The NEDRA board would like to thank our latest volunteers. Kim Brown and Elana Pierkowski will serve as members of the Programming Committee this year. Thank you, Kim and Elana!

Having just adopted two extremely adorable kittens from the Animal Rescue League, the work done by animal welfare organizations has been much on my mind lately. In this article from 2010, Susan Ruderman gives some helpful tips on prospecting at this type of organization--tips that will likely be useful for any organization without an alumni or grateful patient base.

When Your Alumni Have Fur and Tails.pdf

The NEDRA Board had a call on August 3 to recap the APRA conference and the APRA Chapter Leaders Summit that took place there. A lot of interesting ideas came back from the conference! The board also spent a lot of time discussing upcoming programming to take place this fall. Read on for more information!

Hopefully, everyone saw the e-mail that was sent out earlier this month already, but just in case anyone missed it: the date of the 2017 NEDRA conference has been changed! The original dates conflicted with holidays that might have inhibited some from attending the conference. The conference will still be held at the Sheraton Portsmouth Harborside Hotel in Portsmouth, NH, but now the dates will be Thursday, April 27 and Friday, April 28. The pre-conference Research Basics Bootcamp will be held on Wednesday, April 26. With luck, this will enable more NEDRA members to attend the conference!

At the APRA International conference earlier this summer, Susan Grivno found some inspiration that surprised her in the keynote speech. Susan is a NEDRA board member, and a Senior Prospect Research Analyst at the University of New Hampshire.

Finding My Value Proposition: Thoughts on Risa Mish’s Keynote at APRA Prospect Development 2016

by Susan Grivno

I’m one of those people that really gets into a good keynote speech. A good conference keynote should leave listeners inspired and invigorated to make the most of the information they’ll encounter during the conference. A great one will challenge an audience to look at something in a way they may never have before. The keynote at the 2016 APRA conference in Nashville by Risa Mish did both and has stayed in my head and heart in post-conference. 

To be honest, I wasn’t sure a keynote titled “Art of the Sale: Persuasion and Influence Tips for Development Professionals (and Everyone Else!)” would be terribly memorable. The objective of her talk, to help participants become more persuasive and influential, was intriguing. But I wasn’t sitting at the edge of my seat until she made the following statement: “The key to being comfortable in your own skin is knowing what you stand for. That's credibility from the inside out."

She urged us to establish our own, personal value proposition. The term “value proposition” is typically used in marketing. They’re statements about how a product or company will benefit a customer. Mish suggested that we can’t be successful unless we actively identify, acknowledge, and live by a set of core values. She provided a sheet with dozens of possible value words—a list with words like autonomy, efficiency, passion, unity, tolerance, trust, and many more—and urged us to choose five that we identified with. Then she had us sacrifice two of our darlings and settle on the top three to get at what we value the most. How difficult! And then she gave us homework. How will we use these values in action? With our values in mind, what actions do we commit to? Commit to avoiding? 

There’s something about firmly establishing my values and actually using them in action that I find liberating. Does this decision, this activity jive with what I hold valuable? I find I’m framing new opportunities that way and even turned down a volunteer role recently that would have been interesting—one I was have surely accepted in the past. I found myself pausing, though, wondering if it would lead me too far away from one of my three core values: harmony. The role would have meant even more time in front of a computer screen and my work-life balance would likely have suffered. I was able to turn down the offer with less guilt than I would have normally felt, sure in the fact that it was the right decision for me.

 

A few years ago, a colleague of mine and her spouse left their comfortable IT positions to move to California. They had no jobs lined up, just a few connections, and only a vague sense of a life coach business she would start there. When asked why they were making such a drastic change, her short answer was “to be happy.” She’d explain that it was not just about stepping back from a 9-5 office job, or about escaping the New England weather—it was about being happy. She received mostly smiles and nods and a few “good for you’s,” but not too many people probed further. I did. What was this move going to do to bring her happiness? She said: “it will start me on a path toward authenticity.” I don’t think I really understood what she meant until I listened to Risa Mish at the APRA conference. Now I’m on my own path, with authenticity as my destination.

We have some great Fall programming coming up! On Thursday, October 20, Hugh Bennett will be presenting a program on valuing private companies at MIT in Cambridge. Hugh's expertise on this subject made his session at the NEDRA conference very popular, so if you missed it (or if you need a refresher), we hope you'll join us! Keep an eye on your inbox, social media, and the NEDRA News for more information when it becomes available.

The Programming Committee is also working to put together what should be some very thought-provoking programming on the subject of diversity and inclusion. Hopefully, we'll have some more information for you soon about what sort of events we'll have to offer on this important topic. Stay tuned!

In this, the first part of a two-part article, Tara McMullen provides an introduction to real estate research: how to find information, and how to use it wisely.

The Art and Science of Real Estate Research.pdf

Due to some last-minute unforeseen circumstances, the NEDRA Board did not hold the operations call we had planned for the month of July. We will, however, be holding a conference call on Wednesday, August 3 to debrief on the APRA conference and on the Chapter Leaders Meeting that took place there. We do, however, have news, knowledge, and thoughts to share in this update of the NEDRA News Blog, so read on!

