RING Small Shop Research
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 (3:00 pm – 4:30 pm)
Boston Ballet, 19 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA

This Regional Interest Networking Group will be held for the benefit of research professionals working with few staff members and/or limited budgets. Jeffrey Begg will facilitate a roundtable discussion to share strategies for success and discuss how to overcome challenges intrinsic to your work. This is also an opportunity to connect with new colleagues who may provide great resources and friendships.

Members: Free/Non-Members: $25.


Directors Forum
Thursday, November 15, 2012 (9:30 am – 11:00 am; 9:00 am – 9:30 am networking opportunity)
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, 10 Brookline Place West, 5th Floor, Room 563, Brookline, MA

Come prepared to participate in this lively discussion on topics such as departmental organization and benchmarking, prospect management, screenings and partnering with frontline fundraisers. This forum will be a great opportunity to share strategies with others who are leading research departments. Please be sure to bring your org chart, as well as your strategies for upholding best practices. This forum, which will be facilitated by Chris DeChellis and Alicia Kim-Shen, is recommended for all research professionals working in supervisory roles.

Members: $50/Non-Members: $85. Light refreshments are included.


Research Basics Bootcamp (Second offering)
Friday, November 16, 2012 (9:30 am – 4:00 pm)
University of New England, 716 Stevens Avenue, Goddard Hall, Room 009, Portland, ME

NEDRA presents a full day of instruction in the essentials of prospect research. This training is a must for those new to research, or those whom have had research added to their roles. No experience in the field is necessary to begin learning how to apply professional research methodologies. Speakers Amy Begg and Roslyn Clarke will cover a variety of vital topics, including the strategic role of advancement research, prospect research fundamentals and techniques for assessing gift capacity.

Members: $199/Non-Members: $299. Morning light refreshments and lunch are included.


Is the Financial Crisis Over? A Survey of Our Economy, and Our Prospects
Tuesday, December 4, 2012 (8:30 am – 10:30 am)
Yale Office of Development, 157 Church Street, 8th Floor, New Haven, CT

Understanding how prospects are reacting to these financially challenging times is essential to engaging them and earning their support. This session will examine the current economic landscape and help address ways to anticipate the needs of your organization’s constituents. Speaker Richard Horne will share insights regarding the economic climate to help strengthen your research, inform your communications and inspire your development strategies.

Members: $85/Non-Members: $125. Light refreshments are included.


RING: Large Research Shops
Thursday, December 6, 2012 (3:00 pm – 4:30 pm)
Harvard University, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Room 603B, Cambridge, MA

This roundtable discussion will be geared towards research professionals conducting business in large advancement organizations with many staff members and/or considerable budgets. Barbara Moore and Sarah Fernandez will facilitate this gathering and give attendees the opportunity to freely discuss the best strategies for large shop success. Some of the topics covered will include the most useful resources, staff recruitment and retention, organizational structure and the integration of data analytics. This discussion will be suitable for members of research teams with at least 5 researchers or a development staff of 50 employees or more.

Members: Free/Non-Members: $25.

Following this Bootcamp, a new subgroup for Bootcamp attendees was established on NEDRA's LinkedIn group. (Not a member of our LinkedIn group yet? Go here to join!) This subgroup is a great place for those who attended the Research Basics Bootcamp to continue conversations they began at the event with their fellow attendees, to ask follow-up questions, and to help one another learn. If you attended the Bootcamp and would like to connect with your fellow attendees, join the subgroup today.

Corporate Debt, Investor Gold.pdf

Dr. Reynold Levy’s Yours for the Asking: An Indispensable Guide to Fundraising and Management, is simply one of the most engaging and informative soup-to-nuts books on fundraising available in print. Currently President of New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Levy is also a very experienced philanthropy leader. His career has spanned senior roles at foundations and non-profits from the International Rescue Committee and the AT&T Foundation to New York City’s 92^nd Street Y. In his well-paced, 172-page third book, Levy crams in a lifetime’s worth of personal anecdotes, observations, and humor to keep the reader turning to the next page for more of his insight and wit.

