Get 42 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

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.

In this presentation, we will explore innovative strategies for optimizing fundraising efforts by creating tiers based on fundraiser metrics. By categorizing fundraisers into distinct tiers, we can tailor Prospect Management and Research services to better align with the specific needs and potential of each tier.

Ethics in our Policies: From Gift Acceptance to Relationship Acceptance. How can we use Due Diligence Best Practices to Address Prospects Whose Values are Misaligned With Organizational Values? How does your organization manage relationships with prospects whose behavior or ideology is more problematic than their source of wealth? Have you ever wished there were recorded best practices to safeguard our organizations from problematic donor relationships? You're in luck! Join the Ethics & Compliance Committee to learn more about the work they've done this year to codify best practices for 'Relationship Acceptance' that ensure a safe and equitable way for these values misalignments to be captured in our CRM to be addressed by relationship management policies. This new guidance centers on the well-being of our staff and our organizations, across all industries, incorporating an element of organizational risk that is consistently top of mind.

An effective prospect management system enables development teams to better collaborate, make data-driven decisions, and predict outcomes. But without all the right elements, these systems break down, data becomes unreliable, and great prospects slip through the cracks. Emily Kahn and Mikhaila Eller joined Yale University in 2024 with a charge of revitalizing prospect management, which had not had full-time staffing since 2022. Drawing on their experiences as a case study, this session will cover the key components and indicators of a high-performing prospect management system; signs that your prospect management system needs a tune-up or a full overhaul; tips for navigating organization-wide changes; and how advanced Excel skills can be an essential tool for implementing change - even in the age of AI and PowerBI!

Is your major gift program haunted by underperforming portfolios? Are your gift officers spending valuable time on prospects who are unlikely to give, while high-potential donors remain hidden in your database? If your portfolios feel more like a horror story than a roadmap to success, this session is your turning point.

Join us for an in-depth look at how to use data-driven tools—specifically Blackbaud’s Prospect Insights and Prospect Insights Pro—to bring clarity, focus, and strategy to your major gift efforts. This session will guide you through practical steps to:

• Diagnose and clean up portfolios by identifying prospects who are unable or unlikely to make a major gift, freeing up space for more promising relationships.
• Uncover hidden gems in your database—new and emerging major gift prospects who may not yet be on your radar but are ready to engage.
• Strategically set ask amounts using giving capacity insights and behavioral indicators, helping your team approach each prospect with confidence and precision.

Whether you're building a portfolio from scratch or refining an existing one, this session will equip you with the knowledge and tools to make your major gift strategy more efficient, effective, and aligned with your organization’s goals.

Say goodbye to guesswork and ghost prospects—it's time to turn your portfolios into powerful engines for philanthropic growth.

Knowing the right questions to ask fundraisers (when they need our help) is key to building strategic partnerships. This often means checking our assumptions about what fundraisers know about portfolio management and prospect research at the door. This session takes a look at conclusions we make when asked to provide research, interpret dashboards, or build out pipelines. We will ask questions of ourselves and fundraisers: how can we think about how the information will be used? Do we have a consistent understanding of the terms we use? Do we hear the obstacles fundraisers are up against?

All at various points in the campaign journey, three peers combined forces to try to answer leadership questions about the key metrics, measures, and creative ideas that drive successful fundraising. Join us for an engaging and interactive session to discover ways our teams are using data-driven decision-making to enhance the fundraising efforts at our institutions. Explore real-life examples and case studies from our organizations as well as other large higher-education peers to gain valuable insights in how we are influencing accountability strategies to help fundraisers achieve their goals.

In 2023, the West Chester University Foundation started to put together building blocks to address a need for increased portfolio pipeline and proposal movement. The portfolio quadrant project was launched to completely reshape how prospects and major gift proposals are evaluated, tracked, and advanced in a timely manner. This session details how major gift officer involvement, implementation of robust CRM tracking systems, and established accountability measures improved prospect outreach and also drove more effective proposal movement. Attendees will leave with actionable strategies to implement similar improvements in their own teams with both major gift engagement and overall portfolio management.