I had a nice email back-and-forth with a colleague the other day discussing a new trend she was seeing in the field. As the conversation wound down to a close, I wrote that I looked forward to seeing her at the Apra International conference (Pittsburgh! August 8-11!). She came back for one last reply, saying that after nearly 20 years of going, the vice president of fundraising was asking her for justification of the expense. [Read more…]
Rock Solid
This past year has been enough to make anybody’s head spin. What would have been the normal amount of news in one of 52 average pre-2017 weeks has been crammed into 341 news cycles of increasingly elevated astonishment. Nearly every day feels to me like watching a piranha feeding frenzy in the Amazon.
Will we end up losing our capacity to relax? Or to believe that we aren’t just missing something in our newsfeed if we don’t immediately see evidence that something shocking has happened overnight? [Read more…]
Fundraising intelligence
There’s been a sea change in prospect research, and it was front and center at our international industry conference last week. The 27th annual APRA conference, held in steamy Las Vegas, was called “Prospect Development 2014; new approaches, new connections.” The Twitter hashtag was #APRApd2014 (have a look – good stuff there). As always, it was a great conference with lots of meaty takeaways.
Nonetheless, I kept shaking my head every time I saw the conference name or used the hashtag. I’m just having a hard time with “prospect development.” Not the profession – the name. Prospect development is relatively new as a descriptor for what we professionals formerly known as “prospect researchers” do. [Read more…]