Monday, July 30, 2012
OPTIONAL PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP
8:00 — 9:00 a.m. Registration and continental breakfast for pre-conference workshop attendees (breakfast included in workshop registration)
9:00 a.m. — 12:00 p.m. Optional pre-conference workshop: Planting Seeds - Student Philanthropy as the First Step to Engaging Young Alumni
You have four years to connect with your students before they become young alumni. This workshop will walk you through the college experience year-by-year, explaining where you can cultivate engagement, leadership, and giving at each step along the way. You’ll then examine best practices for transitioning your students to young alumni through effective volunteer, activity, and philanthropic techniques. An emphasis will be put on evaluating what you are currently doing with your students, how you are preparing them for their transition post-graduation, and what you can do to develop an initial plan to best cultivate your future young alumni.
12:00 — 1:00 p.m. Lunch for pre-conference workshop participants (included in workshop registration)
12:00 — 1:00 p.m. Registration for conference participants
1:00 — 1:15 p.m. Conference introductions and opening remarks
1:15 — 2:00 p.m. 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. However, if you haven’t considered the magnitude of the student-to-alumni transition, you’ll most likely lose your most valuable resources -– your already-loyal representatives. In this session, you will look at the developmental issues your young alumni face and learn how to weave consistency into your programming in order retain their loyalty.
2:00 — 2:45 p.m. 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 to promote these three building blocks and to 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.
2:45 — 3:00 p.m. Afternoon break
3:00 — 4:00 p.m. Understanding What Your Alumni Want
As you may already know, Millennials are markedly different from past generations. However, this knowledge alone will not tell you what your young alumni want. Here you will 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 sure to be effective. Time will be left at the end of the session to allow you to start putting together a few questions or topical areas you’d like to address to your own young alumni.
4:00 — 5:00 p.m. To Build or Not to Build: Young Alumni Councils
Young alumni councils are a great way to engage young alumni, to elicit input, to develop leadership, and to set the tone for giving among young alumni. However, they can be time-consuming, difficult to manage and ineffective. During this session, your faculty walk you through the strategic considerations undertaken at Hamilton in order to decide the question: to build or not to build? Additionally, we will brainstorm ways to build a young alumni council that will meet your strategic goals and discuss giving ownership of the council to young alumni while assuring it is in alignment with your mission.
5:15 — 6:15 p.m. Networking reception (included in registration)
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
8:30 — 9:00 a.m. Continental breakfast (included in registration)
9:00 — 10:15 a.m. 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, we’ll focus on how to effectively recruit young alumni volunteers, define clear expectations, develop dependable leaders, and adjust when things just aren’t going to plan.
10:15 — 10:30 a.m. Morning break
10:30 a.m. — 12:00 p.m. 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 this session will include hands-on social media work.
12:00 — 1:15 p.m. Lunch (included in registration)
1:15 — 2:00 p.m. 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 list of desires. We 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 on how to meet the career needs of your young alumni without major resource investment.
2:00 — 2:45 p.m. 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 examine 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 these different life stages. The session will conclude by looking at the relationship these events have to the greater institution and exploring basic ways to measure their effectiveness.
2:45 — 3:00 p.m. Afternoon break
3:00 — 4:00 p.m. Developing Giving Structures for Young Alumni and Discussion Around Restricted vs. Unrestricted Giving
Many schools offer senior gift events to introduce their students to giving before they leave, but after they graduate, how do you offer them giving opportunities that are conducive to giving as young alumni? This time will be spent helping you understand the different giving structures you can implement at your institution to better promote young alumni giving. The session will close with a discussion around whether your effort should gravitate toward restricted (as Millennials often want to know exactly where their gifts are going) or unrestricted giving options (to emphasize philanthropy’s importance to an institution overall).
4:00 — 5:00 p.m. Panel: A Discussion with Engaged Young Alumni
Even the most well-prepared and well-resourced advancement shop is bound to miss something in its young alumni work. Day 2 will close with a frank discussion featuring a panel discussion of guest young alumni who are engaged with their respective alma maters. Issues around time commitment, communication, events, and broader needs will all be addressed.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
8:30 — 9:00 a.m. Continental breakfast (included in registration)
9:00 — 10:00 a.m. 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. However, 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.
10:00 — 10:30 a.m. Final conference break and hotel check-out
10:30 — 11:45 a.m. 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 want to implement –- or changes you’d like to make –- at your institution.
11:45 a.m. — 12:00 p.m. Identifying key takeaways and closing Q&A
OPTIONAL POST-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP
12:00 — 1:15 p.m. Lunch for post-conference workshop attendees (included in workshop registration)
1:15 — 4:15 p.m. Optional post-conference workshop: Social Media - Making the Case for Resources, Creating a Listening Post, and Measuring Return on Investment/Engagement
Some of the toughest challenges with regard to social media involve convincing others that your shop’s presence in the virtual world is a necessity, not a luxury. Common road blocks to an increased online presence include lack of resources and difficulties with tracking progress. During this workshop, our faculty will address these issues and guide you through the hands-on experience of building a listening post -– a centralized location to aggregate data from Twitter, Facebook, and your other social networking sites. You’ll also explore how to measure the return on investment/engagement with basic performance indicators. At the end of the workshop, you’ll have identified your next steps toward establishing a more magnetic online presence.
Follow AI
Conference
Share This Page: