Email Me at [email protected]
On this page you will find the following:
1. Lecture Topics
2. Trainings
3. A YouTube Video of Me speaking
4. A Contact Form
Lecture Topics
(Trainings Below)
“Prospect Research is a Cause”
Great Prospect Research, effectively acted upon is great fundraising. And great fundraising can lead to great gifts for your program. Whether you’re running a homeless shelter, researching a cure for Alzheimer’s, or raising student scholarships, new levels of fundraising can transform the power and effectiveness of your organization. How do we demystify Prospect Research, remove the stigma and take pride in our profession? This motivational talk will help you challenge the accepted norm and raise new gifts.
Sleeping Giant: Latino Major Giving in the US Today
About a year ago sitting in the office of a 34 year CEO of a new tech company talking about philanthropy and what his interests were. We explored his motivations for making a major gift. After three meetings I asked him if he’d consider a significant gift, after 10 minutes of talking about various levels and impacts of giving he gave a significant seven figure gift. What was amazing was that I was the only person who had ever talked to him about philanthropy. He had publicly sold his company for hundreds of millions dollars. As a Mexican American, was it that he didn’t fit someone’s profile of wealth? Certainly, organizations working on causes Mexican American’s care about didn’t spot him, they don’t simply don’t have Prospect Research. He cared deeply about cancer, climate change and immigrant rights but nobody was asking him about those issues or giving to them. Large national organizations and often universities simply overlook Latinos in major giving.
How do we, as a profession, stop this cycle where nobody is looking for Latino major donors? Is the key in hiring and training more Latinos in development officer roles? How does culture play a role? What is different about approaching Latino’s in the US today? In this discussion and presentation we will explore these questions from a practical and strategic perspective. This is both a cause and necessity for many organizations to grow. Does your organization/institution have an untapped resource in Latino donors waiting to be asked?
“The Crisis of Development Officer Short Tenures: Reevaluating How Our Performance is Judged”
We all know that Development Officers have short tenures. It’s a joke to many. But it’s really not all that funny. Short tenures are not only damaging to our careers but the organizations we serve. One of the largest factors in these short tenures is rarely discussed. The fact that we are very poorly evaluated, often by people who simply don’t understand our work and have unrealistic expectations. How do we counter this “crisis” and how do we improve the evaluation of our Development Officers?
“Disconnect: Why Most Institutions Don’t Use Prospect Researchers Effectively”
Time to change a crucial mistake most development offices make. Poorly using their Prospect Research and Management staff. Underpowering, disconnecting and starving these crucial staff for resources. Prospect Researchers produce gold. They find the next big donor, the next headline. Yet their work is often misunderstood, marginalized and even vilified. Let’s stop this and sync up our field Development Officer and Prospect Research Officers into a cash producing prospecting machine!
“I am a Fundraiser”
Our profession is the backbone of a $1.65 trillion dollar sector doing great work across the US. Yet our profession and our work is often misunderstood, disliked and even maligned. We have all heard the jokes about fundraisers as “arm twisters”, ‘begging” and “wining and dining rich people”. There are literally no positive portrayals of fundraisers in the media. Why? Let’s take charge of our image and identify how it harms our vital work. Let’s challenge and stand up for our profession and bring a new day where fundraising is honored and respected.
“Under Investing in Fundraising: The Myth of the One Person Development Shop”
Who hasn’t seen the single Development Officer struggling to do all and be all? One staff person with 40+ hours a week who is supposed to do the annual fund, the annual gala, start a major gifts program, write grants, do crowd funding, write a planned giving brochure, approach corporate donors etc. Small and medium nonprofits overwhelmingly make this mistake over and over. It’s literally the reason they are small. They won’t grow without the proper, cost effective investment in development. This investment includes realistic growth and goals over the right amount of time. This talk has also been called “The Non Profit Achievement Gap: Seven Ways Small and Medium Nonprofits Stunt Their Own Fundraising” which covers a slightly different area.
“The Love/Hate Relationship: Your Board and Fundraising”
I call it “Fundraising Fear.” Why do people fear and loathe fundraising? If you call a Board Meeting to talk about fundraising it’s a sure way to harm attendance. In reality is that a Board who fears or dislikes fundraising will never understand it properly, never engage and help. Those two actions will literally stunt an organization's mission and effectiveness. Fearing fundraising is strangling your organization. If we challenge and confront common notions, debunk and educate we can ask our Board Member not to accept fundraising but to embrace it. Honor it and be part of your organization's rise!
“Why Don’t We Consider Prospect Researchers Fundraisers?”
Inside Development Shops across the country there are commonly two fundraising worlds. The Development Officers and the Prospect Research staff. Too often they don’t work together and too often Prospect Research is misunderstood and poorly used. Prospect Research is a vital and indispensable part of fundraising. It’s the engine in your fundraising car. Yet it’s still common to have this team disempowered far down the org chart, underpaid compared to their other colleagues. When we empower Prospect Researchers it can lead to great prospecting, when we have great prospecting it leads to great fundraising !
Trainings: Live and Online
Cold Calling and Prospecting
What do you do when you have a great prospect that nobody knows? This happens all too often to development officers of all levels. For many staff who are growing a major gifts program this is often the majority of their portfolio of major gifts prospects.
This training will help you get focused, learn techniques, tips and methods to reach cold donors and get that first meeting. This training will also help you create a professional learning community so your entire field staff can benefit from each other’s success and experience.
If you want to reach new prospects, if you want to get to the prospects nobody else has been able to reach then this training is for you.
This training is commonly attended by field fundraising staff of all levels, Executive Directors, Prospect Research and Management staff and volunteers.
Cold Calling and Prospecting for Development Officers: Workshop
This is the follow up to “Cold Calling and Prospecting”. This is an actual practice session where we will work together with Armando to put into action some of the first webinars’ practices. We will work together to write our own scripts, templates and other materials. I will take as many participants as possible and practice live on the line practice role-play sessions with participants. Armando will allow time for key questions and help resolve problems. You will walk away with the ability to set up your own professional learning community. The “PLC” method will help you identify best practices, help your team practice and learn.
Small Event Prospecting
So many small events are wasted opportunities to energize new prospects with the mission of your institution/organization. This training will teach you to create small dinners that will directly help you prospect and fill your pipeline with major gifts prospects.
Guided by your Prospect Research and Management staff these small events will help you to get your best prospects in the room, qualify those prospects and gather information on them. Through these dinners you will be able to qualify and start new relationships with dozens of people at a time. They are often very inexpensive to run and will help you raise more money in a tough economy. These dinners stand out in that the attendee’s are highly screened and invited in a way that fills the room with the best prospects available.
This training is great for all types of field fundraising staff, Prospect Research and Management staff and Event staff. It is also useful for Executive Directors who have to do fundraising but don’t have staff.
Forming Major Gifts Committee’s and Board Recruitment
We can create highly effective Major Gifts committee’s from the start. We can also recruit new and powerful Board Members that will have quick and positive effects on fundraising at your institution. This training will reveal how using good data, coordinated practice and prospecting can help you build new dynamically effective leadership for your institution.
How do you influence the Board selection process as a development officer or prospect researcher? How can you help create criteria for board/volunteer selection?
What’s the best way to identify the hottest prospects for a major gifts committee? How do you get to the Board Candidate every institution in town wants first?
First Appointment: The Art of the Qualification/Discovery Visit
The Qualification visit or “discovery visit” is the vital fork in the road for an individual’s relationship with your institution. Yet, it’s rarely taught and often great prospects are mistakenly disqualified and individuals who aren’t prospects have a great deal of time and attention paid to them. Only through doing the right prep, asking the right questions, learning to listen and choosing the right methods of qualification can you launch new valuable relationships for your institution.
We will work on using visual, verbal and facial clues to understand your prospect. We will develop a list of questions you can use to qualify our prospects.
Creating a Prospecting Culture at your Institution
How do some institutions do it? They are always first to find the new wealth and scooping their competitors? Often they have an established culture that structurally supports and rewards great prospecting. Even smaller institutions can get in first to new major gifts prospects where others can’t by developing an internal culture of prospecting. One can have great prospects and purchase great tools for identifying those prospects, but without a strong prospecting culture it will be unlikely for anyone to follow up and start relationships with those prospects.
