All sessions are Central Time.
All Friday sessions are at the DePaul Conference Center, 8th Floor, 1 E. Jackson Blvd.
8:00-9:00 a.m. – Continental Breakfast
9:00-10:00 a.m. – Breakout Sessions
What Happens When You Test Everything? Annual Giving Reimagined
Haley Hamilton, University of Colorado, Boulder
Room 8005
Annual giving programs often rely on familiar strategies—repeating the same emails, timelines, and tactics year after year. But what happens when you start testing everything?
This session explores how small, intentional experiments can transform your approach to annual giving without requiring a full analytics team or complex data infrastructure. Through real-world examples and practical frameworks, we’ll show how to move beyond “this is how we’ve always done it” and toward a culture of continuous improvement. Attendees will learn how to design and implement low-lift tests across email, messaging, and audience segmentation; interpret results without overcomplicating the data; and apply insights quickly to improve performance. Whether you’re a one-person shop or part of a larger team, this session will provide actionable tools to start testing—and learning—right away.
A Healthcare Annual Giving Forum (In Two Parts)
Patients, Physicians, Providers, Policies, and Pipelines
Meredith Howell, UChicago Medicine, Ramona Maza, UIC Health, Leah Evanchuck, Rush University Medical Center, and Victoria Gajc, Northwestern Medicine
Room 8012
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?
A Donor Relations Forum: Key Insights from the Conference and Beyond
Mary Weingartner, UNICEF USA
Room 8204
This casual, interactive session will reflect on the conference, drawing out key donor relations insights from across the week’s topics, from giving days to gift administration, recurring giving to storytelling. The conversation can also stretch beyond the conference to broader questions in the field. Throughout the forum, presenters will be invited to share perspectives from their own sessions and attendees can join in by offering observations, trading insights or asking questions.
Why Donors Say Yes:
The Eight Principles Influencing Annual Giving
Clark Gafke, LEAD Philanthropy
Room 8002
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!
10:15-11:15 a.m. – Breakout Sessions
Favorites From the 27th Annual Giving Appeal and Idea Exchange
Bob Burdenski
Room 8005
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 for some of the clever fundraising ideas of the year.
A Healthcare Annual Giving Forum (Part 2)
Patients, Physicians, Providers, Policies, and Pipelines
Meredith Howell, UChicago Medicine, Ann Fisher, Michigan Medicine, Ally Campbell, WashU Medicine
Room 8012
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?
If They Don’t See It, They Can’t Give: Expanding Reach with Text Messaging
Paul Klenk, GetThru
Room 8204
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.
A Giving Day Workshop
Jason Long, Sleek
Room 8002
This Giving Day Workshop provides a practical, step-by-step technical roadmap for reinventing your institution’s signature fundraising events by establishing a sustainable and seamless high-performance infrastructure. Led by Jason Long, who brings extensive experience from his leadership at Western Michigan University and his collaboration at Sleek with industry leaders like Occidental College, the session focuses on how to move beyond manual “black box” limitations to a system capable of supporting multiple giving days throughout the year. You will learn how to deploy targeted messaging and engaging, multi-channel campaigns that break institutional goals by leveraging automated batching for complex gift types and real-time downstream dashboards. Strategies for deploying fun and interactive leader boards will be shared. By adopting these proven strategies—which includes the framework recognized in 2025 for Salesforce Partner Innovation —institutions can transition from weeks of manual data entry to a streamlined environment where volunteer and student-driven outreach and personalized donor journeys drive lasting philanthropic impact.
11:30-12:30 – Breakout Sessions
An Annual Giving Directors’ Final Deep Dive Forum
With Annual Giving Faculty
Room 8005
Join a group of Meeting of the Minds faculty for a last-call discussion of topics, trends, issues and futures for annual giving.
From Missing to Mobilized: Engaging All Donors in Giving Days and Crowdfunding
Courtney Pourciaux, Encoura
Room 8012
Session description to follow.
An Advancement Services Final Deep Dive Forum
With Elizabeth Tavares and Advancement Services Faculty
Room 8204
Join a group of Meeting of the Minds faculty for a last-call discussion of topics, trends, issues and futures for advancement services.
12:30-1:00 p.m. – Closing Session
AI, DAFs, VSE, DXOs, VEOs, LAG and More:
Reviewing the 2026 MMOTM Alphabet Soup
Closing Session with Bob and Elizabeth
Room 8005
Join us for a grand finale review of conference sessions, as we share some favorite take-aways, words of wisdom and inspired ideas from this year’s conference. And we give out prizes too!