Welcome to St. Petersburg! Please stop by the registration desk starting at 12:00 p.m. to check in and pick up your conference materials.
1:00 – 1:15
Welcome, Faculty Introductions and Conference Overview
Join conference chair Marc Barnes to meet the faculty and learn how to get the most out of your time at the conference.
1:15 – 2:15
The Mindset of a Major Gift Officer
The expectations placed on major gift officers are wide-ranging and require a diverse blend of skills applied in unique situations. Developing your core competencies will contribute to your long-term success but it all starts with having the right outlook and approach. The speaker will lead a fast-paced look at the mindset required to thrive as a successful major gift officer in the 21st century.
2:15 – 2:45
Refreshment Break
2:45 – 3:45
Elective Sessions
Identification and Cultivation Strategies for Small Shops and Small Donor Bases
Small to mid-sized colleges face unique challenges in building major gift pools. Often, these colleges do not have large alumni populations, lack donor bases that lead to headline grabbing gifts, or have smaller staffs that make intensive cultivation challenging. Sometimes, there are limited engagement opportunities particularly for prospects at a distance. Yet, major gift cultivation and solicitation are the core components of a successful fundraising strategy, especially in an era of ever larger campaigns. This session is designed to provide practical steps for major gift prospect identification, cultivation, and solicitation. Using a discussion-based approach, we'll share ideas that have been successful, not successful, and lessons learned with a goal of developing new strategies you can immediately implement.
Speaker: Chris Mueller, Vice President for College Advancement, The College of Saint Scholastica
Making the Most out of Discovery & Qualification Visits
Good discovery starts with two things: 1) identifying prospects by evaluating the spectrum of support and engagement they’ve shown to your organization or institution; and, 2) strategically reaching out to those that need to be nurtured and effectively “qualifying” future philanthropic potential. This session will help you think about how to evaluate your data to identify desirable prospects and offer strategies to build your skills to have strategic conversations and ask certain questions that compel you to do the most important thing in a meeting – listen. Effective discovery will help ensure that your portfolio delivers consistent and powerful results.
4:00 – 5:00
Practicing Inclusive Fundraising
How can – and how should – higher education development approach fundraising opportunities within diverse communities? This session offers some ideas on how fundraisers and institutions can reflect on their practices, content, and outreach to respectfully and effectively engage donors whose philanthropy may be consciously informed by race, gender identity, orientation, able-bodied status, and a range of other identities. After reviewing some examples, participants will also have the opportunity to share challenges and successes, in the spirit of a candid dialog aimed at helping our work reflect our personal values and institutional missions, and the diverse constituencies we serve.
5:00 – 6:00
Networking Reception
Join conference faculty and your colleagues to network and unwind after Day 1. Complimentary hors d'oeuvres and drink tickets will be provided.
6:00 PM
Conference Adjourns for the Day
Dinner on your own. Small group dine-around sign-ups will be available earlier in the day at the registration desk for attendees looking to join a group for dinner at nearby restaurants.
8:30 – 9:30 AM
Continental Breakfast & Roundtable Discussions
Join your peers for optional small-group discussions during breakfast. Share your biggest challenges, review hot topics and discuss solutions with your peers.
9:30 – 10:30
Big Ideas and Storytelling
The history of your organization is constructed through thousands of individual stories from alumni and friends, some of whose names adorn buildings or whose generosity have built endowments to ensure its future. Many of these stories began with a big idea that was achieved through sharing a transformational vision and subsequently engaging hearts and minds. This session explains how to discover a donor’s “philanthropy philosophy” through active listening and storytelling.
10:45 – 11:45
Elective Sessions
Pathway to Philanthropist: How FIU is Redefining Charitable Giving
FIU’s Pathway to Philanthropist program (P2P) uses new gift tactics that embrace the ever-changing face of philanthropy, making it attainable for any donor, regardless of age or capacity, to have prominent impact in their communities as premier philanthropists.
Traditional planned and blended giving have various constraints and limited impact perceptions that are not inclusive of mid-level capacity donors, but P2P’s non-traditional model looks beyond conventional modes of thinking, broadens the donor base, expands donor capacity, and empowers the next generation of philanthropists.
