Please join Apra for another NERD (New, Engaging, Relevant Discussion) Talk. We will gather virtually to discuss all aspects of proactive research. Designed with both new and experienced researchers in mind, this roundtable discussion will be done in small groups with a facilitator in each group. Please bring your questions and ideas, frustrations and celebrations, and enjoy a lunch break chatting with your Apra peers.

December is known as National Giving Month for good reason. More than 30% of giving takes place at the end of the year, with Giving Tuesday as an official kick-off. How do you make the most of this critical fundraising season?

During our upcoming webinar with APRA, we’ll look at trends that could influence your fundraising and the benefits of expanding donor research across more sources beyond public records, including:

 -News and company information to help identify corporate donors whose environmental, social or governance (ESG) commitments align with your mission;

-Company and executive data, including foundation information, for building executive lists for targeted engagement campaigns;

-Wealth indicators to match donation requests to individuals’ priorities and propensity to give;

-News and legal information to conduct donor due diligence to protect your organization from reputational damage;

-Job histories, education backgrounds, memberships, and affiliations to capture a more complete view of prospective and current donors so you can personalize fundraising appeals; and

-Donor profiles featuring visualizations to help you spot critical information faster.

The folx at Oregon Food Bank (OFB) are thinking a bit differently about their philanthropy approach as they decenter money and center love and equity. Historic performance metrics can influence if relationship managers remain in harmful relationships, feel valued/seen in their work, or stay in philanthropy at all. Hear from a small shop and caused-based organization about their methodology that has informed their donor prospecting, is transforming their fundraising to make it accessible to diverse fundraisers, and how they’re measuring love.

Get 15 sessions offered at the Prospect Development 2022 Conference, held July 27-29, 2022.

• PD 2022 Apra Talks: The Context of Change: Perspectives on Philanthropy
• Advanced Fundraising Reporting
• Revamping Portfolio Consultations
• Pipelines and Metrics and Engagement! Oh, my! A Journey Down the Yellow Brick Road to Creating an Action-Driven Performance Development Reporting Suite
• How to Convert to a New CRM in 4,000 Easy Steps
• Enabling Advanced Analytic Tools and Access to Data: Bringing technology and people together for better analytics
• Leadership Buy in through Design Thinking in Advancement
• Lessons We Should Have Known, But COVID Had to Teach Us
• Bon Appétit: How to Properly Digest Stock Form Alphabet Soup and Footnote Word Salad
• Diversifying your Prospect Pool: Methods and Approaches to Social Inclusion in Prospecting
• How Summa Health Engaged Retired Physicians as Partners in Fundraising
• The Evolution of Due Diligence at Stanford: Building the Plane While Flying It
• Free Solo: Campaign Planning On Your Own
• Insights from a New Prospect Researcher
• Building Relationships Based on Love

While there are many ways to research net worth and find potential donors, there is an opportunity cost if the data is inaccurate, outdated, or limited to the ultra-wealthy. The University of Michigan's development team tested and measured multiple data vendors to evaluate quality with the goal of improving prospect research as well as DEI initiatives. In this webinar, you will hear what they learned and take away new methods for ensuring data quality and leveraging people insights for fundraising and other critical initiatives within your organization. 

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.

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.

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.

The need for due diligence research in fundraising was widely recognized in late 2019, but there were few models for how this new research function would work. Join us to learn how Stanford University's Medical Center Development office worked to create methods, policies and procedures to limit Stanford’s reputational risk and build a robust, flexible due diligence program.

Free soloing is a form of technical rock climbing where the climbers climb alone without ropes, forcing them to rely entirely on their own individual preparation, strength, and skill. Similarly, in the past two years, the UNICEF USA Prospect Development team has conducted campaign planning, feasibility studies, and campaign prospecting solo - without traditional campaign planning support like external consultants, peer interviews, and other traditional planning methods. In this session, attendees will hear how UUSA launched three campaigns and fundraising initiatives with goals ranging from $3M to $175M and did it with internal resources only. This session is ideal for smaller organizations who do not have the resources for traditional campaign planning but have guts to go it alone!