From the Conference Committee, co-chaired this year by Lisa Foster and Susan Grivno, comes the exciting news that a location and dates have been chosen for next year's conference! Since the feedback on our most recent location has been overwhelmingly positive, we will once again be holding the conference at the Sheraton Harborside Hotel in Portsmouth, NH. The conference will take place on Thursday, April 13 and Friday, April 14, 2017. On Wednesday, April 12, we will be holding a pre-conference Research Basics Bootcamp, also at the Sheraton Harborside. Mark your calendars, and get ready to start planning some of the educational sessions that will make the conference great! 

Outside In: Finding Diversity & Inclusion in Philanthropy in the Midst of National Crises & Augmented Reality

by James Cheng, Development Data Analytics Specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and  NEDRA Board member

As the popularity of the "augmented reality" game Pokémon GO began to spread exponentially like a virus, my snarky comments on friends’ social posts of captured cartoon images increased correspondingly. When a couple of these friends pointed that out to me, I started to contemplate my critical responses. Were they a personal retaliation against what I saw as nostalgia-induced Pollyanna-ish myopia? Or was I perhaps reacting against the apparent surrender of higher reasoning to a tribalistic hive-mind?

As the newsfeeds flowed, the reason became clear. This craze came directly at the heels of the police-shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, as well as the retaliatory escalation of gun violence leading to the deaths of Officers Patrick Zamarripa, Brent Thompson, Lorne Ahrens, Michael Smith, and Michael Krol. While my African-American friends began to post and share videos of demonstrations and personal stories of struggles and fears, I also saw many of my Asian-American and Caucasian friends posting their personal and collective struggles… in capturing imaginary pocket monsters on their handheld devices.

And yet perhaps I should include myself in this indictment of inaction. Rather than immersing myself in games, my avoidance mechanism of choice is finding solace in the workplace. Here, I am the data master, being able to grow, train and transform my variables with the slightest of codes. Here, in the truest exploratory fashion, all my variables are considered “equal” a priori, giving no preferential treatment to some predictors of my outcomes over others. Here, I can ferret out dirty data and “dummify” them dichotomously, thus reducing their informational importance to my predictive models.

At this moment, you may be asking, “Why are you writing about national tragedies to talk about, of all things, Pokémon GO and your job? Where is the common sense, the courtesy and respect, the emotional intelligence? Are you reducing national headlines to water-cooler conversations? What do these things have anything to do with diversity and inclusion in philanthropy?”  

These questions are on point, and I have no definitive responses. At the same time, I feel like I've reached a personal tipping point. The boundaries between the professional and the personal, the societal and the social, the extraordinary and the routine, the pivotal and the mundane, are becoming permeable. As I type and retype, the phrase “Outside In” is on mental repeat. There is a sense of the “macro” --reality that is “outside” our spheres of influence: things that are happening on a national or even global level. Our "micro" reality--our "inside"-- would be those personal, social and even profession circles where our actions and decisions do have visible influence.

For some of us--those who have more melatonin in our skin than others, or who are activists fighting the good fight in social justice--the boundaries between the macro and micro often blur, if they exist at all. Those national and global conversations can end up affecting us on a personal level. Unfortunately, for others of us, those boundaries are as distinct ever--people can, and do, ignore the large-scale problems that don't affect them directly. As some people hunt for their diminishing civil rights/dignity/social justice, and as snipers hunt for police officers as targets, others blithely hunt for the next Pikachu or Charmander. 

Yet I believe a group of us are caught in that awkward in-between, where that “Outside” is coming “In.” We are bringing what is happening in society at large into our personal spheres and we are not sure what to do about it. Questions beget more questions, and I find myself walking in circles. 

What I do sense is that one of my micro-spheres may be aligned with the macro-sphere of our national conversations on diversity and inclusion. While my past and present colleagues have countries of origin and experiences that are truly global, I question our diversity and inclusion within the philanthropy sector at large. Who are our donors, and how diverse is our constituency?  Who are our gift officers, and what diverse experiences make them better fundraisers?  What about the diversity of the leadership and boards within our organizations?  Does diversity and inclusion within our non-profit organizations actually help with the “bottom line” of raising more funds?  If so, how do we become more diverse and inclusive without creating an environment of resentment and division within the workplace?  What IS diversity? What IS inclusion?

Could beginning to think about--let alone talk about and act on--the subject of diversity and inclusion in the philanthropic workplace be of any consequence to the national debate about civil rights, social justice, and race relations?  Is it possible to create some bi-directionality where what we do on the "inside" can impact the larger conversation "outside?"  I hope beyond hope that it is.

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If you are interested in sharing your thoughts and stories about diversity and inclusion in philanthropy, to listen to those sharing, or to be an ally, please contact us at office@nedra.org or me personally at chengj@mskcc.org. We are currently hoping to bridge our macro and our micro spheres by forming a committee on diversity and inclusion within the NEDRA community