SAVE THE DATE!

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Intro to Prospect Research: Building A Diversified Funding Pipeline for Financial Resilience

Presenter: Christina Caputo, Manager of Knowledge Services - Forefront

During this interactive workshop, we will introduce Prospect Research, including best practices, tools, and techniques that can help your nonprofit organization find potential donors and institutional funders aligned with the nonprofit’s mission and shared values, and thrive in today’s competitive fundraising landscape. The workshop will teach participants prospecting strategies to identify, qualify, and prioritize donors and institutional opportunities for fundraising efforts and unlock valuable insights from data sources and analysis. Moreover, it will help participants understand how Prospect Research is paramount for nonprofit success in building and diversifying its funding pipeline. Prospect Research supports nonprofits in cultivating relationships with institutional funders and individual donors. A portion of this session will be dedicated to providing a brief overview of available databases, including Forefront LibGuides, using public library resources and freely available tools to supplement your grant search, and a deeper look at Candid's database, the Foundation Directory Online (FDO).

This workshop is designed for those who are new in fundraising for nonprofits, mid-level, or who are seeking to refresh their existing prospect research skills.

OBJECTIVES

• Gain insight into the critical role of Prospect Research in fundraising and development success.
• Understand the basics of Prospect Research and what is included in publicly available data.
• Understand the practical strategy and knowledge base to apply to prospect research to your work.

Pass the Mission, Not the Mic: Sustaining Donor Trust Through Succession

Presenter: Christine Enetak, Principal Consultant - Grounded in Equity, LLC

Staff and leadership transitions are inevitable in nonprofit organizations, but funding disruption and donor-trust erosion don’t have to be. This session addresses a persistent challenge: maintaining fundraising momentum and institutional stability when critical personnel changes occur. Participants will explore succession planning not simply as a contingency, but as a proactive fundraising strategy that sustains donor confidence, strengthens operations, and reinforces an organization's long-term credibility and commitment to equity.  

This workshop is timely as many nonprofits encounter increasing organizational transitions and a growing need to demonstrate resilience and continuity to external stakeholders. By reframing succession as a strategic, fundable practice, the session responds directly to a widespread need: how to plan for change without jeopardizing philanthropic relationships or internal capacity. Rather than focusing solely on executive transitions, the session considers how shifts at all levels—staff, board, or senior leadership—impact fundraising, communications, and organizational resilience.  

Participants will engage with tools and frameworks that support equity-centered succession planning and development strategy across all areas of the organization. Through guided discussion and real-world examples, attendees will gain practical approaches to budgeting for talent development, communicating transitions transparently to funders, and positioning succession planning as a pillar of sustainable, equity-aligned fundraising.  

By facilitating shared learning and dialogue, the workshop will create a space for nonprofit professionals to connect around a common challenge and exchange strategies often learned in isolation. This community-building aspect is central to the session’s design, encouraging reflection, collaboration, and co-created solutions.  

The session highlights and supports the work of nonprofit practitioners who are actively navigating change with limited resources. It affirms their leadership and equips them with frameworks to move forward strategically. This topic is relevant across roles—development professionals, executive directors, operations staff, and board members—because it tackles a pressing and often under-acknowledged question: How can organizations plan for leadership and staffing changes while protecting mission continuity and funder relationships? This session offers thoughtful, tested answers and creates space to discover new ones together.

Learning Objectives

This session will provide nonprofit professionals with concrete, fundraising-centered strategies to prepare for and communicate through staff and leadership transitions. Participants will leave with tools and messaging they can use directly in their day-to-day development, leadership, or board engagement work.  By the end of the session, participants will be able to: 

• Identify three ways succession planning can be integrated into fundraising strategy to sustain donor trust during staff, board, or leadership transitions. Participants will gain insights they can immediately apply to identify vulnerable donor relationships and begin building continuity plans in their current role.
• Use equity-informed messaging strategies to communicate organizational changes with funders and donors. Participants will practice developing language they can adapt for reports, announcements, and direct communications in their professional context. 
• Develop a donor engagement outline that supports leadership handoffs and relationship continuity during times of transition. This will equip participants with a reusable framework for stewarding donors through organizational changes in their own workplace.  

Engagement Strategies

Participants will engage through guided discussion, a focused messaging activity, and a structured worksheet to apply session content to their organization’s context. A take-home action guide will include templates and prompts for continued use after the session.

Rethinking High-Impact Stewardship: Aligning Donor Engagement with Shared Values

Presenter: Christy Smith-Hall, CFRE, MNA, Development Director - Deborah's Place

Declining individual contributions and weakening social safety nets present significant challenges for nonprofit organizations, making their ability to predict and sustain funding increasingly critical for navigating unpredictable challenges.   A well-thought donor stewardship plan that includes  one-time and lapsed donors is paramount to long-term strategies.

In this workshop, we’ll  explore an integrative strategy and shared values of donor and community-based approaches, and will walk through a sample donor stewardship matrix.  The interactive workshop is designed to enhance the capacity of organizations to make a meaningful impact with one-time and lapsed donors at various giving levels by thoughtfully aligning shared values of the donor, community, and organization and nurturing mutually-beneficial relationships.

It encourages grassroots innovation for individuals who work on nonprofit fundraising and donor relations.  Participants will learn how lapsed donor outreach for micro, small, and mid-level donors can be a meaningful volunteer opportunity and team-building strategy, and a point of entry for deeper donor engagement.  The framework is easily adaptable to help implementers plan their donor stewardship efforts more deliberately, effectively, and sustainably. The methods used to accomplish goals and objectives can be practiced in a variety of settings to address a myriad of fund development issues. Participants need not have experience working on nonprofit fundraising prior to participating in this workshop, although it may be useful.

Workshop Objectives

The purpose of this workshop is to increase the understanding and skills among participants to plan, facilitate, and implement donor stewardship strategies to bring about philanthropic change and support for their organizations and social impact for their communities. Specifically, as a result of this workshop, participants will be able to:

• Advocate for the significance of stewardship for your fundraising and across your organization and what it entails.
• Take a practical look at the systems and resources in place in your organization to deliver exceptional stewardship.
• Gain insight into how integrating values shared by donor and community-based approaches together to stewardship can nurture mutually beneficial relationships and improve donor engagement success.
• Understand the components of a high-impact donor stewardship strategy.
• Redefine stewardship for the new era of fundraising and lead the way in your organization.
• Identify solutions to address stewardship challenges.
• Design tactics to cultivate long-term and sustainable actions and giving.
• Develop a plan for integrating a donor stewardship strategy into their organization’s practices and unlock its transformative potential.  

Participants will leave with ideas to draft a high-impact donor stewardship strategy grounded in empathy, data, and proven techniques to share with colleagues and implement after the workshop.