By expanding on existing gift acceptance policies, the Pathway to Philanthropist program leverages mid-level donors’ capacity and passion to realize their philanthropic goals of making positive systemic change and establishing their own legacy of philanthropy in their community.
Through this program, FIU development professionals serve as philanthropic advisors guiding donors through opportunities to impact student success, take part in growing FIU’s alumni participation, endowment funding, current and operational cash needs, as well as building a philanthropic legacy for themselves and their families.
At FIU, Pathway to Philanthropist donors are an incredible group of next generation philanthropists who lead and inspire over 250,000 alumni and are guiding positive systemic change and evolution, ensuring FIU remains a top public university and anchor institution for the students and communities it serves. P2P redefines charitable giving through a financially inclusive approach, transforming a donor’s philanthropic experience as it educates on the positive systemic change that is greater than thought possible at their giving level. Like FIU’s inclusive educational approach to provide access to excellence and student success, P2P creates inclusive philanthropic opportunities for first generation philanthropists.
Speakers: Laura Padron, Associate Vice President, Development, & Livia Souza, Associate Director, Estate & Planned Giving, Florida International University
Negotiating Win-Win Major Gifts with Top Donors
11:45 AM – 1:15 PM
Lunch on your own
1:15 – 2:15
Ask Me Anything Session – Small Group Discussions
2:30 – 3:30
Elective Sessions
CASE AMAtlas: From Global Standards to Global Data
Discover the latest trends that impact advancement across the United States and around the globe. The CASE AMAtlas team will share recent findings from our benchmarking surveys. CASE’s new Global Reporting Standards are foundational to the ongoing work of AMAtlas. The CASE Standards address the dynamic landscape of an ever-evolving advancement profession. This new global edition comes at a time when the increasing size and complexity of gifts require clear standards and guidelines for counting and reporting for all types of institutions regardless of location. Learn more what is included in the new standards, why they matter, and how these new standards will intersect with AMAtlas surveys to provide global metrics and benchmarks.
Speaker: Cara Giacomini, Vice President, Data, Research, and Technology, Council for Advancement and Support of Education
Care & Feeding Of Your Researcher: Partnering To Secure Bigger & Better Major Gifts
If you’re waiting to talk with your prospect research department until right before a major gift ask, you’re missing out on all the valuable information they can provide along the way. From qualification to solicitation, a strong relationship with your prospect researcher can yield dividends. We will walk you through how to use prospect research with all donors in your portfolio no matter where they are in their giving cycle and what information research needs from you to foster a meaningful partnership.
Speakers: Rachel Katyl, Major Gift Officer & Tara McDonough, Manager of Prospect Research, University of New England
4:00 – 5:00
Working with Campus Partners to Drive Collaborative Fundraising
Development work can no longer be done in silos, with development officers solely representing a major project or idea; instead, the increasingly savvy donor wants to hear from the experts as well. This session will cover how to maximize and manage institutional academic partnerships for larger gifts.
5:00
Conference Adjourns for the Day
Dinner on your own. Small group dine-around sign-ups will be available earlier in the day at the registration desk for attendees looking to join a group for dinner at nearby restaurants.
8:30 – 9:30 AM
Continental Breakfast & Roundtable Discussions
Join your peers for optional small-group discussions during breakfast. Share your biggest challenges, review hot topics and discuss solutions with your peers.
9:30 – 10:30
Portfolios & Performance – Taking a More Strategic Approach
Successful major gift fundraising requires taking a strategic and balanced approach to portfolio management. It also requires a strong alignment between fundraising activities, goals and other factors that contribute to your success. Explore concepts designed to help build effective portfolios and achieve higher levels of success in today's metrics-driven fundraising environment.
10:45 – 11:45 AM
Faculty Panel: Career Pathways and Closing Q&A
11:45 AM
Conference Adjourns
Habits of Highly Effective Gift Officers: Self-assessment and Personal Staff Development Plans
The most important factor in success (or lack thereof) as a major gift officer is YOU. With the right mindset, hard work and by forming the right habits, you can dramatically increase your chances for success. How you approach, plan, execute, and track your work matters. This session will help you identify characteristics and habits of highly successful major gift officers from goal setting to persistence, to a laser focus on relationships, and results.
