Are you ever curious how a peer institution handles their portfolio reviews? What about their metrics? How do they manage research requests and how in-depth do they go? These questions are natural and one of the main drivers of people to attend large professional conferences and connect with their colleagues. APRA-IL wants to help you connect with your institutional peers and answer your burning questions!!  

On September 30, 2016, APRA-IL is celebrating our 20^th anniversary during our fall conference on Northwestern University’s Evanston campus. The concept of our conference this year is collaboration, building networks, and partnerships with your fellow APRA-IL members. As a Board, we wanted to provide a different kind of program that challenged our members to build support systems beyond their organizations. I know some of us get institutional tunnel vision and forget that we have colleagues beyond our office and those can be some of the most helpful and beneficial colleagues to ask for ideas, opinions, and inspiration. I also know that our members are some of the most innovative, generous, and experienced prospect development professionals.

At each APRA International conference I attend, I’m continually impressed and proud at the contributions that our chapter members provide to our profession and that they are our best representation of who and what APRA-IL stands for. While I’m lucky enough to be a witness to this collaboration at the International level, I feel that we lack that dedicated space, time, and network on the chapter level. Not every member of APRA-IL can attend and benefit from an annual large conference and so it is our goal this year to dedicate our fall conference to creating that same sense of community and collaboration time for our chapter.  

The program itself will start at 1 p.m. and will be split in three tracks, Prospect Research, Prospect Management, and Data Analytics. Each track will be facilitated by an APRA-IL Board member or volunteer, who will help curate the conversation. We are asking that attendees submit topics, questions, and suggestions on what they would like to discuss with their peers. We want these conversations to be directly beneficial to your current work and allow you the opportunity to share or inquire about the work of your institutional peers within APRA-IL. In order to be prepared for the day, please email your topics, questions, and suggestions to apraillinois@gmail.com. We will include these in your respective tracks and build them into the round table discussions. In addition to submitting your questions, we also ask that you bring materials that you’d like to share i.e. (reports, profiles, charts, etc.). This will increase the depth and quality of our conversations.