Keynote Speaker
Fatima Shama
Executive Director, The Fresh Air Fund
Fatima Shama is the executive director of The Fresh Air Fund, the 140 year-old nonprofit agency that provides free summer experiences for New York City children from low-income communities through summer camps and a host families program in rural and suburban communities along the East Coast and Southern Canada, and provides year-round leadership and educational programs.
Ms. Shama served in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration as the commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs from 2009 through 2013. From 2007 through 2009, she served as Mayor’s senior education policy advisor, and in 2006, when Ms. Shama joined Mayor Bloomberg’s office, she worked on a special initiative on the intersection between health care, language access, and literacy. Immediately after the administration and prior to joining The Fund, Ms. Shama served on the senior team at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York overseeing their External Affairs department and special projects.
Ms. Shama serves as a Trustee on the New York Foundation board, on the Board of Coro Leadership New York, and the New York Immigration Coalition.
The Research & Prospect Development Track
8:45 AM - 10:00 AM In the first session, Enthusiasts, Strategists, Closers, Oh My: The New Major Donor Archetypes—and Your Prospects, Colleen O’Grady, Lipman Hearne’s philanthropic communications strategist, and Peter Barber, Executive Vice President, Business and Account Development with Lipman Hearne, presented a case study on five inspiring Major Donor Archetypes drawing on verbatim statements from 150+ high-profile donors.Their research is continuing and they hope to provide find additional research there in future. Here is the link to the Megadonor Archetype information from the Lipman Hearne Website.
10:45 AM - 12:00 PM In Fact-finding in the era of Social Media and Fake News Sree Sreenivasan, a leading consultant, speaker and trainer for nonprofits, corporations, startups and executives, walked us through how to utilize LinkedIn as a tool for Prospect Research. Check out this article about Sree's session written by The NonProfit Times.
2:00 PM - 3:15 PM Jon Biedermann, manager of fundraising business units and products of DonorPerfect, and Nathan Dietz, a published scholar and experienced practitioner of quantitative and qualitative social science research with the Senior Research Associate in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at Urban Institute and the Do Good Institute at the University of Maryland led our third session, Big Data Fundraising Trends from NY Nonprofits. In this session Jon and Nathan performed a deep dive into giving data from thousands of nonprofits and millions of donors both nationwide and in the New York metro area. You can find their presentation here.
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM Persuading and Negotiating for Success: Portfolio Reviews Prospect development has grown beyond the “nerdy folks in the back room” reputation, yet many of us struggle to build collaborative relationships with our front line partners. We will provide communication techniques centered on adding names to portfolios, removing inactive prospects, and assessing prospects to queue up for strategy meetings. In our final session, Persuading and Negotiating for Success: Portfolio Reviews, Anne Dean, the managing director of Research and Relationship Management at George Washington University, and Bond Lammey, Managing Associate at Bentz Whaley Flessner specializing in prospect development and donor relations, helped tackle the struggle of building collaborative relationships between prospect development folks and their frontline partners