This a great seminar for development staff of all types, but especially for development leadership. This seminar will help you understand the cultural, structural, hierarchical barriers to building this dynamic prospecting culture in your development operation. Having this “can do” culture in your institution will raise you more money now and help you build a solid base for the future.
The Prospect Researcher/ Development Officer Relationship
Imagine your Prospect Research and Management staff helping you lead and build solid portfolio’s new prospects and new gifts with your Major Gifts/ Development Officers? Yet this relationship is one of the most ineffective relationships traditionally at most development shops nationally. Why? This humor filled presentation will help bridge the gap in each team’s perceptions and misperceptions of each other. It will help you form agreement and build synergy between two divergent personalities and teams.
This seminar is especially effective when Prospect Research, Management and Development Officers are all in attendance.
LinkedIn For Development Officers
Everyone knows LinkedIn, but few Development Officers understand it's true power. Especially its power to be used in prospecting. This tutorial will help you and your team understand the many clear and less obvious uses of LinkedIn. We will cover the use of Inmail, Advanced Searches, networking, Groups, searches and many other areas. It's my belief that LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools to come to new Major Gifts prospecting in years. We will go through LinkedIn live and online.
Using “Circles of Influence” in Prospecting
When your prospecting gets introduced to popular major prospects, it can often be very challenging. Yet, almost all prospects have peers and “circles” they live in. How can you partner with Prospect Research to identify and infiltrate “circles of influence”? This classic technique has many subtle techniques and pitfalls.
We will go over techniques, examples and help you identify circles of influence amongst your donors and prospects.
Creating a Development Professional Learning Community in your Institution
Often success and best practices are a wall away ! We have development officers working together but apart. Some succeed and some struggle. Some of it’s experience, some of its innovation and some of its tenacity. How do we create a safe, transparent officer where successful practices are identified, written down, and spread. How do we promote practice and equal professional development? This methodology can also showcase effective ways to support prospecting and new major donor development.
I have implemented a professional learning community amongst 4 staff and 65 staff. It’s a complex design that takes into account personalities, hierarchy, job roles and culture.
Creating a Dynamic Prospecting Culture at your Institution: For Development Leadership and Executives
This presentation is for development leadership and the head of Prospect Research and Management. This is an overview and discussion to help management realign staffing, funding, office space and culture around producing new major gifts prospects and donors.
Too often institutions settle into a maintenance culture that takes care of currently identified prospects but rarely finds new prospects or at least doesn’t find them in any systematic fashion. How can you align your resources, find the missing parts and train staff effectively? We will leave this training with the framework for a plan of action. As a leader you will know the questions to ask and the pieces you need for your own plan.
Join the Major Leagues, Make Those Headlines Yours! Prospecting for Small and Medium Institutions
Too many small and medium nonprofits are wholly unaware of the world of Prospect Research and Management. Or they think of prospect research as a luxury reserved for universities and hospitals.
Yet many would agree that great prospecting is the difference between staying a small institution and entering “the major leagues” of fundraising. This frank and humorous presentation is designed to be heard by leadership, funders and Board members. It’s a compelling case to invest in prospect research, management and effectively pursuing individual major giving rather than other more common methods of funding. We will confront misconceptions and fears about individual major giving, wealthy philanthropists and money.
We will review various options to make prospect research happen at institutions with small staffs and budgets. We will leave the presentation with clear expectations, goals and roles clearly defined. So next time there is a big headline in the newspaper about a new major gift , the headlines will be yours.
Electronic Screenings: Avoid the pitfalls, get your staff prepared and bring in new major donors!
Many organizations budget for expensive electronic screenings only to have the results be poorly understood and not effectively followed up on. Let’s face it most electronic screenings are simply wasted. Yet they can indeed be prospect windfalls if properly prepared for.
What is commonly missing is a prepared staff, internal transparent follow up, accountability and staff training. Electronic screenings, even with excellent data and new leads can be easily undermined by under motivated or misinformed staff.
