Pre-Conference Sessions

Navigate

1:30 - 5:00 PM

Get the most out of your Summit 2023 experience The Navigate Pre-conference session will brief attendees on Summit 2023 content and session offerings, ensuring participants choose the presentations and events most aligned with their professional interests and career goals. Network with aasp leadership, as they explain more about the benefits and resources included with membership. Then prepare for your post-conference experience by learning more about the volunteer, mentorship, and networking opportunities available year-round to members of the aasp community.

Elevate

Bringing Problem Solving to the Next Level with Design Thinking: A-Bring-Your-Own-Scenarios Workshop | Salon C-4, LL

2:00 - 5:00 PM  

Today’s leaders need more tools than ever to solve complex problems in an evolving world. This interactive workshop session will introduce a three-part toolbox to help speed your time between problem and solution: Design Thinking, Problem Framing, and Problem-Solving. Each concept will be introduced in a lightning learning round, followed by small-group guided practice sessions. The methods introduced are inclusive, impact-oriented, and proven to help leaders tap into the intelligence of their teams. You will leave with a head-start on solving one of your own most intractable problems, and a toolkit to use for making progress on the rest of them.

As an artist with an MBA who’s worked in museums since high school, Jen Holmes brings an array of creative, collaborative, and analytical approaches to her current role as Assistant Vice President, Strategic Development Services at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She oversees the enterprise relationship management database, advancement operations, prospect research, and analytics. Her team leverages technology to deliver actionable insights and workload-easing automations to departments across the museum, including marketing, visitor services, membership, education, and development. In 2016, after over fifteen years in executive affairs and fundraising, Jen pivoted toward technology when she was tapped to lead a major database conversion at LACMA that transformed an outdated legacy system into an adaptable, scalable insights hub. She went on to launch the organization’s first cross-team business intelligence program from scratch. She writes on data equity, mentors early and mid-career women in data, and sits on the Board of the Museum Computer Network

Data Analytics & Business Intelligence workshop

How to Build and Grow your Career in Advancement Services | Salon C-1&2, LL

2:00 - 5:00 PM 

In this workshop, you will learn about tools and frameworks to help advance your career in advancement services. Often there is a mismatch between what we think an organization wants and what we provide, thus reducing the overall perceived value of our contributions. Drawing on diverse and inclusive perspectives, you will learn to deliver valuable solutions from data analytics thought leaders and business intelligence practitioners. Through robust panel discussion and interactive exercises, you will leave with purpose and clarity on prioritizing your efforts to unlock career growth and leadership opportunities for you and your teams.

In this workshop, you will learn how to:

Identify core challenges and opportunities within your team(s) or organization
Select data analytics and business intelligence problems worth solving
Build or buy solutions for different functional areas
Translate solutions for different audience levels
Elevate success for resource investment

Ashutosh Nandeshwar is an award-winning data science leader who has championed innovative techniques to help nonprofits and higher education institutions become effective. Ashutosh has over 20 years of experience applying advanced data science and currently leads the data science practice at CCS Fundraising. He has built data science teams and practices from the ground up at institutions like USC, Caltech, and Michigan. Ashutosh holds a Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering, specializing in machine learning, and an MS in Design Thinking, and is the author of multiple books, including “Data Science for Fundraising.” He has served on the Apra national board and the CASE DRIVE committees

Dr. Rodger Devine brings over 20 years of experience in enterprise information technology, business intelligence, organizational development, and cross-functional leadership. Rodger completed his graduate studies in information science at the University of Michigan School of Information, where he was a member of the Michigan Data Sciences team and co-founder of the Student Organization for Data Analytics. Rodger completed his doctoral research in Organizational Change and Leadership at the University of Southern California with a focus on technological change, workforce development, and organizational learning. Rodger presents at conferences, chairs symposia, designs workshops, and volunteers in various leadership roles and mentorship capacities with non-profit organizations such as the Apra, AASP, and CASE, among others. Rodger looks forward to connecting with other lifelong learners and building diverse and inclusive communities of professional development, expertise, and knowledge sharing across higher education and beyond.

Mirabai Auer is Senior Associate Director of Data Science at UChicago. Across her career she’s worked in the nonprofit and higher education sector to increase the impact of analytics, reporting and technology.
At UChicago she leads the development of modeling and metrics for alumni engagement and fundraising. She enjoys developing data strategy and working with teams to explore new approaches through A/B testing. Her team recently converted to Salesforce CRM and she's exploring new tools and trainings to the increase the scale and impact of analytics.
Prior to working in fundraising, she worked in urban policy on a variety of equity indicators projects that explored socioeconomic disparities across regions in the realms of housing, work, and the environment. She holds a Master's in Urban Planning and Policy from University of Illinois-Chicago and is working on a Master's in Analytics at Georgia Tech.

LaReyna Griffin currently serves as the Data Analytics Manager for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services. from the University of Chicago. Having spent time at the University of Chicago and DePaul University, LaReyna gained two Master degrees, MS-Human Computer Interaction and MA-Public Policy – all together forming a solid foundation in design thinking and non-profit analysis as a way to contribute to data driven mindsets. As a data-driven visual analyst - LaReyna is passionate about designing data stories that are accessible from C-suite to backend analysts. By applying design thinking and user-centered frameworks, LaReyna can refine and improve their processes with each project and is excited to bring a data as a product mindset to each new role, allowing the opportunity to modernize and enhance the data projects there.

Maria Barrera Valdez is a Senior Developer of Data Insights & Analytics at USC, where she also recently earned her M.S. in Applied Data Science. She began her career as a Data Coordinator and worked her way up to her current role. This journey provided her with invaluable insights into the fundamentals of data collection, cleaning, and analysis. With over five years of experience in data analytics, she has honed her skills in data manipulation, visualization, and interpretation. She is well-versed in data mining techniques and has a knack for uncovering trends, patterns, and outliers that drive informed decision-making. She is drawn to the idea that behind every dataset lies a story waiting to be uncovered.

Session brought to you by

Gift Administration

Strategies for Infrastructure and Gift Acceptance |  Salon C-5&6, LL

2:00 - 5:00 PM

The vagaries of Gift Acceptance for your nonprofit organization tend to make every day a new adventure. Not only do our prospective donors thrive on coming up with their own creative opportunities for how they want to support our nonprofit, they tend to have expectations of us gladly accepting anything they want to offer. Amy Phillips will be hosting this session and, along with renowned IRS guru John Taylor, will provide thoughts on industry standards for articulating functional gift acceptance policies as well as possibilities for how to establish manageable gift flow Infrastructure parameters at the database level. This session will dive deeply into both of these critical areas of Gift Administration and include breakout opportunities with participants we hope will come armed with lots of challenging and interesting questions to discuss and debate!

John Taylor is the Principal of John H. Taylor Consulting, LLC, an independent advancement consulting practice. John was Associate Vice Chancellor for Advancement Services and Interim Campaign Manager at North Carolina State University. He previously was the Vice President for Research and Data Services at the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in Washington, DC. John was the Director of Alumni & Development Records at Duke University for nearly 15 years. He holds a BA in Mass Communications and Socio-Political Change from Vanderbilt University and a Certificate in Nonprofit Management from Duke University.John has spoken at hundreds of conferences internationally, receiving the CASE Crystal Apple Award for outstanding teaching. John is a founder, member, and Former President of the Board of the Association of Advancement Services Professionals (aasp). He received the aasp Jonathan Lindsey Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012. CASE distinguished John as a CASE Laureate in 2019.

Amy J. Phillips is Director of Advancement Services, Gift Administration for Institutional Advancement at CUA in which role she manages all aspects of gift processing, philanthropic fund creation and reconciliation. Amy is an active member of the Association of Advancement Services Professionals for which organization she served as a member of the inaugural Board in addition to being both a Founding and Charter member; she served on the Membership committee for many years and is currently active on both the annual aasp Summit Program and Summer Deep Dive Workshop committees. Amy has provided presentations on industry standards and best practices for many professional development organizations in addition to aasp including CASE and ADRP along with various database user communities. Outside of work Amy has a passion for music, is an avid reader, huge movie fan, amateur author, active crafter and an aficionado of a broad spectrum of kitchen tools!