The Keynote on Speaking Engagement

Sarah Winkler is the senior vice president of INVNT Higher Ed, where she helps colleges and universities build the immersive experiences behind their biggest moments: campaign launches, presidential events, and milestone celebrations.

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (52 mins)

In this Keynote, Sarah and Ryan get into why in-person experiences matter more in a digital age, not less, because emotion, trust, and belief are the things a screen can't manufacture. They dig into why a campaign launch is decisional rather than informational, why events fall flat when they become a checklist of speakers instead of an audience-centered story, how building one aligns advancement, marketing, and leadership behind a single message, and where AI and more personalized experiences might take the work next.

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn, and learn more about INVNT Higher Ed. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Yesterday was the culmination of our first Faculty-in-Residence experience here on Speaking Engagement. I so appreciate Mallory Erickson’s trust and willingness to give this a shot and work with me to engage a slightly different audience from her own. Mallory’s work is primarily with frontline fundraisers, and across all types of non-profits. Our SE community is largely engagement pros in education advancement. It was fun to apply her excellent research findings to the work of alumni and constituent engagement.

That said, we’re all fundraisers. I believe that wholeheartedly, and even though I sometimes refer to the “development side” and the “engagement side” of advancement as a sort of short hand, it’s just one big team and should be a holistic effort to stimulate generosity and investment.

In the Symposium which we streamed live on LinkedIn, we get deep into Mallory’s research. Scott Francis from Auburn University and Andrea Devine from UVA led the discussion, and I helped make sure we were on-time.

Thanks for listening and let me know what you think!

Also, mark your calendars for the next Faculty-in-Residence Live Symposium with Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon on Tuesday, November 10 at 12:30 pm ET.

Cameron Hall is the executive director of annual giving and donor experience at the University of South Carolina, and one of the more forward-thinking voices in the annual giving space.

Listen to the full-length version on YouTube (58 mins)

In this Keynote, Cameron and Ryan get into why being someone's alum doesn't mean an institution has earned the right to solicit them, why the neutral and lapsed donors are the most undervalued segments on the list, and how USC's donor experience model asks donors for their story rather than telling them one. They also dig into annual giving as a pipeline rather than a churn, what great stewardship really means, and building the whole operation around data.

Connect with Cameron on LinkedIn. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Ryan King is the Chief of Staff and Innovation officer at Roanoke College, a small liberal arts college in Virginia working to become the most sought-after educational partner in the Roanoke Valley.

Listen to the full-length version on YouTube (58 mins)

In this Keynote, King and Ryan Catherwood dig into Roanoke's WorkAI Lab, a seven-week program that teaches working professionals not just how to use AI but when it helps and when it hurts, and that is taught entirely by Roanoke alumni. They get into why the college started with the community rather than students, how a small institution moves from idea to launch in weeks, what it means to serve adult learners and lifelong learners, and how engaging alumni as teachers became one of the program's biggest wins.

Connect with Ryan King on LinkedIn, and learn more about Roanoke College at roanoke.edu. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Dayana Kibilds has made email her specialty, co-authoring the book Mailed It and building a following for her plain-spoken take on how higher ed actually reaches people.

In this Keynote, Speaking Engagement contributing editor Kristin Hanson sits down with Day to make the case that email is advancement's most intimate and most owned channel, and that most teams waste it by talking about themselves instead of being useful. They get into why relevance beats segmentation, what advancement can borrow from enrollment, where AI belongs in email and where it doesn't, and how to get change approved in a risk-averse institution.

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (47 mins)

Connect with Day on LinkedIn and through her weekly newsletter, and pick up her book, Mailed It. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Resources referenced:

Donor Perceptions of Report, by Kindsight): https://kindsight.io/resources/ebooks/2025-donor-perceptions-of-ai-report/

Is Higher Ed Deploying AI Backwards?: https://www.enrollify.org/episodes/episode-129-is-higher-ed-deploying-ai-backwards

Someone stands up in a bar with a slide deck and spends three minutes hyping up their single friend. That’s Pitch-a-Friend, and it’s fun and something of a new phenomenon. What I wanted to talk to my friend and colleague, Melissa Schipke, about is the infrastructure that lets something that playful run in more than a thousand cities.