Published just before the global economic crisis in late 2008, Levy’s book is definitely geared to development personnel trying to cultivate and solicit donors. However, I feel that anyone in development can learn a good deal from this book about how to engage donors, including the importance of better understanding what drives their philanthropic interests, in an effort to engage them in your cause. “Two-thirds of all [U.S.] households contributed funds to nonprofit institutions” in 2007, Levy says, highlighting the fact that the number of potential donors to any particular cause is huge. It’s more about how to properly steer donors to one’s organization and motivate them to continue to support its initiatives. Levy’s goal in writing this book is to get at the root of why “the act of asking seems so universally disliked, misunderstood, and disdained. It is even more perplexing to discover that there is no must-read, must-own guide to raising funds, given the hundreds of thousands of Americans who struggle to solicit donations every day.”  I found that last observation a little perplexing myself, as Penelope Burk, who has spoken at NEDRA conferences in the past, predated Levy by five years with her Donor-Centered Fundraising.

That oversight, and Levy’s prediction that the economic crisis hitting while he was writing Yours for the Asking would be “short and shallow,” are notable missteps in a publication that otherwise features a lot of great strides towards enriching one’s understanding about the field of development.

In his first chapter, Levy makes a passionate appeal to “America’s charitable potential.”  He considers the disparity between the top states in terms of aggregate wealth (California and New York, whose rate of per capita giving ranks them 21^st and 23^rd in the U.S.) measured against the top states in terms of per capita giving (Utah and Oklahoma). “Generosity is unevenly distributed geographically,” he observes. “Expanding where generosity lives is a terrific challenge for fundraisers and a tonic for some of the most serious problems that ail the nation and the planet.”  His first chapter is chock-full of interesting anecdotes and applicable lessons from his tenure at several international, national, and regional non-profits.

Chapters two through five, comprising the bulk of Yours for the Asking, offer a deep dive into specific on-the-road development ideas. These sections focus on individual donor solicitation, encouraging trustees and directors to donate more to the causes in which they are involved, the characteristics of an excellent development officer, and raising funds from an ever-increasing number of foundations, which often have labyrinthine policies to adhere to. I found the following rallying cry from Levy inspiring. “The profound obligation to convince those with the wherewithal to give more of themselves to institutions and causes larger than themselves falls to you,” he asserts. “That is not a burden. It is a pleasure. That is not a job. It is a calling.”

One nugget from Levy’s chapter on individual donor solicitation really resonated with my experience. I imagine it will sound familiar to many others in development research as well. “Listening carefully to donors,” he says, “allows you to bring back valuable observations to the line staff of your agency and assist in their quest for continuous improvement.”  For anyone who has ever hoped, encouraged, and begged "road warriors" for more details in their contact reports so that researchers have additional information on a prospect, surely this sentence strikes a chord.

Another section that I found particularly interesting and perhaps more applicable to development researchers focuses on the often-overlooked small, local and regional businesses near one’s institution as an under-identified source of funding. Dr. Levy encourages development shops to zero in on this largely untapped potential donor by appealing to civic pride and the mutually beneficial partnership of having a business and a non-profit deepen their involvement in the community in which they both operate. Locating “the intersection between the interests of business and the needs of your nonprofit” is essential in order to “easily tap corporate resources.”

Levy offers answers to “tough questions” in chapter six, insightful life lessons to be a successful fundraiser in chapter seven, and a breezy few pages of fundraising humor in chapter eight. In the lengthy appendices, he also offers several examples of fundraising successes from his long career in philanthropy. All of those chapters were interesting, but I personally found chapter nine (about the future of fundraising in an era of globalization) to be the most directly relatable chapter to my day-to-day responsibilities and thinking. He uses contemporary examples such as the rise of texting-to-give and an ever-expanding set of resources to identify international donors as encouraging signs for the future of development. “The nation’s army of professional and volunteer solicitors,” Levy powerfully persuades, “are fully capable of identifying enhanced and new sources of giving and of raising funds in unprecedented sums.”

Throughout this book, one fact is clear: Levy is deeply committed to raising the visibility and capability of America’s philanthropic “third sector” on a par with the business and government sectors. He unflinchingly believes that the hundreds of non-profits, and the thousands of development staff members working in the third sector, can be a stronger force for good throughout our society. That inspiring vision, and Reynold Levy's ideas about how we can make that vision a reality, were well worth my time in reading Yours for the Asking and seeing how I can apply its lessons to my involvement in the world of philanthropy.

The Frugal Researcher
Tuesday, October 16, 2012 (9:00 am – 10:30 am)
Amherst College, Smith House (Bliss Room), 22 Hitchcock Road, Amherst, MA

This session will offer ways to find valuable information without having to invest in expensive databases and programs. Information will be shared concerning a wide range of essential sources for prospect researchers. Speaker David Sterling will show you how to customize online searches to extract optimal data from a number of sources and empower you to produce high-quality research for your office’s fundraising efforts.

