Event Category: Free For All-Inclusive

Encore: Recruiting, Training, and Engaging Alumni Volunteers in a Digital Environment

Alumni volunteers are immensely valuable to institutions in both their service and giving power— they tend to give 10 times more than non-volunteers. However, since the pandemic, the script has flipped on how we recruit and engage alumni volunteers through digital channels. In-person volunteer opportunities continue to foster alumni engagement, but with digital opportunities growing increasingly common as well, we must continue to learn best practices from one another to remain successful. In this virtual training, our expert panelists will guide you as you share your own lessons when digitally engaging your alumni volunteers. Together, we will identify emerging best practices regarding volunteer recruitment, training, and engagement that lead to the retention of your most dedicated alumni. You will leave this training with the best current practices to engage your volunteers — during this pandemic, and beyond. In this updated edition, a Q&A with the speakers, Clarybel Peguero and Parks Smith, has been added to the recording. How It Works: If you missed the event when it took place in March of 2023 or you have been meaning to engage with the on-demand training, this is your chance to watch it together with higher ed colleagues from across the country. […]

Encore and Live Q&A: 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.

Encore: Securing the Gift: Making the Ask with Confidence

Gift officers can sometimes feel uncomfortable making the ask for a variety of reasons, and the anxiety they can produce may be felt and mirrored by donors, leading to a “no.” However, not making the ask can lead to missed opportunities and a loss of momentum with key prospects. A successful ask comes down to the relationship you’ve built with the donor, being clear about your role and intent, and a strong solicitation strategy that leads up to this moment. This approach requires knowing your prospect well: understanding their giving history, what motivates them to give, and the relationships they’ve built with the different stakeholders at your institution. Join this session to gain insights on how to strategically approach a prospect you have in mind to make the ask. When done right, this moment in a donor relationship should come organically with the assurance that the answer will be a yes—and if it is not, that the relationship will remain on solid ground, and you will get another opportunity to make an ask in the future. How It Works: If you missed the event when it took place in June of 2023 or you have been meaning to engage with […]

Encore and Live Q&A: Developing a Principal Gifts Program that Supports Transformational Priorities

Principal gifts, defined differently at different institutions, can bring high-level success to your institutional priorities—especially those advocated by your president and academic leaders. By building out a disciplined principal gifts program, regardless of its current maturity, you can bring clarity to how your team and institutional stakeholders advance transformational ideas in partnership with your top donors. Challenges to this endeavor, however, can prevent teams from building out the program they want. Whether it’s lack of confidence speaking to and managing prospect relationships, managing donor fatigue, or having budget shortfalls with capital projects without donors in your pipeline to finish the job, developing an effective principal gifts program can help you prepare viable prospects who are poised and ready to give when the moment is right. Join us for this conversation on developing a disciplined principal gifts program, and preparing your institution for sustained success both now and into the future.

Where Two or Three Gather Together: A New Perspective on Effective Team Collaboration

Team, committee, and group-based work abounds in higher education. But many struggle to collaborate effectively in these settings because not everyone comes to the table with the same understanding, expectation, and collaboration style. While teams are often designed to bring together different voices and perspectives, most leaders default to a singular approach to teamwork that works well for some, but that also causes frustration, withdrawal, or conflict for others.   In this event, we’ll use the Five Paths to Leadership℠ as a framework to introduce the four different collaboration styles that are at play within any given team. We’ll walk you through a detailed explanation of each path and provide tactics that leaders and team members alike can use to approach collaboration and group-based work more effectively. You will leave with a more nuanced understanding of the collaboration types that yield the best results based on the outcomes you are trying to achieve, rather than defaulting to one style based on comfort or personal preference.  

