedly different from past generations. This knowledge alone, however, will not tell you what your young alumni want. In this session, you'll be introduced to best practices for conducting research with your institution's young alumni, including focus groups, surveying, and assessing your current programming in order to design future offerings that will be effective. At the end of the session, you will have time to put together a few questions or topical areas you'd like to address with your own young alumni.

To Build or Not to Build: Young Alumni Councils

Young alumni councils are a great way to engage young alumni, elicit input, develop leadership, and set the tone for giving. During this session, your faculty will teach you how to build a young alumni council that will meet these goals and how to give ownership of the council to young alumni while assuring alignment with your mission. The session will end with a discussion around the efficacy of young alumni councils and creative alternatives.

Networking Reception (included in registration)

Continental Breakfast (included in registration)

Managing Young Alumni Volunteers

Young alumni often find themselves overwhelmed and over committed after graduation. While their alma mater may be very important to them, the demands of their lives can quickly take precedence. During this session, you will focus on how to effectively recruit young alumni volunteers, define clear expectations, develop dependable leaders, and adjust when things just aren't going according to plan.

Morning Break

Strategizing Social Media for Young Alumni

Ever more reliably, young alumni are using online social networking and media sharing tools instead of email to communicate. Institutions have been intensifying their online presence as well, but will this really help you connect with your young alumni? Social media is not a silver bullet, but it is a powerful tool when part of a larger communication strategy. In this session, faculty will discuss the most popular networking, media sharing, bookmarking, and micro-blogging tools, along with what you can reasonably expect from an online presence. The last part of the session will include hands-on social media work.

Lunch (included in registration)

Career Development Services for Young Alumni

Although young alumni at each institution will vary in what they want, research has proved career services will top their lists. You will use this session to explore several ways to meet this need, including: creating effective on-campus partnerships, highlighting successful programs and services, and investigating new models and structures for career development. You will leave this session with ideas and tactics for meeting the career needs of your young alumni, without major resource investment.

Creating Events Targeted at Young Alumni

How do you move beyond social nights in local bars and invitations to athletic events when you want to engage young alumni? In this session, you'll learn how to design creative events that will attract young alumni. You'll consider different programming options aimed at graduates of the first five years compared to those of the first decade, and examples of successful events for different life stages. The session will conclude by looking at the relationship young-alumni events have to the greater institution and exploring basic ways to measure their effectiveness.

Afternoon Break

Developing Giving Structures for Young Alumni and Discussion Around Restricted vs. Unrestricted Giving

Many schools offer senior gift events to introduce students to giving before they leave, but after they graduate, how do you offer giving opportunities conducive to giving as young alumni? This time will be spent helping you understand different giving structures you can implement at your institution to better promote young alumni giving. The session will close with a discussion of whether your effort should focus on giving options that are restricted (as Millennials often want to know exactly where their gifts are going) or unrestricted (to emphasize philanthropy's importance to an institution overall).

Panel: A Discussion with Engaged Young Alumni

Even the most well-prepared and well-resourced shop is bound to miss something in its young alumni work. Day two will close with a frank discussion featuring a panel of guest young alumni engaged with their respective alma maters. Issues around time commitment, communication, events, and broader needs will be addressed.

Continental Breakfast (included in registration)

Getting Buy-in for New Young Alumni Initiatives

Young alumni are the next generation of leaders across all industries and will be a source of support for your institution in years to come, so putting real resources toward engagement, giving, and leadership will pay dividends. But how do you make a case for long-term return during a time when most shops are focused on short-term gains? This session will help you make the case for a comprehensive young alumni program, build a reasonable budget while you are getting buy-in, and recruit cross-campus allies to your cause.

Final Conference Break and Hotel Check-Out

Putting it All Together: Planning for Young Alumni Engagement, Leadership, and Giving

In this session, you will revisit the core components needed to build a lifelong relationship with your young alumni. Then, using your findings from the gap-analysis session, you will create an initial plan for additional programming you'd like to implement - or changes you'd like to make - at your institution.

Identifying Key Takeaways and Closing Q&A