During the Summer of 2020 my organization took the cues of social change and decided to focus more on diversity and inclusion, primarily, centering the Black and Latinx experience. We later had a nationally broadcasted controversy around race. I led the charge in focusing portfolios and analytics around ethnicity and race to determine how we engaged our BIPOC constituents while simultaneously chairing the University Relations (Advancement) division's Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce. Here's how it went.

In this session, David Lively, Senior Associate VP and Campaign Manager at Northwestern University, and Erin Lynch Moran, Partner at The Solas Group, will present The Fundraiser Scorecard, a tool that Northwestern University uses to help development officers track their progress and improve their ability to attain goals.

Fallon Morris and Ashley Mick, Prospect Development Analysts, outline the critical support LSU’s Prospect Development team has provided to drive strategic structural shifts in the University’s development enterprise. We will frame this conversation around Development’s transition to a cohort fundraising model that necessitated the swift rebuilding of 30 gift officer portfolios. We will outline the process we followed to build the portfolios and the challenges we encountered and overcame to meet our ambitious goals.

Do you struggle with meeting fatigue within your development shop? In pandemic-times, this fatigue moved fully into the virtual space and only intensified. Missouri State University’s one-person prospect development shop used this as an opportunity to re-think their approach to discussing prospect strategies, balanced portfolios, and proposals in the pipeline as a development shop and in 1:1 partnership with gift officers. Join Jacqui and Bond as they discuss roadblocks and success towards this new approach and give practical advice for how to set your organization up for success, including strategies to gain buy in and report examples.

​In the midst of global uncertainly, how did LSU rearrange the board -- rebuilding metrics and unveiling new portfolios -- while retaining talent and reinforcing a culture of accountability?

Are you working to build a prospect research and moves management program as part of your organization’s campaign or individual major giving efforts but not sure where to start or how to develop a plan? This session will walk you through seven key steps that proved to be critical in tripling the number of major gift dollars raised for a national religious organization over a five-year period. The presenters will share a case study with practical examples of how they worked to create a cultural shift among leadership and fundraising staff utilizing APRA’s Book of Knowledge for Prospect Development Professionals to facilitate a better understanding and appreciation of prospect research and the importance of data-driven decisions. Timelines, templates and a few tips and tricks will be shared to help prospect development professionals in small to mid-sized shops achieve success in generating major gift resources for your organization.

Join us for a candid discussion as we share how we modernized our moves management from Excel spreadsheets, reports and confusing processes to dynamic dashboards and clear expectations. We will also share how we brought our frontline fundraisers along with this transformation. And, we will discuss how we embarked on this journey and navigated all of this with a small team.

​Many hospitals and healthcare organizations are beginning to explore how to more authentically represent the communities and patients they serve. This includes examining fundraising practices with the goal of becoming more inclusive and welcoming to a variety of donors. As such, how to meaningfully incorporate principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion has become an increasingly significant question for prospect researchers. Prospect researchers at healthcare institutions have many opportunities to drive change in fundraising practices at their organizations in this area. At the same time, to make progress, healthcare fundraising shops and prospect researchers must be prepared to tangle with tough questions and issues.

The SEC makes publicly available a vast amount of data that is very important to prospect development. The large amount of information makes it challenging to quickly digest and analyze it for individual analysts, however. In this session, we'll review several sources of SEC data (e.g. Form 4, Form DEF14) and how data scientists can programmatically extract value from it for prospecting, research, or modeling purposes.

You’ve been instructed to do a massive database screen but you’re a research shop of one. How do you even begin? What about your other duties? How do you manage that data when you get it back? From beginning to end, there are many factors consider with a project on this scale. Join Caitlin Gilmore as she shares her experience in coordinating the screening of 2.3 million records at her organization. She will walk you through buy-in, coordinating with teams within your department, choosing a vendor, and planning on what to do with all that lovely data when you get it back while still performing your regularly scheduled duties.