This training will provide a simple list of common pitfalls, a simple way to diagnose your institutions prospecting culture and a step by step explanation of what you need to improve, enhance and highlight. Using these simple common sense methods, you will be able to identify new major prospects that could really be game changers for your institution! I have personally followed up on 6 electronic screenings in my career from different vendors and have worked for a short time for one electronic screening company. So I present this from multiple experiences and perspectives.
Fundraising Is Beautiful: Teaching your Leadership and Board to LOVE Fundraising.
Yes I say “Love”. The most crippling unspoken issue in nonprofits today is our leadership's fear and dislike of fundraising. Educating our boards about fundraising isn’t enough, we need them to learn to honor fundraising. Only through their complete appreciation for the actual work that is fundraising can the true power of your institution be unlocked. By showing our leadership their true and unique roles in fundraising can a whole team approach be activated. This approach will help you improve board giving, identify new major prospects, strengthen development staffing, protect your work and job.
If you have been hampered by your leadership’s lack of understanding and/or fear of fundraising then this presentation was written for you. With a mix of humor and specific steps Armando will help you identify how best to indoctrinate your Board into your crucial work. We will examine public perceptions and misinformation about fundraising, we will examine the power of the Board/Development Officer partnership and we will help you prepare a presentation for your own Board.
“I am a fundraiser"
A discussion about how our culture thinks about fundraising and fundraisers. How this is very damaging to nonprofits and how we can change it? That fear of fundraising has crippled many nonprofits ability to fundraise. Board and Leadership’s ignorance into what fundraising actually entails has led to tiny budgets, insufficient staffing and short tenures for staff. Most importantly it has led to inactive boards where they could instead be pivotal in major fundraising.
Why is fundraising considered “overhead” and why is fundraising and especially prospect research considered so slimy and dirty? Why is it our society understands raising money for profit, but raising money to help people is somehow unseemly. Prospect Research is the embarrassing secret, even for many fundraisers. A secret that is kept even from boards of directors and leadership.
This empowering discussion will highlight how we as a profession, field fundraisers and prospect researchers need to come together to promote, protect and advance our profession. For ourselves but most importantly for our institutions.
All Presentations, Content, and Titles are the property of Armando Zumaya. Reproduction is only allowed with written permission.
1. Lecture Topics
2. Trainings
3. A YouTube Video of Me speaking
4. A Contact Form
Lecture Topics
(Trainings Below)
“Prospect Research is a Cause”
Great Prospect Research, effectively acted upon is great fundraising. And great fundraising can lead to great gifts for your program. Whether you’re running a homeless shelter, researching a cure for Alzheimer’s, or raising student scholarships, new levels of fundraising can transform the power and effectiveness of your organization. How do we demystify Prospect Research, remove the stigma and take pride in our profession? This motivational talk will help you challenge the accepted norm and raise new gifts.
Sleeping Giant: Latino Major Giving in the US Today
About a year ago sitting in the office of a 34 year CEO of a new tech company talking about philanthropy and what his interests were. We explored his motivations for making a major gift. After three meetings I asked him if he’d consider a significant gift, after 10 minutes of talking about various levels and impacts of giving he gave a significant seven figure gift. What was amazing was that I was the only person who had ever talked to him about philanthropy. He had publicly sold his company for hundreds of millions dollars. As a Mexican American, was it that he didn’t fit someone’s profile of wealth? Certainly, organizations working on causes Mexican American’s care about didn’t spot him, they don’t simply don’t have Prospect Research. He cared deeply about cancer, climate change and immigrant rights but nobody was asking him about those issues or giving to them. Large national organizations and often universities simply overlook Latinos in major giving.
How do we, as a profession, stop this cycle where nobody is looking for Latino major donors? Is the key in hiring and training more Latinos in development officer roles? How does culture play a role? What is different about approaching Latino’s in the US today? In this discussion and presentation we will explore these questions from a practical and strategic perspective. This is both a cause and necessity for many organizations to grow. Does your organization/institution have an untapped resource in Latino donors waiting to be asked?
“The Crisis of Development Officer Short Tenures: Reevaluating How Our Performance is Judged”
We all know that Development Officers have short tenures. It’s a joke to many. But it’s really not all that funny. Short tenures are not only damaging to our careers but the organizations we serve. One of the largest factors in these short tenures is rarely discussed. The fact that we are very poorly evaluated, often by people who simply don’t understand our work and have unrealistic expectations. How do we counter this “crisis” and how do we improve the evaluation of our Development Officers?
