President’s Welcome Message

Dear Colleagues,

Welcome to 2023 – I hope your year is off to a flying start! It’s hard to believe another year has come and gone, and we are back at the beginning of a new year and getting ready to do it all over again.

The team at Educate Plus have been working incredibly hard over the holidays to prepare an extensive and diverse program for our members to enjoy throughout the course of 2023 at both the national, and local levels. The organisation continues to go from strength to strength both in membership and professional development offerings.

Last month, our Chapter Committee spent the better part of a day brainstorming, planning and preparing a calendar of events for you, our members. We look forward to giving you a centralised place to ask questions, bounce ideas off colleagues and connect over best practices. Our professional development programs are designed to help you discover new ways to solve the daily problems you face and also ensure you’re constantly building your portfolio of skills.

Throughout the year, we will invite you to connect with a community of peers, gain insights from others in your network, and access specialised thought-leader articles and resources.

On that note, we hope you will all join us for our WA Chapter Welcome Event on Wednesday 22 February at the Hamptons restaurant in City Beach. This is a great way to kick off the year connecting with colleagues and friends and to warmly welcome our new members to the Educate Plus community. This has proven to be one of our most popular events of the year, and we hope to see you all there.

As always, we welcome your feedback and are keen to know what you would like to see on the professional development calendar this year – please feel free to contact me directly with ideas/feedback.  We would love to hear from you!

My wish for you in 2023 is for healthy admissions, successful fundraising, amazing marketing campaigns and deep connections with your alumni!

Go get ‘em, you’ve got this! 😊

Best wishes

Susie Gill | Educate Plus WA Chapter President

e: susie@enquirytracker.net

Perth 2024! We’d Love To Hear Your Ideas

Educate Plus International Conference 2024 Survey.

Excellence Series…Going Live!

We’re delighted to invite you to attend our first Excellence Series webinar where we will be showcasing the 2022 Alumni and/or Community Event Category winner, St Andrew’s Cathedral School.

This is an excellent professional development opportunity to learn about best practice, share the challenges and achievements.

Lyn Jarvis, Director of Community Engagement at St Andrew’s Cathedral School in Sydney will share how a lean team of four traversed the challenges of COVID and delivered the largest Gala Dinner the school had ever held to achieve multiple objectives:

• Honour an outgoing Head of School
• Celebrate and showcase Alumni
• Engage with parents, staff and the wider community
• Reunite everyone in person in a tentative COVID world
• …….and have some fun (all within a tight budget!)

Can’t attend on the day? This session will be recorded so register anyway to receive your link to the recording post event.

Event Details

Date: Wednesday 15 February 2023

Time:  10.00 am – 10.30 am AWST (1.00 pm – 1.30 pm AEDT)

Location: Online (via Zoom)

Cost: Free for Members, $35 for Non-Members (plus gst).

Presenter: Lyn Jarvis, Director of Community Engagement, St Andrew’s Cathedral School

Thank you to our 2022 Excellence Awards Partner Global Philanthropic for facilitating this session.

Register here

Click on the button below to view the dates* for all of the upcoming Excellence Awards Webinar Series. Registrations for these webinars will open soon.

Excellence Series

*Webinar dates may change. 

The New Age Of The Middle Manager

The WA Chapter is excited to begin the year by hosting a chapter wide Leadership webinar on Middle Management.

Facilitated by our very own Mandy McFarland, award winning educators, Fiona Johnston (Principal, St Hilda’s Anglican School for Girls) and Dr Alec O’Connell (Headmaster, Scotch College) share their experiences, discuss why Middle Management is so important in their institutions and give you tips on how to escalate your leadership development.  

The panel will cover

• The challenges of managing up and down
• The skills worth developing in this space
• Sharing their experiences initially as Middle Managers and what they now most value about Middle Management as Heads (i.e. the Business benefits of strong Middle Management)
• Some tips for wanting to move up the career ladder

Event Details

Date: Tuesday 28 February 2023

Time:  11.00 am – 12.00 pm AWST (2.00 pm – 3.00 pm AEDT)

Location: Online (via Zoom)

Cost: Free for Members, $35 for Non-Members (plus gst)

Register here

WA Chapter Welcome Event

The Educate Plus WA Committee can’t wait to kick start 2023! We have a huge year ahead and the Educate Plus WA Committee would love you to join us for networking drinks to kick start 2023! All members are invited…please come along to meet new members and old friends as we chat all things Advancement and find inspiration for the year ahead, whilst overlooking the beautiful Indian Ocean.

This is a fantastic opportunity to relax, have a drink and to build your networks with other like-minded members.

Event Details

Date: Wednesday 22 February 2023

Time: 4.30 pm – 6.00 pm

Venue: Hamptons City Beach, 179 Challenger Parade, City Beach

Cost: Free for Members. Nibbles provided, cash bar.

Register here….we can’t wait to see you there!

Goal Setting Workshop

With the new year comes new possibilities for growth. It’s a great time to review achievements, set up plans, and put ideas into action.

While identifying challenging yet achievable goals can be difficult, this structured workshop accelerates the process of defining SMART goals through self-reflection and group discussions.

This workshop provides tools, knowledge, and skills to identify goals, create effective mentoring requests and initiate meaningful conversations.