Members: $85/Non-Members: $125. Light refreshments are included.


Research Basics Bootcamp (First offering)
Friday, October 19, 2012 (9:30 am – 4:00 pm)
Northeastern University, Curry Center, 346 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA

NEDRA presents a full day of instruction in the essentials of prospect research. This training is a must for those new to research, or those whom have had research added to their roles. No prior experience is necessary to begin learning how to apply professional research methodologies. Speakers Amy Begg and Roslyn Clarke will cover a variety of vital topics, including the strategic role of advancement research, prospect research fundamentals and techniques for assessing gift capacity.

Members: $199/Non-Members: $299. Morning light refreshments and lunch are included.


Development Analytics 101
Friday, October 26th, 2012 (10:00 am – 12:00 pm)
Massachusetts General Hospital, 165 Cambridge Street, 2nd Floor, Room 220, Boston, MA

This seminar will examine the fundamentals of analytics from a development perspective. Concepts such as “predictive modeling” and “data analytics” will be defined within the context of the not-for-profit business process. Join James Cheng as he provides examples of descriptive and predictive analytics within the business process, and shares his expertise in this crucial new area of development.

Members: $85/Non-Members: $125. Light refreshments are included


RING Small Shop Research
Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 (3:00 pm – 4:30 pm)
Boston Ballet, 19 Clarendon Street, Boston, MA

This Regional Interest Networking Group will be held for the benefit of research professionals working with few staff members and/or limited budgets. Jeffrey Begg will facilitate a roundtable discussion to share strategies for success and discuss how to overcome challenges intrinsic to your work. This is also an opportunity to connect with new colleagues who may provide great resources and friendships.

Members: Free/Non-Members: $25.


Directors Forum
Thursday, November 15, 2012 (9:30 am – 11:00 am; 9:00 am – 9:30 am networking opportunity)
Dana Farber Cancer Institute, 10 Brookline Place West, 5th Floor, Room 563, Brookline, MA

Come prepared to participate in this lively discussion on topics such as departmental organization and benchmarking, prospect management, screenings and partnering with frontline fundraisers. This forum will be a great opportunity to share strategies with others who are leading research departments. Please be sure to bring your org chart, as well as your strategies for upholding best practices. This forum, which will be facilitated by Chris DeChellis and Alicia Kim-Shen, is recommended for all research professionals working in supervisory roles.

Members: $50/Non-Members: $85. Light refreshments are included.


Research Basics Bootcamp (Second offering)
Friday, November 16, 2012 (9:30 am – 4:00 pm)
University of New England, 716 Stevens Avenue, Goddard Hall, Room 009, Portland, ME

NEDRA presents a full day of instruction in the essentials of prospect research. This training is a must for those new to research, or those whom have had research added to their roles. No experience in the field is necessary to begin learning how to apply professional research methodologies. Speakers Amy Begg and Roslyn Clarke will cover a variety of vital topics, including the strategic role of advancement research, prospect research fundamentals and techniques for assessing gift capacity.

Members: $199/Non-Members: $299. Morning light refreshments and lunch are included.


Is the Financial Crisis Over? A Survey of Our Economy, and Our Prospects
Tuesday, December 4, 2012 (8:30 am – 10:30 am)
Yale Office of Development, 157 Church Street, 8th Floor, New Haven, CT

Understanding how prospects are reacting to these financially challenging times is essential to engaging them and earning their support. This session will examine the current economic landscape and help address ways to anticipate the needs of your organization’s constituents. Speaker Richard Horne will share insights regarding the economic climate to help strengthen your research, inform your communications and inspire your development strategies.

Members: $85/Non-Members: $125. Light refreshments are included.


RING: Large Research Shops
Thursday, December 6, 2012 (3:00 pm – 4:30 pm)
Harvard University, 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Room 603B, Cambridge, MA

This roundtable discussion will be geared towards research professionals conducting business in large advancement organizations with many staff members and/or considerable budgets. Barbara Moore and Sarah Fernandez will facilitate this gathering and give attendees the opportunity to freely discuss the best strategies for large shop success. Some of the topics covered will include the most useful resources, staff recruitment and retention, organizational structure and the integration of data analytics. This discussion will be suitable for members of research teams with at least 5 researchers or a development staff of 50 employees or more.

Members: Free/Non-Members: $25.