“Disconnect: Why Most Institutions Don’t Use Prospect Researchers Effectively”
Time to change a crucial mistake most development offices make. Poorly using their Prospect Research and Management staff. Underpowering, disconnecting and starving these crucial staff for resources. Prospect Researchers produce gold. They find the next big donor, the next headline. Yet their work is often misunderstood, marginalized and even vilified. Let’s stop this and sync up our field Development Officer and Prospect Research Officers into a cash producing prospecting machine!
“I am a Fundraiser”
Our profession is the backbone of a $1.65 trillion dollar sector doing great work across the US. Yet our profession and our work is often misunderstood, disliked and even maligned. We have all heard the jokes about fundraisers as “arm twisters”, ‘begging” and “wining and dining rich people”. There are literally no positive portrayals of fundraisers in the media. Why? Let’s take charge of our image and identify how it harms our vital work. Let’s challenge and stand up for our profession and bring a new day where fundraising is honored and respected.
“Under Investing in Fundraising: The Myth of the One Person Development Shop”
Who hasn’t seen the single Development Officer struggling to do all and be all? One staff person with 40+ hours a week who is supposed to do the annual fund, the annual gala, start a major gifts program, write grants, do crowd funding, write a planned giving brochure, approach corporate donors etc. Small and medium nonprofits overwhelmingly make this mistake over and over. It’s literally the reason they are small. They won’t grow without the proper, cost effective investment in development. This investment includes realistic growth and goals over the right amount of time. This talk has also been called “The Non Profit Achievement Gap: Seven Ways Small and Medium Nonprofits Stunt Their Own Fundraising” which covers a slightly different area.
“The Love/Hate Relationship: Your Board and Fundraising”
I call it “Fundraising Fear.” Why do people fear and loathe fundraising? If you call a Board Meeting to talk about fundraising it’s a sure way to harm attendance. In reality is that a Board who fears or dislikes fundraising will never understand it properly, never engage and help. Those two actions will literally stunt an organization's mission and effectiveness. Fearing fundraising is strangling your organization. If we challenge and confront common notions, debunk and educate we can ask our Board Member not to accept fundraising but to embrace it. Honor it and be part of your organization's rise!
“Why Don’t We Consider Prospect Researchers Fundraisers?”
Inside Development Shops across the country there are commonly two fundraising worlds. The Development Officers and the Prospect Research staff. Too often they don’t work together and too often Prospect Research is misunderstood and poorly used. Prospect Research is a vital and indispensable part of fundraising. It’s the engine in your fundraising car. Yet it’s still common to have this team disempowered far down the org chart, underpaid compared to their other colleagues. When we empower Prospect Researchers it can lead to great prospecting, when we have great prospecting it leads to great fundraising !
Trainings: Live and Online
Cold Calling and Prospecting
What do you do when you have a great prospect that nobody knows? This happens all too often to development officers of all levels. For many staff who are growing a major gifts program this is often the majority of their portfolio of major gifts prospects.
This training will help you get focused, learn techniques, tips and methods to reach cold donors and get that first meeting. This training will also help you create a professional learning community so your entire field staff can benefit from each other’s success and experience.
If you want to reach new prospects, if you want to get to the prospects nobody else has been able to reach then this training is for you.
This training is commonly attended by field fundraising staff of all levels, Executive Directors, Prospect Research and Management staff and volunteers.
Cold Calling and Prospecting for Development Officers: Workshop
This is the follow up to “Cold Calling and Prospecting”. This is an actual practice session where we will work together with Armando to put into action some of the first webinars’ practices. We will work together to write our own scripts, templates and other materials. I will take as many participants as possible and practice live on the line practice role-play sessions with participants. Armando will allow time for key questions and help resolve problems. You will walk away with the ability to set up your own professional learning community. The “PLC” method will help you identify best practices, help your team practice and learn.
Small Event Prospecting
So many small events are wasted opportunities to energize new prospects with the mission of your institution/organization. This training will teach you to create small dinners that will directly help you prospect and fill your pipeline with major gifts prospects.
