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.

Learn more about how leaders from a range of development shops with varying roles have adapted to address the shifts, changes, best practices, and campaign adjustments that institutional and advancement leaders and their staff have had to make due to the uncertainty and instability caused by the COVID-19 pandemic's economic impact to fundraising.

The Office of Advancement at Illinois Wesleyan University had been through key staff changes, a fast-paced CRM conversion, and had not done a comprehensive wealth screening in several years. With these hurdles in mind, we were also tasked with preparing for a campaign. In a small shop with limited resources, we found it necessary to find ways to combine the wealth screening data with internal data to present segmentations that not only considered the data we collected from the wealth screening but also the knowledge we had gathered from prospects. Our process needed to be data-driven but also have the capacity to be donor-centric.

After successfully completing a $1 billion campaign in 2015, SMU has been prepping to launch its third campaign. Sarah Daly is heading a newly-restructured Prospect Development shop. Paula Voyles is heading a newly-configured team charged with raising support for SMU's eight academic schools, athletics, student affairs, libraries, and other academic initiatives. These leaders have partnered to face daunting challenges during this silent phase of a bigger-and-better campaign. Come hear our strategies and lessons learned about change management, establishing and refining guidelines and processes, building collaboration between teams, and keeping our sense of humor along the way.

The Advancement teams at Wisconsin Foundation & Alumni Association have been working together on a coordinated effort to collect and utilize interest information with an eye toward improving prospect identification, increasing participation rates and enhancing constituent engagement opportunities. This session will discuss the journey leading up to the formation of a cross-functional Interest Tagging Workgroup, projects undertaken to collect interests and plans for on-going data collection, along with outcomes and results.

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.

​Join us for a discussion with Mount Sinai Health System, Einstein Healthcare Network, and The Pursuant Group / Advizor Solutions and learn how they and other healthcare fundraisers are using data from their patient and advancement systems in their day to day operations.

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.

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.

Annual funds often are troubled by external issues—the need to activate lapsed donors, gift sizes not increasing alongside capacity, secular decline in participation rates—that threaten the health of the fundraising pipeline. Annual giving is instrumental to a development office since the appeals they work on raise current use dollars while keeping donors engaged with the organization. Consistent annual giving helps to establish giving patterns that will ultimately result in donors progressing through the pipeline to become major gift prospects. This presentation demonstrates the ways in which researchers can mitigate these challenges through data science, distilling actionable insights from our databases to help improve annual fund efforts.