Respectfully and Confidently Engage in Difficult Conversations: A Dialogue Workshop Series for Advancement Professionals  

As an advancement professional, you engage with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues from different backgrounds, lived experiences, and perspectives. At times, you may receive unsolicited or angry opinions about institutional decisions, or inquiries about national and global news or events as they unfold. These comments or questions can sometimes be polarizing and catch you off guard. For some of us, our natural tendency in these situations is to shut down, disengage, and become defensive. However, a critical requirement of the relationship cultivation process with internal and external constituents is staying present in these challenging moments and allowing the conversation to continue despite political, religious, or social differences. It is also just as critical to know when to exit these conversations safely and professionally, depending on the intensity of the situation and/or other factors.  Join us for this four-part online workshop series, where you’ll learn how to respond professionally to difficult conversations with alumni, volunteers, donors, and colleagues. In community with other Advancement professionals across the nation, you will learn simple yet powerful techniques and practices to help you to stay present in difficult dialogues. The workshop series will also give you an opportunity to practice having difficult conversations through a variety of […]

Recognizing and Celebrating Faculty and Staff:  A Panel Conversation

Faculty and staff morale is at an all-time low across most institutions in higher education, and this puts your department or unit at risk of increasing levels of burnout, decreased productivity and, ultimately, higher turnover. One way you can start to make a difference is by fostering a work environment where praise, appreciation, and gratitude are front and center. Join a panel of academic leaders and discover tips, strategies, and new methods for how you can provide praise and recognition that is meaningful, authentic, and consistent. We recognize that the needs of faculty and staff vary across disciplines and career levels, and we know that your team is likely working in a hybrid environment, so we’ll make sure you walk away with a variety of ways for you to better celebrate the accomplishments, effort, and energy of your faculty and staff.

Feedback as a Faculty (Re)Engagement Strategy 

Both affirmative and constructive one-on-one feedback are critical to faculty talent development.  Feedback that is appropriate for the career level (assistant, associate, professor) provides clarity, direction, goal alignment and motivation, all of which are required to successfully navigate today’s higher education landscape filled with complexity and uncertainty. Feedback, when delivered effectively, can promote creativity, productivity, learning and growth, job satisfaction, and, ultimately, retention through faculty career stages. However, with quitting (both quiet and loud) so prevalent—and current faculty morale so low—providing feedback to faculty can feel high-risk. You don’t want to alienate faculty any further.    Join us online for a two-hour workshop in which we’ll practice the art of providing feedback to faculty in an effort to both develop their talent and re-engage them. We’ll begin the workshop with a short lesson on the most critical components of effective feedback (i.e., timing and consistency, as well as delivery method, mode, and tone) and how they may be influenced by generational differences. You’ll then have time with your peers to practice giving feedback using your new skills. If you’re looking to grow your skills and comfort in giving feedback, this workshop is for you! 

Optimize Your Fundraising Efforts Through Generative Artificial Intelligence

What would you do with an extra 4 hours in your work week?  In recent years, large for-profit businesses have been using artificial intelligence to win over consumer interest, despite a highly competitive market. Given the rise of more competitor “noise” in the eyes and ears of your alumni or donors, you may have been wondering how artificial intelligence can improve or enhance your own fundraising efforts. Or perhaps you have already experimented with artificial intelligence tools but are curious to learn about additional opportunities—or maybe you’d like to discuss and address barriers that you have faced when using these kinds of programs yourself.  Whether you are new to artificial intelligence or a seasoned user, we invite you to join us online to learn the difference between predictive versus generative artificial intelligence, and how these tools can be easily incorporated into your current fundraising strategy. You will learn the added value that these tools can bring to your daily work in advancement, including how they can help to free up your time so that you can spend it in high-quality, interactive conversations, instead. This two-hour session is intentionally designed to provide both a lecture on artificial intelligence, as well as […]

A 5-Step Framework for Women Navigating Life Transitions

Maternity leave. Job reorganization or restructuring. A role or career change. Experiencing a loss. Retirement. Each of these transitions, whether personal or professional, comes with its own unique set of challenges—challenges that can upend the way you move through your daily life as a woman leader. Learning how to navigate these kinds of changes in your personal and professional life can create a work environment where empathy is extended to both you and to others.   During this session, you’ll be introduced to the SNAP to Impact framework developed by our speaker, Dr. Krista Klein. This framework will weave together the following five key steps to help you learn strategies for navigating personal and professional transitions in community with other women higher educational professionals: