2025 CCAE Annual General Meeting

Jun 17, 2025 | Advancement Insights

The 2025 CCAE Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held virtually via zoom on Tuesday, June 17, 2025, beginning at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.
Be sure to join the pre-AGM session at 12:00 p.m. Eastern, to experience one of the 2025 CCAE National Conference runaway hit sessions.

Schedule Outline:
12:00 – 1:00 pm ET : We Can’t Do What We Can’t Track
1:00 – 1:30 pm ET : AGM

2025 Annual General Meeting Documents

Pre-AGM session, 12:00 p.m. ET:

We Can’t Do What We Can’t Track

There is never enough time, never enough money….and yet a seemingly endless list of opportunities. Sound familiar? Join the Alumni Relations team from Simon Fraser University for a session built around focusing your strategies and challenging the way you think about your alumni relations program. Data informed decision making, cheesy mottos, and focus has helped SFU increase alumni engagement by 226% from FY2020 to FY2023. We want to share our story and learning along the way to help you do the same. We will unleash the tips and tricks that have helped a small team manage up, advocate for additional resources, move the dial on fund development, data cleanliness and benchmarking, and to answer the question “why are we doing this?” We will also debut our BIG HAIRY AUDACIOUS GOAL (BHAG) of becoming a budget net neutral alumni relations team by 2030, and some of the steps we are taking to help us get there.

 

Learning Objectives

  • How to manage up and advocate for investment in your alumni relations program.
  • How to keep you and your team focused on driving ROI and making evidence-based decisions.
  • Seeing the bigger picture: what a healthy Alumni Relations program should mean to your institution.

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Vivian Chang

Vivian Chang
Director, Operations, Alumni Relations
Simon Fraser University

Nicole Dorssers

Nicole Dorssers, MPEd, MBA
Executive Director, Strategic Engagement
Simon Fraser University

Ophelia Yu

Ophelia Yu
Director, Alumni Relations
Simon Fraser University

The Role of the CFO and Other Leaders in Advancement

Mar 6, 2025 | Advancement Insights, Annual General Meeting, Best Practises, Education Sessions

March 2025

Featuring:
David Palmer, Vice-President, Advancement, University of Toronto and Trevor Rogers, Chief Financial Officer, of the University of Toronto

Partnership and collaboration among senior university leaders that helps foster a culture of philanthropy and drives growth in fundraising and engagement

Transformational growth in fundraising and engagement does not come without significant budgetary investment. In an environment of increasingly tight financial constraints and intense internal competition for available dollars, finding such investment with operating budgets is often a non-starter. To meet this challenge, the University of Toronto recently re-introduced assessments on endowment distributions and expendable gifts, under the Advancement Investment Model (AIM).

The AIM model has also served as the basis for discussion of a national best practice guideline on the use of gift fees presented to and endorsed by senior advancement leaders at the CCAE National Conference in May 2024. This guideline describes principles and parameters for the successful implementation of such fees within educational institutions.

In this session, the University of Toronto’s Vice-President of Advancement, David Palmer and CFO, Trevor Rogers discuss the genesis of the AIM model and the important role that senior university leaders play in supporting a positive, productive, and growth-oriented culture of advancement that enables the pursuit of transformation growth in fundraising and engagement.

Supporting documents:
Deepening the Impact of Advancement at the University of Toronto
Guiding Principles on Supplemental Funding Sources for Advancement
University of Toronto AIM Model
CCAE AGM Presentation: Guiding Principles on Supplemental Funding Sources for Advancement

 

TDIMM Fellowship Information Webinar

Nov 14, 2024 | Advancement Insights, TDIMM Fellowship Archive

This webinar provides the knowledge on how to select an applicant, the impact a fellowship creates, and what it takes for a successful application.

Featuring 2019/20 fellowship recipient, Jenna Kirker of Confederation College, 2020/21 institutional mentor, Tom Meadus of NBCC, Danielle Lamothe, CCAE President & CEO, and Anne Menard & Scott Grant of TD Insurance Meloche Monnex.

Related Resources:
2023 TD Insurance Meloche Monnex Fellowship Presentations
APPLY for a TDIMM Fellowship in Advancement

Key Competencies for Responsible GenAI Use

Oct 2, 2024 | Advancement Insights, Education Sessions

September 2024
CCAE 2024 Fall Education Kick-off Session

Featuring:
David Burns, AVP, Academic, Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU)

This session discusses a competency framework developed at Kwantlen Polytechnic University for generative artificial intelligence use – not by computer scientists but, rather, by the rest of us. AVP, Academic, David Burns discusses some of the early challenges he saw in his corner of the institution and some of the ways in which the team he works with faced them.

Key Takeaways:

  • The industry and government advisors KPU contacted while developing its approach suggest several key competencies for responsible GenAI use.
  • These will, and are, changing over time.
  • Institutions are best advised to take an approach of cautious optimism. 

Related Resources:
KPU GenAi Framework
Policy and Practice of Artificial Intelligence white paper
Podcasts: theverge.com The Vergecast Podcast & Hard Fork podcast – NY Times