In our "Meet an Apra-IL Member" feature, we interview a different individual from our member rolls every month. This month, we are pleased to be featuring Derek Beigh, an Apra-IL member since 2019.

Derek is a prospect Development Analyst at Lucile Packard for Children's Health, the fundraising partner of Lucile Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford University and Stanford School of Medicine in Palo Alto, CA. He broke into fundraising at University of Chicago in 2019 and built prospect research and management programs from scratch at Jewish Family Service of San Diego from 2022 to 2024. For the first decade of his career, he was a reporter and editor for local newspapers across Illinois and Indiana, covering government, education, business, arts, and crime. He works remotely from his home in Naperville.

Read on to learn more about Derek!

1. What is your favorite part about your current role, or about working for your current institution?

I have two sons under three years old, and I find tremendous satisfaction knowing my work helps kids like them. My second spent five days in the NICU after he was born, so I saw up close how philanthropy can help make patients and families more comfortable during times of intense stress. I hope my work at LPFCH can serve as a small way to pay it forward. I also really appreciate that LPFCH embraces remote work; of our seven-person prospect development team, four are remote (including my manager), and it’s an enormous benefit to know I’m not alone navigating the trade-offs that brings.

2. How do you explain your role to people outside of development?

I told a friend once my career is fancy Googling, and he’s never forgotten that! He knows now the reality is a lot more complicated, but I do try to start simple – “I work in fundraising for a children’s hospital” - and if folks are curious, talk about how I hunt down vital information that can pave the way for philanthropy and synthesize it into something readable and memorable. For folks who know my background, it clicks quickly that this work has a lot in common with what I did for local newspapers, and that’s a great springboard to talk about the different challenges of each industry.

3. If you were not in prospect research, what career would you have?

Had I been born 25 years earlier, in a more optimistic and profitable era for journalism, that may have been my only career - I decided in high school to become editor of the Chicago Tribune, and even though I fell well short, I’m tremendously proud of the work I did in the field and it broke my heart to leave. A couple fun alternates: I first came to the idea of writing professionally because I thought it would be awesome to review video games for Electronic Gaming Monthly, and I sometimes feel I missed my calling as a 70s sitcom writer, engineering misunderstandings and crafting snappy puns.

4. What has been the best part about being an Apra-IL member?

I really value the professional and personal connections APRA-IL has helped me establish. I had just moved to the Chicago area when the pandemic started, remote work is isolating, and it’s hard to get out as a new dad, so prospect research has turned out to be the community I needed. Apra-IL was also an invaluable resource when I was a one-man prospect development shop at JFS; I leaned a lot on folks at local nonprofits for advice and best practices as I figured out how to serve an organization that previously had no formal prospect research and could be almost hostile to prospect management as a concept. I cannot encourage enough reaching out to your peers in prospect development, both professionally and personally, and I’m grateful Apra-IL is a great venue for it.What is the last movie you watched (and how was it)?

5. What is the last movie you watched (and how was it)?

The new Naked Gun finally hit streaming last week, and I was thrilled it was just as funny and ridiculous as I hoped. (If I can make a bonus recommendation, it made me want to watch Angie Tribeca again.)