By Elisa Shoenberger, Benchmarking Analyst, Grenzebach Glier and Associates
This is the saddest week of the year. It’s a little over a week since APRA International ended. It’s the longest period until the next one!
As you may tell, APRA International remains one of my favorite times of the year. There’s nothing like a few days to talk and learn from your colleagues from all over the world and different institutions. Plus, this was the 30th annual APRA International.
One of the sessions that I attended “Organizational Capacity Ratings: Don’t Leave Them out of Your Campaign Mix Tape”. Four institutions presented their different methods for handling organizational data including University of British Columbia, University of Alberta, University of Washington, and University of California – San Diego. Each institution reviewed how they rated organizations. I thought that University of Alberta’s system was the most impressive. Instead of developing one system to rate both corporations and foundations, they have developed two different systems for each. In their system, they use three criteria for rating corporations, creating a matrix to rate corporations on operating revenue, affinity, and fit. The system for rating foundations has four criteria including capacity, assets, affinity and fit. This is such a great idea! It never occurred to me to have different systems but it does make a lot of sense.
I also attended a very useful presentation, “Grateful Patient 2.0: Integrating Patient data into Distinct Prospect Pools” from the University of California San Diego. They talked about how they turned their direct mail grateful patient system into physician based fundraising with a major gift focus in two years. That’s pretty incredible! The majority of their presentation dealt with how they got a daily patient feed of in-patient and out-patient data from the hospital each night and the administrative work that went in to it. That feed needed to be HIPAA compliant so it was critical to have good relationships with Compliance Officers to earn their trust and get the right data consistently. Their end result was a problem that every shop hopes for- a huge number of new constituents.
My last session was “You Spin Me Right Round: Fundraising Regulation & GDPR Changes in the UK.” This session talked about the current and future privacy laws and their impact on fundraising. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will make the privacy laws stricter and will be implemented on May 25, 2018. It is critical to note that organizations need to be compliant when the law goes into effect so the time to plan is now. This law will “enhance data subject rights, increase fines, international reach, and stricter consent requirements.” People need to be informed of their rights about their data in a clear way. People must opt-in, instead of opting-out like here in the States. Further clarification will be released in the upcoming months and even at the beginning of 2018.
The above are just a few nuggets that I learned at this year’s APRA International. I met wonderful people, learned a lot of great things. I can’t wait for next year’s conference!