Guided by your Prospect Research and Management staff these small events will help you to get your best prospects in the room, qualify those prospects and gather information on them. Through these dinners you will be able to qualify and start new relationships with dozens of people at a time. They are often very inexpensive to run and will help you raise more money in a tough economy. These dinners stand out in that the attendee’s are highly screened and invited in a way that fills the room with the best prospects available.
This training is great for all types of field fundraising staff, Prospect Research and Management staff and Event staff. It is also useful for Executive Directors who have to do fundraising but don’t have staff.
Forming Major Gifts Committee’s and Board Recruitment
We can create highly effective Major Gifts committee’s from the start. We can also recruit new and powerful Board Members that will have quick and positive effects on fundraising at your institution. This training will reveal how using good data, coordinated practice and prospecting can help you build new dynamically effective leadership for your institution.
How do you influence the Board selection process as a development officer or prospect researcher? How can you help create criteria for board/volunteer selection?
What’s the best way to identify the hottest prospects for a major gifts committee? How do you get to the Board Candidate every institution in town wants first?
First Appointment: The Art of the Qualification/Discovery Visit
The Qualification visit or “discovery visit” is the vital fork in the road for an individual’s relationship with your institution. Yet, it’s rarely taught and often great prospects are mistakenly disqualified and individuals who aren’t prospects have a great deal of time and attention paid to them. Only through doing the right prep, asking the right questions, learning to listen and choosing the right methods of qualification can you launch new valuable relationships for your institution.
We will work on using visual, verbal and facial clues to understand your prospect. We will develop a list of questions you can use to qualify our prospects.
Creating a Prospecting Culture at your Institution
How do some institutions do it? They are always first to find the new wealth and scooping their competitors? Often they have an established culture that structurally supports and rewards great prospecting. Even smaller institutions can get in first to new major gifts prospects where others can’t by developing an internal culture of prospecting. One can have great prospects and purchase great tools for identifying those prospects, but without a strong prospecting culture it will be unlikely for anyone to follow up and start relationships with those prospects.
This a great seminar for development staff of all types, but especially for development leadership. This seminar will help you understand the cultural, structural, hierarchical barriers to building this dynamic prospecting culture in your development operation. Having this “can do” culture in your institution will raise you more money now and help you build a solid base for the future.
The Prospect Researcher/ Development Officer Relationship
Imagine your Prospect Research and Management staff helping you lead and build solid portfolio’s new prospects and new gifts with your Major Gifts/ Development Officers? Yet this relationship is one of the most ineffective relationships traditionally at most development shops nationally. Why? This humor filled presentation will help bridge the gap in each team’s perceptions and misperceptions of each other. It will help you form agreement and build synergy between two divergent personalities and teams.
This seminar is especially effective when Prospect Research, Management and Development Officers are all in attendance.
LinkedIn For Development Officers
Everyone knows LinkedIn, but few Development Officers understand it's true power. Especially its power to be used in prospecting. This tutorial will help you and your team understand the many clear and less obvious uses of LinkedIn. We will cover the use of Inmail, Advanced Searches, networking, Groups, searches and many other areas. It's my belief that LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools to come to new Major Gifts prospecting in years. We will go through LinkedIn live and online.
Using “Circles of Influence” in Prospecting
When your prospecting gets introduced to popular major prospects, it can often be very challenging. Yet, almost all prospects have peers and “circles” they live in. How can you partner with Prospect Research to identify and infiltrate “circles of influence”? This classic technique has many subtle techniques and pitfalls.
We will go over techniques, examples and help you identify circles of influence amongst your donors and prospects.
Creating a Development Professional Learning Community in your Institution
Often success and best practices are a wall away ! We have development officers working together but apart. Some succeed and some struggle. Some of it’s experience, some of its innovation and some of its tenacity. How do we create a safe, transparent officer where successful practices are identified, written down, and spread. How do we promote practice and equal professional development? This methodology can also showcase effective ways to support prospecting and new major donor development.
I have implemented a professional learning community amongst 4 staff and 65 staff. It’s a complex design that takes into account personalities, hierarchy, job roles and culture.
