Fundraising Illuminated - a Podcast by The Solas Group

Experienced and effective development officers have always been a scarce resource, but never more so than today. In a profession where there has always been a shortage of workers, The Great Resignation looms large over universities and other organizations competing for talent. 

In this episode, we sit down with Erin Hall-Westfall, Director of Talent Management at the University of Cambridge, to discuss how to hire, coach, retain, and reward the fundraising professionals you need on your team.

In this episode, we talk with Jim Zellinger from the West Point Association of Graduates about his advice for "meeting users where they are" and helping them increase their comfort with technology and BI tools. By putting his users' preferences and needs at the center of his thoughts, Jim has successfully increased buy-in and dashboard adoption among his colleagues. The end result is a more informed fundraising team, fewer bottlenecks, and greater data literacy throughout the office. Because as much as we may hate to admit it, even the most sophisticated and elegant dashboards will fail if our colleagues don't feel comfortable using them.

As information proliferates and more and more resources become available to prospect development teams, how does that change the fundamental nature of the researcher's role? In this episode, Richard Horne, Director of Prospect Development at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, discusses how he has worked with his team to shift from an "information aggregation" model to one in which information is distilled and analyzed so only the most important and relevant data are presented. 

In this episode, we talk with Ben Storck, assistant vice president of advancement services at the University of Nebraska Foundation. During Ben's time there, UNF has converted to a new CRM and adopted Tableau as its analytics platform, moving the Foundation from a culture of ad hoc reporting to on-demand analytics and data exploration. Ben describes the impact that transformation has had not only on the Foundation's capacity for fundraising analysis but also on its work culture.

In this episode, we talk  with Howard Heevner, Executive Director of Annual Programs at the University of California at Berkeley. We'll ask Howard about the future of unrestricted giving in an era where more and more donors want to target their giving to micro-funding projects.

Our second episode features another conversation with David Lively,  Senior Vice President for Alumni Relations and Development at Northwestern University. David is well known for his book Managing Major Gift Fundraisers:  A Contrarian’s Guide. 

In this episode, we explore one of the central arguments in David's book:  major gift officers raise more money if they are assigned to fewer prospects. We ask David to explain this counterintuitive theory and tell us how he discovered this to be true in his own work.

We highly recommend checking out David's book, Managing Major Gift Fundraisers, which can be purchased on the CASE website.

This podcast is produced by The Solas Group, a fundraising analytics and predictive modeling firm. Visit us at www.thesolasgroup.com or write to us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!

In this first episode ever of Fundraising Illuminated, we’ve got a terrific guest:  David Lively, who is currently the Senior Vice President for Alumni Relations and Development at Northwestern University. David is well known for his book Managing Major Gift Fundraisers:  A Contrarian’s Guide. 

In the book, David demonstrates his method for managing major gift officers and evaluating their performance on key metrics, and we talk to him in this episode about the metrics he uses.

We also talk with him about the new research he’s been working on that explores a concept he calls “net fundraiser value.” David’s research has been showing that the “net value” of fundraisers increases over time, making fundraiser tenure a key component for the success of a development program.

We highly recommend checking out David's book, Managing Major Gift Fundraisers, which can be purchased on the CASE website.

This podcast is produced by The Solas Group, a fundraising analytics and predictive modeling firm. Visit us at www.thesolasgroup.com or write to us at [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!