(Watch the full-length version on YouTube - 54 mins)

Melissa is CMAC’s engagement metrics lead and the founder of Tassl, so she thinks in systems. When Pitch-A-Friend took off, she didn’t wing it. She built onboarding, a resource portal volunteers can pull from and contribute back to, and a clear blueprint so a chapter in a brand-new city runs like the ones before it. The fun is the front end. The reason it scales is the unglamorous stuff behind it.

She’s always asking “how much tech is too much tech,” which I really appreciate in this moment we’re living in.

Big Themes This Week

* What lets a light-hearted experience scale is unglamorous infrastructure: onboarding, shared resources, and a repeatable blueprint.

* Ask how much tech is too much. Technology should help a room connect, not replace the face-to-face that is the actual point.

* Start with the audience, not the event. Decide who it’s for and where they already gather, then design something worth showing up for.

Team Discussion Questions

* Where are we spending on the invite but not on the experience?

* What in our regional playbook could become a real blueprint, so a new chapter isn’t reinventing the wheel?

* If we designed an event around what alumni actually want, not what’s easy for us, what would change?

Kevin Grubb has spent his career working to connect students with real experience, first leading career services at Villanova, and now as Vice President for Work-Based Learning at the Strada Education Foundation, where he helps states, systems, and institutions scale it.

Watch the full-length version on YouTube (47 mins)

In this Keynote, Kevin and Ryan reframe work-based learning as a continuum, from job shadows to apprenticeships, and dig into why higher ed struggles to deliver on it: the difficulty of gathering data, the discipline-by-discipline nuance, and the real capacity limits on employers. They get practical about where to start, often with a school's own campus jobs, how states like Virginia are stepping up, the promise of apprenticeship degrees, and what AI might mean for the work ahead.

Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn and at strada.org. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Mallory Erickson is a fundraising coach, the host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and the author of the book by the same name, and Speaking Engagement's first Faculty-in-Residence. She has built her career on reframing fundraising away from something pushy and transactional and toward what she considers sacred work.

In this Keynote, Mallory and Ryan get into her concept of alignment fundraising, the idea that great fundraising is not an ask but an offer, and why understanding what truly drives a donor turns a transaction into a win-win partnership. They dig into scarcity mindset and the belief ceilings that quietly limit what teams think is possible, why not all money is worth accepting, and why burnout is less about overwork than about rejection, uncertainty, and the stories fundraisers tell themselves.

Connect with Mallory at malloryerickson.com and on the What the Fundraising podcast. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

Kalyan Varma has worked with hundreds of institutions on the operational side of advancement, and he can usually predict the problem before he arrives: participation is slipping, the donor base is narrowing even as dollars rise, and the technology meant to help is scattered across disconnected tools. He is the co-founder and CEO of Almabase, one of the largest alumni engagement and fundraising platforms in the country.

(Watch the full-length version on YouTube - 54 mins)

In this Keynote, Kalyan and Ryan get into why he calls "integration" the most abused word in advancement technology, what real integration takes, and why engagement and fundraising should be understood as one continuum rather than two separate worlds. He is candid about what hasn't worked, including engagement scores that almost no one uses, and clear that AI is best understood as an enabler of fundamentally human work.

Connect with Kalyan on LinkedIn and at almabase.com. For more Keynotes, and to join our Book Club and Agora, become a member at speakingengagement.org.

This week's Breakout digs into Mark Dobosz's LinkedIn piece on a sobering number from the 2026 M+R Benchmarks: new donor retention sits at just 24 percent, meaning three of four first-time donors never give again. Ryan Catherwood, Dave Hail, and Courtney Stombock unpack why that is a structural failure rather than a stewardship gap, why organizations are good at keeping the donors they already know but bad at the front door, and what it would take to treat a first gift as the start of a relationship instead of a transaction. They also get honest about the four-part fix Dobosz proposes, and why it is so much harder to run in a real advancement shop than it looks on paper.

Referenced in this episode:

Mark Dobosz, "Three Out of Four Won't Come Back. We're Still Calling." (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-out-four-wont-come-back-were-still-calling-mark-dobosz-ectp-shvle/