by james dungate
Last week a few of the Productle team were in Leeds for the CASE Advancement Operations Conference. It was a really engaging three days and now, a few weeks, we’re feeling reflective...
Here are seven of our key takeaways from the week:
There is a huge spectrum of skills and experience out there. From people thirty plus years into their careers, leading teams with eight figure turn overs, to those who graduated last June, there were a wide range of sessions available, for people of all skills and experience. Well done CASE and the planning committee for delivering!
The sector is genuinely collegiate! We heard about fascinating projects, from the use of LLM to drive a training program, to hearing about how three different universities pooled ideas in a CRM migration project (but ultimately didn’t all go with the same system), there is creativity and ambition throughout the sector. Crucially, people are excited to share their cool work - and equally excited to celebrate the success of others.
This does create a challenge though – there’s never enough time to do everything! We know this isn’t unique to higher education; but despite many organisations taking huge steps forward in terms of automation and process optimisation, every conversation we had had at least a garnish of “well, we’d like to go further for our alumni and do X, if only we had the capacity”. At Productle we’re really excited about the implications of this, and not just because we can deliver you that additional short term capacity, or indeed process review and automation builds!
CASE is international! The furthest journey we heard about was from Stellenbosch University (South Africa!), but on top of that we were reminded just how global the student and alumni populations of British and Irish universities are. This has fascinating knock on impact on activities as diverse as postal address hygiene through to effective communication with alumni who haven’t used English recently, sometimes in decades.
People want Helple! This is our new free support service – to oversimplify, have an hour of consultancy for free! We don’t believe in gatekeeping our expertise and are excited share it with you. It means we’re contributing to the sector whilst staying informed of your challenges. We soft launched this service at CASE and it got a warm response. Why not try it for yourself at Helple — Productle - We Make Data Smile ?
Data visualisation is critical. Ultimately, the way to ensure your team fully engage with your data systems is to ensure that it is in their interests to do so. That means making sure that your fundraisers have access to the information they need, that’s up to date and easy to understand.
Finally, a grown up take on AI! There wasn’t a constant diet of AI sessions, nor were there any, shall we say… optimists (?) devoutly proclaiming that AI will solve everything. Instead, there was a clear pleinary session featuring academic research into how the sector was responding to AI, followed by an expert fundraising consultant looking at both the good and the bad; the opportunities balanced out by the risks and fears. Our key takeaway was that in order to maximise the impact of any AI you may choose to use, you’ll have to make sure that you’ve got all the fundamentals in place to provide a solid platform.
And one more bonus takeaway from James (who we should disclose, has a baby with a Yorkshire lass…) Leeds is beautiful! OK this isn’t about the sector per se, but we just wanted to thank our hosts. We can’t wait to go back!
What did you most enjoy about CASE? Is there anything you are reflecting on here that isn’t mentioned? Let us know in the comments!
