Our team had a fantastic time at the All Districts conference! There were many great speakers and sessions, but here are the highlights from just a few of those we attended.
There are five initial questions you need to ask to decide if a story is worth pursuing:
Once you’ve answered these if the story is something you should cover, remember: transparency is key. Approach the subject openly and use experts to make sure you have all of the facts and have considered the different angles and viewpoints you could take.
Here are an additional five tips to be faster, build audience, and stay relevant:
One of the best ways to amplify your fundraising is to use student ambassadors as peer-to-peer influencers. At Harper College, creating this program meant evaluating not just which students to coach, but also what support systems the central office would need to help them reach out to their networks.
First, they created a student Instagram to leverage one of the strongest social networks for young alumni. Students submitted photos documenting the student life experience and their engagement on campus and then worked with staff to create the language for them to post. The College also allowed students to create the student tour that they’d want to see, showcasing new aspects of the institution not previously included.
The major takeaway for building brand ambassadors? Allow them to create the content. If you manage every aspect of content creation you will dampen the creativity and authenticity that ambassadors naturally provide to uplift your brand.
Before approaching your strategy for a program like this, remember that the number one goal of a digital gift officer is donor retention.
The University of Washington took this approach and began by creating an ecosystem of digital tools to empower their gift officers. this included:
Digital Gift Officers use Thankview as an introduction and to request a conversation. They record a video that is less than 30 seconds and includes CTA links to the personalized giving pages. It is not uncommon to see upwards of 50% open rates in the first 24 hours of sending a video!
This was a panel discussion between Juniata College, Knox College, Murray State University, and UC Merced.
Juniata College
Knox College
Murray State
UC Merced
The University of Richmond is constantly thinking of how to elevate their brand pillars by showcasing their faculty, what they are researching, teaching, etc., and focusing on how to highlight that through their communications and in the media. This helps to provide awareness around the fact that University of Richmond is a powerhouse with expert faculty.
The University is also always tracking the news and finding reporters who would have an interest in working with their experts. This helps create long-lasting relationships between them and those who can amplify their PR footprint.
They pursue a mix of traditional and digital mediums when elevating expertise including an online newsroom and the use of social media specifically for media relations to target reporters and to highlight placement. They place an emphasis on diversifying their digital channels to include all types of school communications and to share across a wide breadth and depth of channels.
If you are looking to start your own elevation program the steps are simple: audit your information intake process, nurture your relationships, pitch your colleagues, and share, share, share!
Over the course of the past year, so much has happened that was unprecedented. Using different CASE competencies has been a crucial tactic among these four leaders throughout the entire year.
Learning lessons include making sure to maintain empathy within your engagement, having strong leadership, and not being afraid to change the status quo. Quick and confident actions allowed these leaders to execute plans throughout the year, along with maintaining strong relationships and emphasizing communication.
Key takeaway: remember that looking forward, the vision of your organization’s future is long-term and is a balance of evidence-informed decision making, leadership, and a high degree of emotional intelligence.
“You can’t crunch people into numbers” – Deep Saini
Major donors look to have a real impact on their community. With smaller institutions, major donors have the opportunity for their gift to have a larger impact than it may have at a larger institution.
Non-alumni giving is strong among higher education, but you must understand the non-alumni donor first. They are usually located within the region, have multi-pronged relationships through their business, may have family ties, and are looking to improve the region and community of the institution.
Key takeaway: people do want to be appreciated; everyone has a role to play in the success of fundraising!
Giving Circles are all about diversity in support; garnering support from different aspects of your community. If you put the resources in, you will see the impact.
Engagement is crucial around giving circles: you must allow your volunteers to step up and have ownership of decisions. This will help your institution to continue to authentically cultivate giving circles to higher levels of giving.
Key takeaway: Giving is an emotional engagement, and Giving Circles provide an opportunity to facilitate that.
There is a huge disparity between alumni of color and white alumni in terms of volume, engagement, event attendance, and more. In fact, alumni of color are underrepresented in engagement as well as giving.
The alumni community is diverse, but there is a problem within the data. It isn’t up to the alumni to feel welcome—that is on the institution. You must create space for all alumni to feel welcome. Alumni identity can be a metric to gauge success. It is how connected an alumnus feels about their institution. Alumni of color and white alumni both share the same level of alumni identity of their alma mater.
Key takeaway: the focus should shift to building inclusive programs for all alumni by including alumni identity as a consideration at the inception of every campaign and program.
OSU is leading the way in digital transformation in higher education. To make this happen they set up an innovation fund to seed ideas and projects internally.
AI is a top-down implementation and it is required to get buy-in throughout the organization. The digital transformation at OSU started with their new CRM and the related applications enhancing the donor experience. To achieve this goal, they had to break down their ‘cylinders of success’ to get their departments out of their silos.
For a project of this magnitude, it’s crucial to let go of the old ways across the board, vertically and horizontally. The most important thing for an org considering this? Trust.