International Alumni Strategy at Higher Education Institutions

As part of TPF’s international alumni activity, we support higher education institutions in Hungary in the development of their international alumni activities on an institutional level, in particular, by organising a consultation and a training each year for alumni officers (and international coordinators).

The goal is to involve and engage these groups for the issue of international alumni in order to receive long-term support. Since the launch of the programme, three consultations and two training were organised. The events are free of charge for the participants.

The last consultation on ‘Effective international alumni relations? Alumni Data!’ took place in April 2018. The aim of the event was to raise awareness how important up-to-date alumni databases are to manage alumni relations successfully. One of the outcomes of the event was that only a few Hungarian higher education institution deal with international alumni in a strategic way. The reasons appear to vary, at some universities there is no strategy, whereas at some others the international alumni staff has changed a lot in the last few years. In the follow-up questionnaire participants identified the topic of starting an international alumni network from the basics as their future training need.

This year, our trainer will be Ms. Sam Davies. She is the Director of Philanthropy and Alumni Engagement Office at University of Brighton. Before becoming the first director of philanthropy and alumni engagement, her first foray into fundraising came whilst a final year undergraduate at Warwick as a caller for their first-ever telephone campaign in 1997. Following graduation, she spent two years managing telephone campaigns at 22 institutions (universities and schools) as a consultant. She then returned to Warwick full-time to run their campaigns and later became responsible for all other annual giving activities. Before she left Warwick, she also took on responsibility for development services and helped introduce a leadership giving circle for the university.

Since 2008, Sam has led philanthropy and alumni engagement at the University of Brighton, having arrived tasked with establishing a sustainable development operation from scratch and embedding a culture of philanthropy amongst the alumni community. Her recruitment coincided with the start of the government's matched funding initiative which provided an excellent springboard from which to push forwards the fundraising and alumni engagement agenda. The department has enjoyed significant success on a number of fronts since its establishment almost 9 years ago, including receiving a national award from CASE in June 2011 for fundraising progress and building an alumni community from 20,000 to now 150,000 globally. (Source: CASE website)

With her knowledge, we are certainly sure, that our participants from higher education institutions will have the best help to raise the alumni relations at their institutions.

NOTE: The event is only available for staff of Hungarian higher education institutions. If you're one of them and didn't applied yet, please, contact Ms. Eszter Végh (eszter.vegh@tpf.hu).