Here are NEAGC’s sessions for Friday, March 20th.
All times are Eastern.
8:00-9:15 a.m. – Breakfast and Networking in the Callahan Dining Hall
“Hot Breakfast Roundtables”
Callahan Dining Hall
Add a side of group conversation to your breakfast with a breakfast roundtable discussion. Topics include Engagement Centers, Stewardship & Showing Impact, Community Colleges and More.
9:30-10:30 a.m. – Breakout Sessions
A 157-Year Advantage: The Art & Science of Volunteer Management at Bowdoin College (Ideas & Tips You Can Steal!)
Christi Lumiere and Josh Elowe, Bowdoin College
Klebanoff Auditorium
Bowdoin College’s annual giving volunteer program is 157 years old and engages more than 1,000 alumni and parent volunteers each year. In this fast-paced session, Christi Lumiere, Executive Director of Annual Giving, will share the art and science of volunteer management by sourcing audience feedback to guide the discussion. Expect scalable ideas, practical tips and tricks, and some stealable tools you can adapt for your annual giving program.
Annual Giving for 58 Million Alumnae?
Building a Girl Scout Donor Pipeline With Scale (and Without Cookies)
Eliza Boffen-Yordanov and Tina Brooks Girl Scouts of the USA
Gerrish Room 147/155
The Girl Scout Alum challenge: How do you design a fundraising strategy that meaningfully engages a vast and diverse alumnae/i community? This session explores elements of a new comprehensive, data-informed fundraising plan to reach and inspire 58 million Girl Scouts alumnae across generations, geographies, and levels of affinity. Liza and Tina will discuss segmentation, scalable personalization, multi-channel engagement, volunteer networks, leadership giving pipelines including a Former National Board Alum Society, and the role of storytelling in strengthening lifelong connection. Learn some scalable insights for setting priorities, aligning resources, and creating measurable goals, while balancing broad participation with major gift growth.
The Best of Both Worlds: Properly Blending Direct Mail with Digital Campaigns
Theresa Aide and Kate Cominsky, CFRE, Suttle-Straus
Gerrish Room 161
Direct Mail is still the most effective tool for fundraising today, but when blended with a well-timed and coordinated digital campaign it becomes even better. Learn how 7 different techniques can be orchestrated together for a 30-day campaign where digital ads act as an accelerant to put “fuel on the fire” to get your donors to give more and give faster to achieve your goals in record time.
If They Don’t See It, They Can’t Give: Expanding Reach with Text Messaging
Paul Klenk, GetThru
Gerrish Room 159
Summary: Annual giving teams can’t rely on email and direct mail alone to break through today’s crowded communications landscape. Adding text messaging to your strategy expands your reach, increases visibility, and creates more opportunities for meaningful donor engagement through a true multichannel approach. Unlike email, text messaging is immediate, personal, and conversational—helping you connect with supporters in real time and inspire action when it matters most. In this session, you’ll learn how GetThru enables institutions to confidently scale compliant, personalized text outreach with built-in safeguards and deep expertise in texting compliance and donor communication best practices.
10:15-10:30 a.m. – Break
10:30-11:30 a.m. – Breakout Sessions
Favorites From the 26th Annual Giving Appeal and Idea Exchange
Bob Burdenski
Klebanoff Auditorium
For 26 years, Bob Burdenski has hosted an annual exchange where hundreds of institutions share thousands of annual giving innovations, ideas and success stories. Awesome appeals, terrific technologies, dynamic discoveries and marvelous messages. It was a great year of pushing the envelope in direct mail, digital and beyond. Come and see 3-time CASE Innovations in Annual Giving author Bob Burdenski dump out his bag of BOB (Best of the Bunch) favorites with some specially-selected fundraising ideas.
Annual Giving For Athletics: Engaging Fans, Families, and Champions of Your Program
Keven Morency, Endicott College
Gerrish Room 147/155
Athletics programs inspire deep loyalty and pride—but how do you turn that passion into meaningful philanthropic support? This session will share strategies, challenges, and successes in athletics fundraising. Topics will include building strong partnerships with coaches and athletic leadership, engaging alumni athletes and parents, leveraging events and game-day energy, cultivating major and leadership gifts, and creating a sustainable annual pipeline of support. Join this session to exchange ideas, compare approaches, and leave with practical insights you can use to strengthen fundraising for your athletics program.
Designing Engagement at Scale: What Actually Moves Donors to Act
Christine Soutter, Gravyty
Gerrish Room 159
Annual giving teams are being asked to deliver more participation, stronger retention, and greater pipeline growth — often with the same (or fewer) resources. At the same time, donors are navigating economic uncertainty and more giving options than ever before. Simply increasing outreach volume is no longer enough. In this session, we’ll explore how higher ed annual giving teams are redesigning engagement across phonathons, Giving Days, everyday giving, young alumni outreach, and digital channels to drive action at scale. We’ll examine why traditional volume-based models struggle, and how intentional engagement can improve response rates without increasing workload. We’ll cover:
• How fundraising teams are modernizing phonathon strategy to prioritize connection, timing, and donor engagement signals
• Why engaging 1-5 year alumni early builds long-term participation, retention, and pipeline growth
• How student fundraisers can create authentic, relatable Giving Day moments that cut through donor fatigue
• Where video communication and AI-powered tools drive scalable personalization without sacrificing authenticity
• How to design smarter outreach flows that help teams do more with less
Throughout the session, we’ll highlight real institutional examples and case studies from higher ed fundraising programs to show what’s working in practice and what attendees can replicate immediately.
A Donor Stewardship Forum
Gerrish Room 161
Join an open discussion about all things donor stewardship. No powerpoints – just powerful conversation!
11:30 a.m.-Noon – Conference Closing Session and Sponsor Drawing
Klebanoff Auditorium
Be there for our fast finale to the 2026 Northeast Annual Giving Conference, where we’ll draw the winner of our sponsor bingo contest, hear some favorite words of wisdom from all the previous sessions at the conference, and say thanks to the speakers, sponsors and all the other attendees that made the conference such a success.
Noon-1:00 p.m. – Farewell Lunch in the Callahan Dining Hall
Catch one more meal with your fellow attendees – we’re hosting a farewell lunch in the Callahan Dining Hall!