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

Volunteering with Apra is more than just a service to the field it's a career accelerator, a leadership lab, and a gateway to an invaluable network. Whether you're looking to expand your industry knowledge, build meaningful connections, or refine leadership skills, raising your hand to volunteer can shape your professional journey in ways you never expected. This panel will bring together seasoned professionals who have leveraged association volunteering to advance their careers, strengthen their expertise, and make a lasting impact on their industry. Attendees will leave with practical insights on how to get involved, have an outsized impact on our community, and turn volunteer experiences into career-defining opportunities.

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.

Traditional prospect research often focuses on an organization's most obvious supporters' alumni, patients, patrons, or direct stakeholders. But what about the untapped potential beyond these natural constituencies? In this session, we'll challenge conventional research boundaries and explore strategies to identify, assess, and engage non-traditional prospects who have the capacity and inclination to give despite lacking a direct affiliation with your organization. We will examine case studies from various organizations, highlighting their identification processes and the successes achieved through strategic prospect research. Whether you're in higher education, healthcare, arts & culture, or any nonprofit sector, this session will help you think outside the lines, uncover hidden prospects, and diversify your donor pipeline like never before.

Struggling to get fundraisers to "take the bait" and engage in strategic conversations? Just like fishing, successful fundraising requires the right strategy, patience, and knowing where to cast your line. Portfolio meetings help ensure fundraisers aren't just fishing in the dark'they provide a clear view of where they stand and how to best engage their prospects. This session will explore how to structure and lead these meetings to hook meaningful insights, identify the best opportunities, reel in strategic conversations, and move beyond routine portfolio reviews to proactive planning. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to enhance collaboration, optimize portfolios, and make data-driven decisions that support fundraising goals.

Change is inevitable in fundraising offices whether it's a new CRM, leadership transition, or restructuring of prospect management systems. Successfully navigating change requires intentional planning and clear communication. This session will provide actionable strategies for managing transitions within a prospect development team, including best practices for training colleagues, gaining buy-in from leadership, and ensuring a smooth implementation of new processes. Attendees will leave with a roadmap for leading change effectively while maintaining productivity.

Leadership isn't just about having a title -it's about influence, collaboration, and the ability to drive change. As prospect development professionals, you are critical to fundraising success, yet you often work behind the scenes, juggling the needs of fundraisers, leadership, and data teams. How do you ensure your expertise is heard, your insights are acted upon, and your role is recognized as essential? This session will help you lead from any position by mastering the art of managing up, down, and across. You'll learn how to communicate effectively with leadership, strengthen partnerships with frontline fundraisers, and navigate organizational dynamics with confidence. We'll explore practical techniques for building trust, advocating for your ideas, and positioning prospect development as a strategic driver of fundraising success. Attendees will leave with actionable leadership skills to increase their influence, foster collaboration, and create lasting impact ' without needing a formal leadership title.

In 2019, Apra experimented with a new format for the popular Apra Talks PD conference session. Lovingly referred to as Apra Debates, the main stage session focused on friendly debates for three different issues in prospect development. Six years later, Apra Debates is back! This session will have three new topics that will explore two sides of common issues in our industry: 

1. Is PD Ready for AI?
2. Top time-wasters for a PD team and
3. Should fundraisers have access to prospect research resources? 

Each issue will be moderated, and questions will be asked to fully understand each side's opinion. But that's not all: Session attendees will also have a role! For each topic, attendees will get to participate in a poll that requests YOUR opinion. Apra Debates will be just the beginning of the conversation! More discussion on these topics will appear in future Apra publications. Don't miss your chance to see history being made and share your opinion!

Despite increasing conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion in philanthropy, many traditional wealth identification methods continue to overlook high-net-worth individuals of color. Bias in artificial intelligence (AI), limitations in publicly available wealth data, and inequities in financial reporting create blind spots that reinforce systemic barriers to inclusive philanthropy. These challenges are particularly evident in healthcare and higher education fundraising, where AI-driven screenings often fail to account for non-traditional indicators of wealth and giving capacity. This session will explore how data modeling, alternative screening techniques, and culturally competent prospecting strategies can be used to uncover high-net-worth prospects of color. Attendees will learn how to critically evaluate wealth screening tools for bias, navigate gaps in data, and implement equity-focused methodologies that surface overlooked major and principal gift prospects. Through real-world case studies, practical frameworks, and an actionable roadmap, this session will provide fundraisers and data professionals with strategies to conduct non-biased wealth screenings and cultivate more inclusive donor engagement efforts.

The establishment of a prospect management team comes with wonderful opportunities and unique challenges. It represents a major shift in your fundraising strategy and requires you to be more creative, sophisticated, and intentional. This session provides a roadmap for prospect researchers and development leaders who are ready to expand their operation from a solo enterprise to a two-person team. Attendees will have an opportunity to revisit the core components of robust prospect management systems, as well as strategies for administering them as a team of one. Then we will explore the changes necessary to scale your team: implementing program upgrades, mapping and distributing work to staff, and creating alignment between tasks, strategic goals, and individual passions. Special emphasis will be placed on change management strategies, including maintaining service levels during transition, establishing new workflow processes, and building strong team dynamics. Whether you're actively planning to expand your team or preparing for future growth, this session will provide valuable insights into successfully scaling your prospect research operation.