Apra Talks has been one of the most versatile sessions at the conference. Over the years it has been delivered as TED-style talks, friendly debates, and short presentations on important and timely topics. No matter the format, Apra Talks has always been about connecting with and learning from perspectives within our prospect development community. This year, we’re building connections to changemakers from the broader philanthropic community and highlighting the work of organizations in our host city of Atlanta! Our work in prospect development occurs within larger social and organizational paradigms—and we’ve experienced fundamental shifts over the past two years. Our speakers this year will share their insights into how they, and their organizations, are thinking and working differently as a result. We hope this session will spark questions, conversations and ideas that can be shared at the conference and beyond.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. Three years into revolutionizing their annual fundraising goal-setting process, Syracuse needed a way to produce solicitation data for all schools, colleges and central units in a timely fashion that didn’t unnecessarily drain personnel resources in the midst of a campaign and global pandemic. Further, senior leadership needed a pragmatic lens by which to view planned work and its likelihood of success, and managers needed comprehensive reports to view their frontline fundraisers’ activity. Join Syracuse University’s Assistant Director of Prospect Management and Assistant Director of Data Analytics to learn how they built a suite of Tableau dashboards that provides detailed insights into the university’s fundraising pipeline and optimizes individual and team portfolio management.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. From 2020-2021 the Prospect Development shop at the University of Washington made a significant shift in our approach to portfolio consultations. Catalyzed by a confluence of forces including a staffing shortage, a pandemic, remote work, and an upcoming CRM transition, the Prospect Management team reimagined these meetings in powerful and effective ways. In partnership with frontline fundraisers we re-focused how we meet the diverse and specific needs of our fundraising teams--without overloading PD staff. In the process we have opened doors to the deeper, forward-looking strategic value we can provide as prospect development partners. In this session we will cover our journey from portfolio reviews to portfolio consultations, as well as how we are intentionally developing a shared language with our fundraisers and our ongoing work to position ourselves as true strategic partners.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. How did the LSU Foundation take our perspective on performance metrics from an annual meeting with the mysterious man behind the curtain to daily-use management insights accessible at the click of a heel? Join Jordan Jopling, Senior Director of Development, and Jessica O’Connor, Senior Director Prospect Development, on a 15-month journey building a suite of tools that brought our team and individual performance indicators into full color - portfolio engagement, regional activity, pipeline building, and peer-group based quartiles. Whether you’re looking for a heart, brains, or courage to take the next step into actionable data insights, attendees will takeaway insights on building reports that inform multiple audiences, choosing your key fundraiser performance indicators, and more!

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. University of Washington is undertaking a CRM conversion project, slated to go live in 2023. Prospect Development was the first area to define business requirements, which then paved the way for re-building reports, creating end-user trainings, and, most importantly, getting the PD team ready to go when the conversion becomes real. Jess will share lessons learned from this huge lift.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. As prospect development professionals, we are often tasked with providing the most relevant insights into data, finding the “best” prospects, informing strategy, and conducting analyses. All of this is based in data – but are we managing this data, these recommendations, these insights as efficiently as we can? How do you as a prospect development professional or other partner provide actionable data? How do you ensure you’re analyzing the “right” things without wasting time? How do you encourage or influence your partners to ask strategic questions and ensure you can efficiently answer? How do you get access to data without needing customized reports or help from other areas of the organization? What datapoints have consistent definitions, and who decides what those definitions are? How do you tailor work to meet individual needs without overwhelming your team or other teams with personalization for different data? Do you empower gift officers or other partners to do their own research/reporting/analytics? What are the pros/cons of doing so? How do you manage that? Join Katie Princo, Research Team Lead, and Aron Sage, Business Intelligence Team Lead, as they delve into the data landscape at the University of Colorado. Though they will share stories and examples, this presentation will focus more on the philosophy and approach rather than pitching one solution or tool, striving to help attendees improve their own approaches to determine what makes the most sense at their organizations.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. Leadership buy in is critical for any project to be successful. Design thinking is a methodology to solve problems that focuses on asking questions and listening with empathy to meet the needs of the stakeholder. Storytelling helps explain the interconnections among people in situations and settings, explaining the findings and insights that engage the stakeholder. In this session, we will explore the key concepts of CRISP-DM, Design Thinking, and how this approach can be used for leadership buy in and to foster innovation.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to change and adapt very quickly. There were bumps and bruises and completely new situations along the way, but there were also many positive takeaways. Our session will focus on the practical lessons that should have been right in front of our eyes, but weren’t brought to light until hit with the COVID-19 pandemic. We will outline how the pandemic helped us implement positive changes in the following three areas: - Fundraising strategy and work with frontline fundraisers - Management and leadership growth and flexibility - Prospect Development’s role, impact, and work within the organization. As every organization is different, we hope to engage with attendees on practical changes they have made, or tried to implement, as a result of the shifting landscape of the last two years. Finally, we will end with a discussion on how to continue these practices long after the pandemic has faded and concrete strategies on how to recognize the need for change or new ideas before a global crises forces it upon us.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. As prospect researchers, our profession challenges us to recognize and clearly convey capacity-related nuances to frontline fundraisers, a skill that is becoming more valuable as we increasingly rely on automated tools to assist us with financial number crunching. This is perhaps nowhere more apparent than on securities reporting provided to the Securities Exchange Commission, which is frequently replete with seemingly esoteric and dense footnotes that modify the content in a manner that an algorithm is unable to detect. This presentation seeks to provide fellow researchers with a guide to recurring terminology and concepts that sometimes obscure the stock picture but that, when properly interpreted, can more accurately reflect a prospect’s stock related wealth. Think of it as a kind of Securities 102 lecture – we are going beyond describing what a Form 4 is, or how to value basic direct stock grants, and talking in-depth about elements of options conversions, alternative forms of equity compensation, and the great utility of the Code G transaction.

Recorded at Prospect Development 2022. The nature of our jobs dictate that we focus on individuals with a given wealth capacity that sometimes excludes various demographics from being cultivated in our organizations. How can we implement approaches and strategies to diversify those prospect pools to be more inclusive of ‘high-quality’ prospects that cover a wider range of social demographics? In this session, we will review prospecting and fundraising techniques gathered from various institutions throughout the US that speak to diversifying our prospects for our organizations.