Faculty & Speakers
Meet Your Chair
Rebecca Weitz
Rebecca Weitz is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in gift services and data management. She currently serves as the Senior Managing Director of Gift Services at the Wisconsin Foundation & Alumni Association (WFAA). Rebecca leads a team of ten amazing humans who annually process over 140,000 gifts and pledges. WFAA’s Gift Services team is committed to timely and accurate gift processing, collaborative stakeholder support, and continuous innovation.
Before joining WFAA, Rebecca dedicated sixteen years to the University of Colorado Foundation. There, she excelled in managing gifts and records services, reporting, prospect and proposal management, and data analysis. Her efforts were instrumental in developing and implementing significant process improvements for both the CU Foundation and the Office of Advancement at CU.
Rebecca has participated in two major CRM conversions: from Ellucian Advance to UCI’s Ascend and from Blackbaud CRM to Affinaquest. She also has extensive experience with smaller-scale CRMs, including Trailblazer and Neon CRM. Rebecca is dedicated to enhancing operational intelligence and efficiency. She strives to streamline processes and elevate the standards of gift and data services, positioning them as a cornerstone of inspirational and influential advancement practices.
Rebecca is also a recognized speaker and presenter, having contributed to multiple Ellucian conferences, CASE conferences, and the aasp Summit. She has served as Chair and faculty of the CASE Gift & Records Workshop multiple times. Rebecca holds a bachelor’s degree from Franklin & Marshall College and a certificate in professional management from Employers Council.
Faculty
Alan Hejnal
Alan S. Hejnal currently serves as the data quality manager in the Office of Advancement of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where he has primary responsibility for records management for the 1.9-million record database that serves the world's largest museum, education, and research complex, with 19 museums, 9 research centers, and affiliates around the world—and a zoo!
Alan has been an advancement services professional for more than 35 years, at institutions including the University of Oregon Foundation, the University of Richmond, Gettysburg College, Marquette University, DePaul University, and the Claremont Graduate University. In a variety of roles, he has managed gift processing, records management, reporting, and prospect research, and has led the implementation of advancement systems at several institutions. He has served as the liaison between Advancement and Information Services, and has gone back and forth between being the person in Advancement who understands something about Information Services, and being the person in Information Services who understands something about Advancement.
Alan has had a particular interest in the standards and regulations that apply to Advancement, has presented at AASP and CASE conferences on related topics, has been an active participant in the FundSvcs community, and has been a member of the AASP Best Practices in Records Management Committee. He is enjoying his current role of—in the words of a former colleague—“being the person who wakes up in the morning and thinks, ‘How can I make our data better?’” He is also serving as a Subject Matter Expert for the Smithsonian’s implementation of Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud as part of a larger Salesforce implementation.
Alan holds a bachelor of arts degree in mathematics from Hobart and William Smith College, a master of arts degree in mathematics from The University of Michigan, and a master of arts degree in religion from Claremont School of Theology.
Kenny Howard
Kenny Howard serves as the Director of Gift Management for the University of Colorado Foundation. There, he manages gifts processing for all four campuses of the University of Colorado system. Over the last four years, he’s worked extensively to help develop, build, implement and improve a Salesforce based donor database. His team of five processes more than 78,000 gifts each year.
Kenny holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and a master’s degree in nonprofit management from Regis University in Denver, CO.
Amanda Jarman
As the president of Fundraising Nerd, Amanda Jarman has helped dozens of nonprofit organizations make smart use of their donor data and data management systems. Her expertise has been honed during two decades of experience in the nonprofit sector, largely in data management. Before launching Fundraising Nerd in 2013, Jarman served in various fundraising data-related positions at Portland State University, most recently as assistant vice president for advancement services. Before that she served as associate director of advancement services at Lewis & Clark College. She started her career at smaller nonprofits. This experience ignited her passion for scaling big shop tools and techniques to fit shops of all sizes.
Jarman is a frequent trainer and presenter on fundraising data. This is her third time serving as a faculty member for this conference, and she has been an eight-time repeat faculty member for CASE's Gifts and Records Workshop. She also served as an instructor in Portland State University's Fundraising Certificate Program. She previously served on the Association of Advancement Services Professionals (AASP) strategic planning advisory council and its nominations committee, and was honored with the AASP's Emerging Leader Award in 2014
Sarah Lawlor
Sarah Lawlor currently serves as the Director of Development for Operations and Programs for the College of Engineering Foundation at NC State. Sarah brings over 16 years of experience within the Advancement Services realm. She is an experienced advancement professional with proven skills in database systems, reporting functions, regulatory compliance across federal, state, and local guidelines, gift and data entry, prospect research and the ability to create deliverables from the data.
Her key interests include strategic leadership and team building, developing communications and presenting to key stakeholders, metric based goals and objectives, regulatory compliance, policy and procedure creation and implementation.
She holds a bachelor’s degree from Westfield State University in psychology with a minor in fine arts.
Speaker
Nick Campisi
Nicholas Campisi, PhD currently serves as CASE’s Director of Data Science, where he uses R to develop benchmarking reports for CASE survey participants. He trained at top institutions in the United Kingdom and Germany, where he served as the department expert in R programming and taught introductory and advanced statistical analysis in R to university students. In his roles working with government bodies in the United States and United Kingdom, he integrated analysis in R with SQL databases and higher education data products.