Course Category: Free for All-Inclusive Members

Considering Communication and Stewardship in Leadership Annual Giving

Communicating the purpose of your leadership annual giving program should be a thoughtful and strategic process to build both donor loyalty as well as your donor pipeline. This session will help you to define specific communications and stewardship strategies for your leadership annual donors. Our expert instructor will also offer ways to build effective communication strategies that outline and emphasize the importance of leadership giving. Particular attention will be paid to young alumni, social media, and making a compelling case for support. You will also learn how to build an impactful stewardship program to ensure that you not only retain your leadership donors, but also retain and upgrade them successfully.

Developing Essential Fundraising Skills for Leadership Annual Giving

To be an effective leadership annual giving officer, you must gain the skills for achieving and managing personal visits. First, you’ll learn how to set goals and metrics, then you’ll learn to identify the necessary legwork to cultivate donors for this type of solicitation. Our expert instructor will focus on teaching the fundraising skills necessary for obtaining donor visits, ensuring that visits are productive, and creating a culture that promotes buy-in from those future major donors. There will also be roleplay opportunities to help you put the content into practice.

Identifying Your Leadership Annual Giving Goals and Pipeline

A leadership annual giving program will not succeed unless it is strategically aligned with your overall annual giving program. Having a clear vision and plan for optimizing your leadership giving program is essential, and this training will help you to understand how leadership giving can—and should—work to deepen donor relationships and help you to exceed your annual giving goals. In this training, you will explore different leadership annual giving recognition clubs and society models, and also learn about the methodology of giving structures and how to determine alternate models of recognition. You will identify the individuals you should be soliciting as leadership annual donors and learn how to manage each donor effectively in order to match their interests to their highest potential.

Strategies to Strengthen Transfer Student Enrollment and Success

Strategies to Strengthen Transfer Student Enrollment and Success November 1-3, 2022 Learn the immediate steps you can take to improve your transfer student pathways and retention. EVENT INFORMATION ENSURE YOUR TECHNOLOGY IS READY This workshop is intentionally designed to allow for maximum learning, connections, and engagement. We advise the following in order to participate fully: Audio & Visual Needs

Using Neuroscience to Engage Your Team Through Change: A Training for Supervisors

Currently within higher ed, we are experiencing significant, rapid and frequent changes. “Change” is no longer a temporary state of being — it’s become a continuous part of our everyday operations. It should be no surprise these days, therefore, that we may often experience our teams resisting or burning out from constant change. As a supervisor, this can be especially challenging since your role is to motivate, empower, and retain your talent. The bad news is that we’re all hard-wired to resist change at a neurological level because our brains subconsciously perceive any change as threatening. The good news is that, with new insight, you can leverage change as an opportunity to engage or re-engage your team. Join us online to learn how neuroscience — specifically, the SCARF model — can improve the way you communicate and engage with your team during changes big and small. You’ll learn how to recognize behaviors that signal that your direct reports are feeling threatened by change, and we’ll also discuss why that happens. More importantly, we’ll examine ways you can respond and modify your own behaviors to create a psychologically safe environment — one where you minimize perceived danger and maximize reward.

Create Meaningful Volunteer Opportunities for your Major Donors

Leadership volunteers can help to advance your institutional goals not only through their major gifts, but through their ambassadorship as advocates of the mission you convey, and by opening access to opportunities as well as leveraging expertise and input that only they can provide. However, if you don’t have a defined objective on what these volunteers can help you to accomplish as part of your fundraising strategy, you won’t have the momentum required to achieve the fundraising outcomes your organization desires. Layering a leadership volunteer’s time and effort into a capital campaign or major initiative is accomplished by developing an engagement plan that aligns their core passion with your fundraising goals. Once you have them on board, creating a meaningful experience worthy of their time can then lead to lifelong engagement and sustained success. Join us at this live event and learn how to approach and manage leadership volunteer recruitment and sustainable engagement for major donors while cultivating these relationships as a central part of your fundraising strategies.

Key Considerations for Strengthening Prospect Management and Gift Officer Collaboration

The relationship between prospect managers and gift officers is critical for portfolio optimization in advancement shops. It is the responsibility of advancement leaders to assess and strengthen collaboration between these roles in order to have a high-performance team that is able to strategically engage with donors. Join us as Cheryl Cerny, Associate Vice President for Advancement Operations and Campaign Director at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, discusses how empowering prospect management and fundraising staff and using strategic questioning throughout the donor cycle can have a positive impact on your donor relations experience. By reflecting on relevant examples and engaging in small-group discussion, you will walk away from this training with useful ideas and strategies for strengthening this important collaborative relationship in your shop.   Who Should Attend This training is designed for advancement staff who directly or indirectly supervise gift officers and/or prospect management staff, or those with direct supervision of a donor relations team. If you are an advancement leader who is hoping to empower gift officers and prospect managers to help them achieve the best in their work, this training is for you.

Using Storytelling to Bolster Unrestricted Giving

Unrestricted funds are an asset to meeting institutional needs, but they are not always easy to acquire based on donor understanding or personal interests. Successfully soliciting unrestricted gifts requires advancement professionals to know how these funds will positively impact the university experience for a variety of constituents and how to tell those stories in ways that will inspire donors to give. Join us for this interactive virtual training to learn how Kim Bowden, Vice President of Annual Giving at Georgia Tech, leads the Roll Call team in using storytelling to meet fundraising goals for their unrestricted annual fund. You will identify campus relationships that can help you to better understand how unrestricted gifts are used, consider your donor audience and what types of stories may resonate within it, and leave with storytelling ideas that will bolster your unrestricted giving.

Taking a Student-Centered Approach to the Probation Process

One of the biggest potential roadblocks in a student’s college career is being put on academic probation. The probation process can feel defeating and overwhelming to students, and when it happens, they may choose to leave the institution altogether rather than navigating the challenge. However, the probation process does not have to seem punitive, and it can ultimately lead to students feeling more empowered to succeed as long as they feel they are supported and given the tools to navigate the process. Join us for a 90-minute virtual training on reimagining the academic probation process in order to take a more student-centered approach. Our expert speakers, Laura Donaldson and Samantha Nielsen, will walk you through the creation and implementation of a probation process program in Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. This voluntary process centers the student experience by allowing advisors and students to create individualized plans to help the student get off probation successfully, while also addressing the non-academic barriers students encounter that may have contributed to their academic struggles. Laura and Samantha will share several valuable resources and considerations to keep in mind when starting a program of your own, as well as […]

Engaging Meaningfully with First-Generation Graduate Students to Increase Retention

While institutions today are getting better at recognizing that first-generation undergraduate students face additional barriers in navigating college, they still often expect first-generation graduate students to know how to overcome those barriers. Yet first-gen graduate students can still experience a variety of unique challenges – both personal and academic – that create additional roadblocks to their success. For instance, many first-gen graduate students may face a lack of understanding from family members while also having to navigate building social capital with faculty in an entirely different way. As graduate enrollment increases, faculty and staff working with graduate students can best support those students by understanding the additional challenges first-gen graduate students face. Join us for a 90-minute virtual training on what to consider in working with and mentoring first-generation graduate students. Our expert, Dr. Zaragosa “Mito” Diaz-Espinoza, will help you to recognize the struggles faced by first-gen graduate students in navigating such hurdles as a changing family life, the transition to graduate school, resource constraints at institutions, and making academic and professional decisions. You will have time to share what you yourself found challenging during graduate school and reflect on how that might be compounded for first-gen students. You will […]

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