Get 43 sessions offered at the Prospect Development 2025 Conference, held August 19 - 22, 2025.

• Keynote Presentation: The Recovery Blueprint: Implementing Resets, Personal Data, and Self-Connection to Sustain Success
• A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative: A Journey to both diversifying pipelines and portfolios and communicating findings to external stakeholders
• Doing More With Less: Taking Care of Your Team During Turnover
• From Overlooked to Engaged: Capturing Hidden, Forgotten, and Untapped Prospects with a Referral Tracking System That Drives Fundraising Success Transforming Prospect Discovery and Qualification Through Data and Accountability
• From Stagnant to Strategic: Transforming Portfolio Management in Small Shops
• Partner Industry Panel: Generative AI: More Than a Buzzword
• Breaking it Down - A Different Way to Approach Portfolio Pipelines and Movement
• Making the Case for More Staff: A Comprehensive Guide to Demonstrating the Need for Additional Staff to Enhance Productivity, Efficiency, and Employee Well-being
• PROST! PRoactive, STrategic Research - a $1 Billion Tool for Cultural Transformation
• What Makes a Good Fundraiser: Is the Devil in the Details?
• Building the Foundations of a Prospect Development Program in a Solo Shop
• Don't Assume!
• Portfolio Horror Stories! Using Data-Driven Insights to Transform Frightening into Fantastic
• The Journey Unfolds: Choosing a Career Path in Prospect Development
• Apra Talks: Sailing through the Storm: Navigating and Growing from a Challenging Work Environment
• Beyond Buy-In: Driving Lasting Change in Prospect Development & Data Management
• Connection Capital: Activating Ultra High Net Worth Prospects in a New Market
• Designing an Excel-lent Prospect Management Revamp
• Major Gifts, Smarter Research: The AI Advantage Explained
• Ask the Ethicist: When Donor Behavior is an Organizational Risk; How to Protect Your Organization and Your Staff
• Consultant Mastery: Hire Smart, Utilize Wisely
• From Excel to Python - A Journey in Name Matching Techniques
• Partners That Align: Due Diligence Strategies for Corporate and Foundation Relations
• Can ChatGPT Write My Profile?
• Decoding the SEC's Alphabet Soup for Dollars
• Getting Started with R for Data Science: A Non-Expert's Guide
• Enhancing Fundraising Efficiency through Tiered Services
• From 0 to 100: A Newbie's Journey in Power BI
• From Solo to Duo: Designing and Scaling an Effective Prospect Management System for a Growing Team
• Hidden Figures: Identifying High Net Worth Prospects of Color Through Non-Bias Screening Techniques
• Apra Debates: 2025 Edition
• Championing Collective Success: Leadership Through Managing Up, Down, and Across
• From Chaos to Clarity: Change Management Strategies for Prospect Development Teams
• Reeling in Results: Turning Portfolio Reviews into Fundraising Strategy
• Planting the Seeds of Philanthropy: A Stardew Valley Approach to Discovery Management
• Researching Land Investments and LLCs
• She Doesn't Even Go Here!: Researching Outside of the Lines
• What's in a Model? The Inner Workings of LLMs
• An Exploratory Approach to Predictive Modeling
• Navigating Transitions: Effective Change Management and CRM Transformation
• Sailing the Seas of Success: Charting the Course with Prospect Research in Healthcare
• The Prospect Strategy Puzzle
• From Volunteer to Leader: Unlocking Career Paths Through Service

In this session, get a high-level overview of the science and technology behind GPT, DeepSeek and other large language models. We'll take a look at the history of deep learning and some of the concepts that have made recent leaps in artificial intelligence possible. We'll also see that understanding how these models are created offers insights into how to overcome some of their limitations for prospect research-based tasks. This is a technical talk (there is some high school math mentioned) presented for a non-technical audience.

