All times listed are Eastern Standard Time (US & Canada)
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11:45 AM–12:00 PM ET
Welcome and Faculty Introductions
Join conference chair Amy Begg to meet the faculty and learn how to get the most out of your time at the conference.
12:00–1:00
Diversity Equity and Inclusion in Prospect Development
Prospect development professionals represent the strategic arm of fundraising efforts. With broad recognition that embedded DEI business practices lead to greater innovation and growth, how can we best leverage equity and inclusion principles to bolster our efforts and contribution? And beyond that, how can prospect development teams offer thought leadership in the space?
Join this session to gain insight, perspective, and practical tips on how to think about integrating DEIB (diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging) strategies within the scope of prospect development and fundraising. We’ll explore definitions and giving trends, challenge best practice assumptions, and map strategies to better show up as equity ambassadors across personal, professional, and organizational dimensions.
1:30–2:30
Elective Sessions (choose one):
If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Improve It: How to Measure the Ongoing Effectiveness of Your Team by Implementing a Researcher Scorecard
Measuring prospect research productivity, value, and impact is a challenging endeavor. Determining the success of a project is one thing, but measuring an employee's output and impact without micromanaging is another. No one cares if you identified 200 proactive prospects in one week if you can't turn them into referrals. No one cares if you referred 100 major gift prospects if none of them turned into a visit. No. One. Cares. All you want to care about when talking about Research team productivity is how much quality work is produced and how it's being used. As Albert Einstein said, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."
This session will explore how an easily refreshable database-driven productivity visualization can optimize research metrics, establish trust, and highlight impact.
What to measure and how to adapt the research visualization scorecard to your metrics and use it to track productivity and promote accountability. How to best utilize an internal research scorecard to track the impact of referred prospects and track activity from prospect identification to gift.
The Art and Science of Prospect Development: Balancing the Science of Innovative Technology and Data with the Art of Relationships and People
During this session we will dive into both the art and science of prospect development. We will talk through innovations in prospect development and how they have affected the science side of our work, including resources, technology and data, as well as the art, the relationships and people. A variety of resources will be discussed as well as different prospecting methods, how our relationships with gift officers have evolved and strategies for balancing it all.
3:00–4:00
Elective Sessions (choose one):
It's not just the numbers! - Income Psychology Giving Behavior
High income earners often have similar assets to those in finance who are typically compensated through a bonus structure. The ways in which they earn their income impacts how they think about their money and ultimately their philanthropy. Explore the psychology of this and strategies we might employ toward these industries.
Small (But Mighty) Shops Workshop
Discuss the most exciting solutions you've learned here at the conference...which you are pretty sure will never work in your shop because of your size. We will use our collective brainpower to solve problems and share ideas that will work in small shops. Bring questions, current challenges, and creative solutions that have worked for you. This will be an interactive discussion.
4:30–5:30
The Hidden Major Donor: Why Your Wealth Screening isn’t Good Enough
Accurate wealth data is hard. It requires analyzing dozens of data points across hundreds of millions of people - continuously. The rate of change in our economy makes it all the harder - wealth was created and destroyed in the past 24 months faster than any time in history. The result: major donors that are hiding in plain sight. In this session we will explore why wealth data is so hard and how AI, data science, and technology can deliver better data. We will then discuss why wealth data should be combined with other data sets to generate powerful wealth insights.
5:30
Conference Adjourns for the Day
11:00–11:45 AM ET
Optional Roundtable Discussions
12:00–1:00 PM ET
Growing Success - How to have a Voice at the table and Advocate for Yourself and Your Team!
Are you feeling invisible or underutilized? Show your value to your organization and advocate for yourself and your professional growth! Are you in a leadership position and want to build a strong team and increase retention? Learn how to make an impact as a leader by championing your team!
From making a case for additional staff or resources to promoting current talent, the presenter will share practical tips for Advocacy in Prospect Development. You will learn how to utilize the Apra Advocacy Toolkit to help your organization understand the value of Prospect Development staff and their impact on the bottom line.
1:30–2:30
Elective Sessions (choose one):
Finding a Needle in the Haystack
As a nonprofit professional, you know how important it is to collect data about your donors to establish connections with those individuals. It is even more important nowadays. Good prospect research can mean the difference between going into a meeting feeling at ease or on edge.
To conduct prospect research, you will need a good amount of donor information. The more data you have, the more comprehensive your prospect research results will be. But this comes at a cost; the more data you have, the more information you will have to search through to find exactly what you are seeking.
A proverbial "needle in a haystack"; from the locations, demographics, education history, communications, giving, model scores, external data, etc. It can be a daunting task to search through all of that information.
If you value your time, the answer is yes. We have taken these categories of information and put them all in one place for easy searching – increasing our efficiency. Through the power of visualization, we have been able to simplify finding those individuals based on specific needs or criteria set by our team.
Redefining Portfolios in a COVID-19 World
COVID-19 has changed the way many of us work and as a result the work from home trend has been accelerated. For many, the opportunity to work remotely has opened up the possibilities of where they want to live and work. As a result, our portfolios which were historically built on geographic regions needed to be re-examined and re-thought. What will the future bring us and how will we build portfolios going forward as the Metaverse starts to become more commonplace in our language.
3:00–4:00
The Evolution of Prospect Development
With the advent of new and evolving technology, the world of the prospect development is quickly changing. From how we staff, what we do, and how we help our organization’s maximize the value of their institutional pipeline of donors, this session will explore these new pathways and opportunities to best position our departments for future success. Our presenter, Mark Koenig, has built several prospect management systems over the course of his career and will discuss our future opportunities to best serve our organization’s success including how we organize our staff and departments that will support organizations both big and small.
4:00–4:30
Stump the Faculty
Wrap up the conference with a fun Q&A session. Bring any questions you didn’t get answered and put our faculty presenters to the test. You may submit your questions in advance or during the session, anonymously or openly.