Creating a Dynamic Prospecting Culture at your Institution: For Development Leadership and Executives
This presentation is for development leadership and the head of Prospect Research and Management. This is an overview and discussion to help management realign staffing, funding, office space and culture around producing new major gifts prospects and donors.
Too often institutions settle into a maintenance culture that takes care of currently identified prospects but rarely finds new prospects or at least doesn’t find them in any systematic fashion. How can you align your resources, find the missing parts and train staff effectively? We will leave this training with the framework for a plan of action. As a leader you will know the questions to ask and the pieces you need for your own plan.
Join the Major Leagues, Make Those Headlines Yours! Prospecting for Small and Medium Institutions
Too many small and medium nonprofits are wholly unaware of the world of Prospect Research and Management. Or they think of prospect research as a luxury reserved for universities and hospitals.
Yet many would agree that great prospecting is the difference between staying a small institution and entering “the major leagues” of fundraising. This frank and humorous presentation is designed to be heard by leadership, funders and Board members. It’s a compelling case to invest in prospect research, management and effectively pursuing individual major giving rather than other more common methods of funding. We will confront misconceptions and fears about individual major giving, wealthy philanthropists and money.
We will review various options to make prospect research happen at institutions with small staffs and budgets. We will leave the presentation with clear expectations, goals and roles clearly defined. So next time there is a big headline in the newspaper about a new major gift , the headlines will be yours.
Electronic Screenings: Avoid the pitfalls, get your staff prepared and bring in new major donors!
Many organizations budget for expensive electronic screenings only to have the results be poorly understood and not effectively followed up on. Let’s face it most electronic screenings are simply wasted. Yet they can indeed be prospect windfalls if properly prepared for.
What is commonly missing is a prepared staff, internal transparent follow up, accountability and staff training. Electronic screenings, even with excellent data and new leads can be easily undermined by under motivated or misinformed staff.
This training will provide a simple list of common pitfalls, a simple way to diagnose your institutions prospecting culture and a step by step explanation of what you need to improve, enhance and highlight. Using these simple common sense methods, you will be able to identify new major prospects that could really be game changers for your institution! I have personally followed up on 6 electronic screenings in my career from different vendors and have worked for a short time for one electronic screening company. So I present this from multiple experiences and perspectives.
Fundraising Is Beautiful: Teaching your Leadership and Board to LOVE Fundraising.
Yes I say “Love”. The most crippling unspoken issue in nonprofits today is our leadership's fear and dislike of fundraising. Educating our boards about fundraising isn’t enough, we need them to learn to honor fundraising. Only through their complete appreciation for the actual work that is fundraising can the true power of your institution be unlocked. By showing our leadership their true and unique roles in fundraising can a whole team approach be activated. This approach will help you improve board giving, identify new major prospects, strengthen development staffing, protect your work and job.
If you have been hampered by your leadership’s lack of understanding and/or fear of fundraising then this presentation was written for you. With a mix of humor and specific steps Armando will help you identify how best to indoctrinate your Board into your crucial work. We will examine public perceptions and misinformation about fundraising, we will examine the power of the Board/Development Officer partnership and we will help you prepare a presentation for your own Board.
“I am a fundraiser"
A discussion about how our culture thinks about fundraising and fundraisers. How this is very damaging to nonprofits and how we can change it? That fear of fundraising has crippled many nonprofits ability to fundraise. Board and Leadership’s ignorance into what fundraising actually entails has led to tiny budgets, insufficient staffing and short tenures for staff. Most importantly it has led to inactive boards where they could instead be pivotal in major fundraising.
Why is fundraising considered “overhead” and why is fundraising and especially prospect research considered so slimy and dirty? Why is it our society understands raising money for profit, but raising money to help people is somehow unseemly. Prospect Research is the embarrassing secret, even for many fundraisers. A secret that is kept even from boards of directors and leadership.
This empowering discussion will highlight how we as a profession, field fundraisers and prospect researchers need to come together to promote, protect and advance our profession. For ourselves but most importantly for our institutions.
All Presentations, Content, and Titles are the property of Armando Zumaya. Reproduction is only allowed with written permission.