Learn step-by-step how I leveled up from Power BI newbie to super user in 12 months. I'll share with you my self-directed learning plan as well as my project management approach to develop and implement a proposal pipeline dashboard for our fundraising team. This presentation will highlight the necessary resources and partnerships needed to undertake a project of this kind and demonstrate how to navigate potential roadblocks and incorporate feedback. I'll show you how to leverage your newfound skills to create an impactful dashboard that supports fundraisers' data management needs and leadership's access to pipeline data.

Making the leap from spreadsheets to specialized data science programs can be challenging: Writing code, unfamiliar software, and how to even share your work. In this session I'll share my experience making that leap as a graduate student in data science, the benefits of learning a program like R, and some demonstration of what it can do. Attendees will learn basic terminology, where to find free open-source software, and how to get started on some simple projects. I'll include recommendations for training and support, as well as how to get AI to write your code.

University of Chicago Prospect Development is often asked to match event attendance lists with prospects in our database. Instead of manually searching each attendee in our database, we asked ourselves: how can we do this more efficiently?

Using several projects as examples, this presentation will walk through different approaches to name matching techniques that are accessible to everyone. While we will start using spreadsheet software like Excel and end using simple Python Scripts. Through this process, this presentation will also show why you shouldn't assume coding is beyond your abilities.

How should you prioritize and segment your wealth data in today’s AI-driven landscape? What role does Predictive AI play in surfacing high-potential prospects? How can you combine this with GenerativeAI to dramatically reduce time spent on manual tasks?

In this session, we’ll walk through how AI is transforming the way fundraising teams analyze, segment, and act on wealth and career intelligence. From propensity modeling to AI-enable intelligent segmentation, we’ll show you how to apply data-driven strategies to uncover new donor insights, streamline workflows, and ensure your team is focused on the right prospects at the right time.

In this webinar, we’ll cover: - Techniques for utilizing wealth intelligence and AI to reveal hidden donor potential across your database - Strategies for seamlessly incorporating AI-driven insights and wealth data directly into everyday fundraising workflows - Tools and key performance indicators for tracking the impact of AI-driven prospecting and improved workflows - BONUS: Some new Windfall SaaS & AI capabilities and our roadmap, including Windfall’s AI Copilot

You’ll leave this session equipped with actionable strategies and tools to harness AI for expanding donor pipelines, increasing engagement at every giving level, and delivering measurable results in a rapidly changing fundraising environment.

*Full participation is applicable for 1.0 points in Category 1.B -Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.

There has been increased interest in leveraging predictive AI by non-profits to generate new major and legacy gift prospects and for improving annual fund prioritization. In this presentation, we will look at how the principles of Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) help build better models. We will also dig into exploring diagnostic tools such as residual plots, leverage plots and partial regression plots. We'll also discuss approaches for effectively activating the results. Come see how we can make statistical modeling fun.

We are entering new worlds in fundraising and prospect development with the exponential growth of AI - more focus on data privacy and security and higher-than-ever demands on identifying new donors and expanding existing relationships.  As a profession, we're also seeing declines in overall giving and in trust in nonprofits. In this session, we'll explore current trends in the sector, data-led approaches to building and maintaining trust and how we can respond to the current landscape in ways that encourage and foster trust, reciprocity and shared goals for future fundraising. * 

*Full participation is applicable for 1.0 points in Category 1.B -Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.

Proof Fundraising: Harnessing the Power of Generative AI." This session is tailored for prospect researchers and fundraisers, focusing on the practical use of ChatGPT. The presentation will highlight how this advanced AI platform can enhance efficiency and effectiveness in prospect research and fundraising activities. In addition to a live demonstration of ChatGPT, the updated slides now include GPT's latest release details and a bonus section for those interested in hosting their LLM. Audience participation is encouraged to experience these AI tools' capabilities and benefits.

This webinar will focus on how to determine which KPI’s should be covered and the front-end design that makes them easy to read and stand out. Through this session, attendees will learn the basics of how to use Power BI including where to upload data, how to create interactive buttons, how to customize charts and graphs, along with other handle beginner and intermediate tools that will enhance the visualization of KPI tracking.*

*Full participation is applicable for 1.0 points in Category 1.B -Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification.