Want to win more funding for your nonprofit? The first step to success is being able to find good fit funders. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to get “in” with institutional funders and double the number of funding opportunities in your pipeline.

By the end of this webinar, you will:

• Gain insights into funder perspectives and how to align proposals with funder priorities to increase success rates
• Learn effective best practices for prospecting, both in research and evaluation of prospective funders
• Hear 7 strategies for initiating and maintaining communication with funders throughout the grant lifecycle.
• See how Instrumentl can help you save up to 15 hours per week on finding & tracking new funding opportunities

Plus, all of our live attendees get special perks:

• Earn 1.0 CFRE point
• Personalized funder recommendations for your nonprofit
• Access to freebies & resources connected to course content
• Win exciting raffle prizes
• Build community with like-minded peers in your field

All registrants will receive a recording and copy of the presentation slides after the workshop.

*Full participation is applicable for 1.0 points in Category 1.B -Education of the CFRE International application for initial certification and/or recertification. 

Get 39 sessions offered at the Prospect Development 2024 Conference, held August 21 - 23, 2024. 

• A KPI Journey - Creating Metrics and Changing Culture with Institutional Fundraisers
• AI and PD – How All Areas Can Ensure Ethical Practices for AI (Ask the Ethicist Live)
• Apra Talks: We're All Data Scientists
• Bridging Eras: Integrating AI with Tried and True Screening Methods
• Building a Career Pathway Program: A Roadmap to Growing Opportunities for our Teams
• Building a Prospect Management System as a Team of One
• Designing Your Own Crystal Ball: From Revenue Forecasting to a Long-Term Growth Model
• Finding Your (Donor’s) Roots: Practical Applications for Genealogy in Development
• From Service Provider to Strategic Partner: The Trusted Advisor Journey
• General Session - Partner Industry Panel
• How to turn your Database into an Asset
• Identifying the Next Generation of Principal Gift Prospects
• In My Teaching Era: Training and Learning in a Small Shop
• In my Wellness Era: How a Wellness Skeptic Became a Convert
• It Takes a Village: Expanding the Donor Pipeline through Strategic Partnerships
• It's Not Just the Numbers! - Income, Psychology, and Giving Behavior  
• Keynote Presentation: Humanity in Fundraising: Revolutionizing Donor Engagement
• Lighting Your Own Way – Using Vision to Find Professional Growth Opportunities in Challenging Times
• Microdata:  Your Key to the Prospects Hidden in Plain Sight
• Moving from the Cubicle to the Kitchen Table: Pivoting to Remote Work
• Navigating Inclusive Philanthropy: Addressing Historical and System Biases in Prospect Development and Data Tracking and Reporting
• Oh the Places You’ll Go: Using Data and Reporting to Inform A Holistic Travel Strategy
• Optimizing Fundraising Success: A Deep Dive into Performance Metrics
• Partners in Fundraising: Facilitating an Effective and Collaborative Portfolio Review Meeting
• Portfolio Health: Your Portfolio Fitness Tracker
• Prospect Management as the Keystone for Radical Change in Portfolio Management and Fundraiser Performance Management
• Protecting Our Institutions: Due Diligence and Risk Management Trends and Insights
• Revolutionize Your Database: Fix Messy Data and Build a Strong Foundation
• Sailing Through Stock Research
• Small and Mighty-- Leveraging the Unique Strengths and Challenges of Smaller Shops
• The (Hidden) Wealth of Nations: Perils, Pitfalls and Opportunities in Using Data to Estimate Gift Capacity
• The ABCs and 123s of DAFs
• The Wheels on the Bus: Using Data & Process to Drive a Public-Phase Campaign Prospect Pipeline
• Unlocking Fundraising Success: Powering Discovery and Referrals with Goal Motivation
• Unlocking Hidden Potential: How Indiana University Health Foundation's Mid-Level Giving Program Generated Over $93,000 in Six Months
• Using Analytics to Drive Dynamic Major and Principal Giving Pipeline Development
• What to Expect When You’re Expecting (a Salesforce CRM)!
• What's Your Red Flag? Reputational Risk and Philanthropic Due Diligence Best Practices
• You CAN Have It All:  Building a Proactive Lead Program That Works for Everyone

While a significant portion of its nearly 150,000 alumni are local, 59% of University of Denver's alumni reside beyond the Denver-metro area. This presents an interesting challenge partnering with development leadership to develop a functional and effective travel strategy when all fundraisers want to visit regional prospects and feel as though they own a particular market or region. With both generalist and unit-based fundraisers eager to travel, DU must manage frontline travel effectively to ensure fundraisers target markets with strong prospect pools, supporting both individual and university-wide goals. 

After years of unfocused strategy and travel to overcrowded markets, join the University of Denver's Strategic Analytics and Prospect Development team on our journey to use data-driven insights and prospect pool analyses to make recommendations for territory realignment, earn trust and buy-in from key stakeholders, and roll out a new travel planning dashboard to ensure the right fundraisers are seeing the right prospects.

Learning Objectives:

• Attendees will learn strategies to discuss and interpret prospect pool data to inform leadership decisions around regional market coverage.
• Attendees will learn how to leverage interactive dashboards using custom zip-code based boundaries and other filters for travel planning and list generation.

Yoga. Meditation. Mindfulness. All good things, but they just weren't for me. But what was for me? Happy team members! Feeling better at work and about doing work! Increasing collaboration and decreasing burnout! While an admitted wellness skeptic, I set out on a journey to center wellness and wellbeing in our team culture. As a team, we built routines and policies that celebrated our strengths and vulnerabilities, supported our mental health, and built self-awareness and awareness of one another. Whether you are a supervisor, team leader, team member, or team of one, this presentation will help you identify impactful ways to actively prioritize wellness at work.

Learning Objectives:

• How to support individual and team wellbeing at work
• Strategies for identifying and implementing wellness practices at a team level

We often hear of the potential and promise of data to boost major gifts, and the need to be data-led in all we do. But published reports, research and datasets used for gift capacity ratings are often based on (very) small samples (and so underestimate the scale of HNW populations), contain important omissions and gaps, or use broadly journalistic methods. Added to this, net-worth figures are often revised significantly (up or down) using undisclosed sources, overlook key asset holdings such as diversified investments, and vary hugely across publications, with figures in Forbes, Bloomberg, Hurun etc., differing by multiple billions of dollars. On top of all this, data on philanthropic giving is extremely limited, or absent, in many global jurisdictions, hampering efforts to scope market potential, benchmark effectively or to create solid business-plans. 

In this session, Ben lays out some of these challenges and suggest practical ways to address them so your team can understand the scale of the potential in your current or prospective major donor audiences. He describes strategies for prospect research teams to make realistic and ambitious gift capacity numbers for their teams, and draws on his fifteen-year career with European and global nonprofits (big and small!) to suggest innovative solutions to strengthen our ability to aim higher, more consistently in our major and principal gifts work, and ultimately to raise more funds, more often, from high-value constituencies.

Learning Objectives:

• Attendees will gain confidence and competence in constructing data-led gift capacity estimates for their teams across the value range - at mid-, major and principal-gift levels.
• Attendees will learn of the global context for data-led philanthropy and take away specific, actionable strategies to access/analyse data to build more consistent/ambitious gift ratings.

Through organizational growth and lessons learned during a comprehensive campaign, the South Dakota State University Foundation has evolved rapidly with data and relationship management best practices. In collaboration with BWF, the SDSU Foundation is now equipped to utilize data analysis to gain insight to truly understand activities and practices that drove fundraiser performance, resulted in top gifts, and influenced donor journeys. This presentation will cover a review of post-campaign gift officer activity data analysis alongside how prospect development policies and practices evolved and formalized over the course of a campaign. This session will include emphasis on exploring how to prioritize data clean up, sustaining data maintenance efforts, selecting the right data to look at closely, and conducting meaningful analysis. Examples of data visualization, detailed analytical techniques, and relationship management practices will be offered to guide discussion.

Learning Objectives:

• Identify key data and analytical techniques assessing fundraiser performance and relationship management. Participants will learn tangible tactical applications for their existing program structures and practices.
• Implement data visualization reporting to complement robust portfolio management practices. Participants will learn to discuss and apply these techniques within their own organizational journey.

Despite our best efforts to be proactive, as prospect development professionals, we may find ourselves stuck reacting to changing fundraiser and organizational needs. The demanding nature of our work can bring us to the brink of burnout as we manage expectations and respond to requests for project after project while having little time to pursue our professional passions. Before we know it, we can look up and realize that, in the midst of incredible productivity we have lost sight of our own professional development and aren't positioned for the next opportunity. 

This session will discuss ways professionals can create a vision for their success that supports their professional development despite the day-to-day demands of the work, especially during challenging times (database migration, campaigns, end of the fiscal year). We'll explore how individuals can use this strategic vision to build the skills they need and want for their next position. These skills include time management to ensure you're prioritizing professional development, setting and maintaining boundaries with your team and organizational colleagues, identifying projects that foster your development, and telling your story in a compelling way to build your personal brand. By elevating the quality of their work while also meeting team goals, individuals can own their professional satisfaction and make themselves marketable within their organization and outside.

Learning Objectives:

• Attendees will have a framework for building and achieving a strategic vision for themselves while meeting team goals.
• Attendees will identify the tools they need to support their professional development and cultivate their personal brand.

How many times is prospect development asked "where we are going to land at the end of the year? Will we make goal? What should next year's fundraising goal be? What long-term growth rate is sustainable?" The answers to many of leadership's most important questions are rooted in our solicitation pipeline data. 

Unfortunately, there's no standard issue crystal ball for prospect development professionals. UNICEF USA spent four years building a robust pipeline data set, documenting people-centric business rules, and shifting our pipeline culture. From there we centralized and automated revenue forecasting and then developed a four-year growth model to drive the organization's strategic plan. Come learn from our case study - complete with rudimentary Excel formulas to an advanced projections dashboard - and how we have iterated and refined our approach over time. You too can become your own financial meteorologist!

Learning Objectives:

• The value of a robust pipeline data set and how prospect development can drive long-term planning
• How to use your pipeline to project your fundraising results at both an introductory and advanced level

Have you ever felt as though your organization's advancement department is behind on current trends and lacks sufficient resources due to funding issues and larger priorities? You are not alone. Instead of small shops focusing on their weaknesses, let's pivot and recognize that the unique business model of a small shop actually offers several benefits that a larger institution does not possess. Recognizing that it is alright to function differently than large, better-sourced institutions, small shops can lean into their strengths and produce equally successful results. 

In this breakout session, you will join a conversation with other small shop practitioners to identify the essential priorities in a small advancement shop that help achieve success. Participants will take away small shop strategies, methodologies, and approaches, collected through research of surveyed successful advancement practitioners. We'll learn about the unique business models of their small shops and hear the wisdom they have to offer for achieving success. If you come from a smaller organization, let's come together and celebrate the strengths and opportunities that only small shops have to offer.

Learning Objectives:

• Maximize small shop potential by embracing its unique business model, fostering professional relationships, building equitable partnerships with frontline fundraisers, and remaining confident throughout hardships.
• To learn key strategies for small shop success and best practices. Methods stem from presenters' insights and externally conducted research, interviewing several field professionals.

Is your organization concerned about reputational or legal risk in engaging or accepting gifts from potential donors? Is your organization looking to establish philanthropic due diligence processes and procedures? This session will discuss the fundamentals of philanthropic due diligence, outline industry best practices, discuss various case studies, and highlight available resources for prospect development professionals.

Learning Objectives: 

• Attendees will receive an overview of philanthropic due diligence strategies and learn about emerging best practices.
• Attendees will have an opportunity to discuss various case studies relating to philanthropic due diligence that can be applied at their organization.