We’ll have more than 30 sessions, so check back for additional sessions, session descriptions and the complete schedule. Speakers are unlikely to change – but they might.
An Annual Giving Directors’ Forum: Participation, Pipelines, and Pivots
Panel TBA
From participation, to pipeline? From socks, to more sustained stewardship? From alumni, to other audiences? And what of AI? We’ll talk about CASE’s Alumni Engagement Metrics, the continuing value of a broad base of giving (including capital campaign participation goals), and what it all means for a variety of educational institutions.
A Digital Fundraising Forum
Moderators TBA
There’s more to digital fundraising than your giving day! Join a terrific team of hosts for a chat about all things digital fundraising. What’s actually working right now—and why? From email and social media to giving days, automation, personalization, and donor journeys, participants will explore practical strategies that drive engagement and inspire giving across online platforms. Come ready to discuss lessons learned, compare tools and tactics, and exchange ideas you can immediately apply to strengthen your digital fundraising results.
Direct Mail Still Delivers
Matt Sulzer, MCR
Testing, testing 1, 2, 3… Are you testing your direct mail approach? Join MCR to learn 5 things you should test, how to perform a quality test, and lessons learned from client results – plus, view a smorgasbord of direct mail samples! Implementing these elements into your upcoming campaign will reveal insights about your audience, identify donor patterns and help you develop a sound fundraising strategy.
The Eight Classic Principles of Annual Giving
Clark Gafke, LEAD Philanthropy
Discover the science behind donor motivation in this engaging and insightful session! Principles of Ethically Influencing Annual Giving will equip you with eight proven principles—Authority, Consistency, Contrast, Liking, Reciprocity, Scarcity, Social Proof, and Unity—that inspire donors to make meaningful gifts to their university. Rooted in the groundbreaking research of the Cialdini Institute, these principles provide a framework for authentic and ethical donor engagement. Clark Gafke, a Cialdini Certified Professional and Ethical Influence Practitioner, will guide you through the subtle yet powerful elements of everyday communication that drive generosity. With practical examples and actionable takeaways, this session will empower you to build stronger connections with donors and achieve sustainable results in annual giving. Whether you’re a seasoned fundraiser or new to the field, this session will improve the way you approach donor engagement!
Favorites From the 27th Annual Giving Appeal and Idea Exchange
Bob Burdenski
For 27 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.
Five Scores for Homed-In Segmentation
Marianne Pelletier, Staupell Analytics
Using five scores, your annual giving team can segment your constituency by more than whether they are LYBNTs or SYBNTs. Join this session to learn how to use these methods
-RFM: Recency, Frequency, and Monetary value score to segment the entire pool and find those constituents needing reacquisition through those constituents meriting a personal touch.
-Velocity: To discover donors who are increasing their giving and both steward and solicit them well.
-Up or Down Score: To identify prospects whose giving is small but steadily increasing over a period years, or prospects who are drifting off. Timely identification leads to quick and effective strategy.
-Close to the Ask score to identify donors who are giving either more than you asked or at the top end of your ask amounts string, or those who are giving below. Use these scores to shift ask amounts and engagement efforts on both sides.
-Gift range by time of year, solicitation method, fund given to, etc.: Find the best time, way, and ask for your prospect pool by understanding how they give under these different spotlights
A Big Giving Day Forum
Casey Castiglione, Rochester Polytechnic Institute and co-Moderators TBA
A Healthcare Fundraising Forum: Patients, Physicians, Providers, Policies, and Pipelines
Moderators TBA
Healthcare institutions offer their own challenges (HIPAA) and opportunities (grateful patients, healthcare professionals, companies and the community) for annual giving fundraising. Join us for a special annual giving forum all about healthcare. Join us for a two-part forum that will share group information and discuss topics including:
◾ What does the prospect journey look like: from acquisition to renewal to major giving prospect?
◾ Using digital options to the fullest: emails, unique web landing page, ongoing impact updates;
◾ Tribute and 3rd-party giving-making the process easy and meaningful;
◾ What’s new in stewardship;
◾ Valuable vendors – Who are you using? Email vendors? Print? Business Associate Agreements?
◾ Giving initiatives: Doctor’s Day, Giving Day, Nurses Week? Do these help?
An Independent Schools Forum (Part 1)
Walker Konkle, Washington International School and co-Moderators TBA
Join us for a forum session devoted to independent schools. Bring your questions, answers, challenges and solutions to this open discussion session.
A Leadership Annual Giving Forum
Nicole Forgit, Bentley University and co-Moderators TBA
Session description to follow.
A Small Shop Forum
Christopher Chambers, SUNY Canton
Are you a one-person annual giving shop? Are you <1? Join Chis for a little therapy and a lot of shared strategy and ideas on how to leverage your work, scale the solutions, work with third-party resources and accomplish annual giving goals when the “team” is you.
Student Philanthropy and Engagement
Daniella Staudacher, Carnegie Mellon University
Session description to follow.
Volunteer Management
Jill Lynch, Brown University
Session description to follow.