Event Details

Date: Tuesday 21 February 2023

Time:  8.00 am – 9.00 am AWST (11.00 am – 12.00 pm AEDT)

Location: Online (via Zoom)

Cost: Free for Members. 

Register here

Advancement Practitioner Training 2023

Andrine Terry, Director of Philanthropy at Hale School, attended the Advancement Practitioner Training in Melbourne last year. Andrine comes to fundraising from a career in physio, followed by a degree in art history and many years of grass roots volunteering in the community.

She commented that, “I can highly recommend this training to fundraisers at any stage of their professional journey. The insights gained have made me far more effective in my role and I have saved myself years of hard work by gaining the presenters’ expertise and IP. The real-life experience was so valuable and clarified where I need to head to elevate my own practice as a fundraising professional.”

Seize the opportunity to enhance your skills, broaden your knowledge and deepen your understanding of the principles underpinning contemporary practice and standards in Advancement within the education sector. This is the only time that the Advancement Practitioner Training courses will be run in 2023. Options include  Admissions, Alumni & Community Engagement, Marcomms and Fundraising …don’t miss out, register now.

Event Details

Dates: Monday 27 March and Tuesday 28 March 2023 (Alumni & Community Relations is a 1-day course on Monday 27 March only)

Venue: Level 7, UTS Building 10, 235 Jones Street, ULTIMO NSW 2007

Format: Each session is 1.5 hours (incl Q&A) with 4 sessions per day and breaks for morning tea, lunch and afternoon tea.

For more information and to register, please click on the button below:

Find out more…

Get To Know…Meredith

Meredith Eddington, WA Chapter Vice-President (Joint)

Alumni Manager | Shenton College

What was your first ever job?

I was a Phys Ed teacher at Margaret River High School

What lead you to your present role?

My career in Advancement (Development) started when I took a job as Development Manager at my old school, Methodist Ladies College, in 1990. A relatively unknown industry in those days, my role was to engage with the whole community to develop long term relationships with the college’s many and varied stake holders.

My responsibilities included creating the college’s publications – from the Prospectus to the MLC Collegians’ quarterly magazine. To achieve the right outcomes, I needed the senior administrators, staff and alumni to buy in to this process to produce materials that would garner support from everyone. I learnt to bring complex tasks to completion with very tight deadlines.

With many diverse years of experience between then and now…I am currently the Alumni Manager at Shenton College. Shenton is a Government secondary school of over 2750 students, no fund raising is required. My role here is to help build a vibrant college community, with plenty of engagement and networking to help create an environment where students grow and thrive.

Tell us something that might surprise us about you?

I was the Membership Manager at the Fremantle Dockers – a job which taught me how best to deal with people, especially those who were not happy with the team’s performance! After seven fascinating years at Freo I joined the UWA Office of Development as Alumni Relations Manager. This job involved running events, to connect people and to fund raise while promoting the university and it’s many achievements to alumni, corporates and the general community. Under the then Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson AO, UWA was buzzing – from organising a VIP dinner for 400 guests with the Governor, to overseas events in London, New York, Singapore and more, to the UWA Centenary Cocktail Party outside Winthrop Hall for 1000 guests, this was a fabulous time to be working in Advancement.

What do you enjoy the most about working in Advancement?

Working in Advancement is tremendous, you never know what will happen next. To do this job effectively you need a wide network of friends and colleagues, where you create opportunities for engagement, connecting people in a supportive environment, helping them to do a better job, all the while having fun.

When I joined Educate Plus back in the 90’s it was called ADAPE, the Association of Development and Alumni Professionals in Education. Members helped each other by sharing activities and ideas, we were mostly new to a very new industry. We always met in person, and the guidance & encouragement given was invaluable. People come to this industry with very different skills; being creative, sharing ideas & providing support is how we will all advance for the better.  

Date Claimers – Upcoming SIGs

We have a number of events scheduled for March.

Tuesday, 21 March | 3pm – Marketing SIG – Mrkt Space, Leighton Beach

Wednesday, 22 March  – General Advancement SIG – Venue and time to be confirmed

Thursday, 23 March | 3pm – Admissions SIG – TeeBox Café, Claremont

Monday, 27 March | 2.30pm – Fundraising SIG – Hale School

Registrations for these SIGs will open in late February and we will send you more details nearer the time.

Welcome To Our New Members!

A very warm welcome to our latest Members. We are thrilled to have you as part of our WA Chapter community and hope to see you at our WA Chapter Welcome Event!

Thank You To Our Valuable Partners!

We’d like to extend a huge ‘Thank You’ to our valuable partners, who support the WA Chapter in our activities and enable us to provide wonderful opportunities to our Members and Non-Members. We ask that you please consider supporting them, so that in turn, they can continue to support us. 

Connect With Us!

Connect on our Socials!

Stay connected with your fellow Advancement professionals to keep abreast of best practice, discover new approaches and technologies and gain valuable industry insights.

To keep you to up to date with what’s happening at Educate Plus and within your sector, please connect with us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn 

Make sure you join our WA Chapter Facebook Page, a local hub in which to discuss issues and latest trends, ask questions, share insights and keep up with events.

WA Chapter Summit 2023

Save the date! Thursday 2 November and Friday 3 November 2023.

Please save the date for the WA Chapter Conference 2023. The draft program and social calendar will be available later in the year…but for now, keep those days free in your diary – you won’t want to miss out.

Keep an eye on the WA Chapter page for updates and info.