AAF Priorities
All gifts to the Alumni Annual Fund are allocated to one of three areas: the Dean's Development Fund, Scholarships or Lifelong Learning.
Dean's Development Fund
Your degree becomes even more valuable as we enhance the quality and awareness of our programmes. Knowledge is ever expanding - and we will remain at the forefront of business insight and teaching with your support.
By making an unrestricted gift, your donation will have maximum impact. The Dean's Development Fund allows us to be more nimble in advancing strategic initiatives.
Our strategy is directed towards delivering Oxford Depth and Breadth, combining Oxford Thinking with Doing. This year the Dean's Development Fund will focus on investing in teaching and research - supporting the foundations of the School.
'Innovation and opportunity do not always fit neatly within a budget cycle. The Dean's Development Fund will allow us to quickly direct resources to new initiatives: whether to fund curricular innovations, to support timely new research, to make sure that our message is clearly delivered to the digital world, to build new programmes which link our global alumni and Oxford-based communities, or to attract the best faculty, staff and students.'
- Dean Peter Tufano
Scholarships
Attracting the brightest and best candidates has long defined the University of Oxford as a world-leading institution. Yet funding for post-graduate education is being cut throughout the UK, and we too must work hard to ensure the best students continue to invest their future with us.
Many leading business schools offer an average of 50+ scholarships to prospective students every year. We need to compete with this by expanding the range of unrestricted scholarships and ensuring we can secure the very best candidates.
The Alumni Annual Fund is vital in ensuring we can develop and maintain this provision. In 2011/2012, AAF donations supported 10 partial scholarships for MBA candidates. We want to extend this provision for future admissions cycles, expanding scholarships across our full range of subjects. To achieve this we must secure more support.
Lifelong Learning
The AAF helps us bridge the gap between current students and alumni, ensuring that opportunities for continued learning and development extend far beyond the classroom.
Because the global nature of the Saïd Business School community sometimes makes it difficult to meet each other in person, support from the AAF is helping the School invest in new digital initiatives that provide intellectual engagement, and deepen relationships between alumni and the School, regardless of borders, time zones and geographic distances.
Last year, the AAF generously supported the launch of our new online, problem-solving community called GOTO, or Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford. In its first year, GOTO engaged more than 1000 alumni with current students, staff and faculty members from the wider University community in conversations about the business implications of the global trend of 'shifting demographics'. Later this year GOTO will expand to also explore the topic of 'big data'.
Your generous contributions to the AAF have also helped us provide our alumni with unprecedented free access to several online databases as part of GOTO. Alumni can now access: ABI/Inform for full text academic journal articles, Trade & Industry for trade journals, Mergent for company data and global coverage, including current and historical annual reports, and the Economist Intelligence unit’s Executive Briefing and Industry Briefings and Forecasts.
By donating to the AAF, you can help the School continue its pursuit of digital innovations that create opportunities for lifelong learning, and ensure we achieve our mission of being ‘a world-class business school community, embedded in a world-class university, tackling world-scale issues.’