2023 Schedule – Pacific Time

Fundraising involves both heart and mind. While cultivating relationships matters most, effective fundraisers expand their impact and raise more money by thinking strategically about all fundraising activities. In this workshop, we'll learn how to build a strategic fundraising program for your land trust. We’ll cover membership systems, appeal letters, Donor Circles, major gift development, capital campaigns, events, donor strategies, planned giving and more to give you the tactics you need to better engage with people and raise more money — all through a 101 lens. This workshop is for people who want a very basic overview of how to think about fundraising and how to build a program from scratch.

In this session, we’ll strip “moves management” down to the bare essentials, workshop systems for qualifying and analyzing donors and review strategies and habits for donor cultivation and stewardship. We’ll review the basic theory behind moves management, establish templates for identifying and evaluating top prospects and strategize organization techniques and programs for increasing donor giving and enhancing a culture of philanthropy. Whether you're new to major gifts or a seasoned professional, tracking donor relationships and increasing giving is impossible without a good system. Everyone talks about “moves management” or the “donor pipeline,” but what does that look like in practice? How do you get your “mid-level” donors to become major donors, and your major donors to become leadership donors? Fundraising is all about relationships, and moves management is a system for assessing, strategizing and growing those relationships in a way that assures a donor feels valued.

As the climate crisis becomes tangible to more people throughout the country, especially in underserved communities hardest hit by rising temperatures, erratic and powerful storms, and underinvestment in better and more equitable access to the outdoors, land trusts play a pivotal role in supporting, creating and leveraging public funding for the adaptation and conservation appropriate for their communities. At the time of writing, one-third of all states are considering the creation of public funding, which could create billions of dollars for parks, trails, lands, waters, natural climate solutions and more. Simultaneously, myriad counties, municipalities and districts are contemplating the creation, extension, or augmentation of local funding for conservation. For the last 25 years, Trust for Public Land has been involved with almost 650 successful ballot measures and dozens of statewide legislative campaigns creating more than $93 billion in new funding for parks, land conservation, restoration and more. Voters across the nation have approved 83% of the ballot measures directed and supported by TPL and, frequently, land trusts. During this workshop, attendees will learn about the varied efforts and mechanisms for conservation funding at the state and local level in 2023; the tools necessary to lead or support ballot measures and statewide legislation; and the Bitter Root Land Trust will share their story about the creation of county funding in a rural corner of Montana.

Fundraising should not be hard or scary. Learn from a couple of executive directors who have no fundraising training whatsoever, but who have found remarkable success by engaging donors in novel ways. Learn about building friendships and relationships with donors and not just squeezing them for support. Why have an uncomfortable conversation in some coffee shop or stuffy restaurant when when you can have fun on the ski slope, fishing river or hiking trail. Learn from real peers about how we raise money for our operations and projects and receive ideas from peers that will work for your land trust.

All land trusts want fundraising to be more efficient and effective. Not every land trust has a large budget for acquiring data to support such efforts. All land trusts can use additional data to enhance what they have. Data sources such as the US Census and county records provide powerful new insight, yet require only a small investment of time and money. Every land trust should know how to access and use these valuable resources. This workshop explains how. Real-world case studies demonstrate how lands trusts have applied these data to answer important questions such as: What new perspectives can I gain on donors and donor prospects? What can I learn from more creative analysis of my own data? How can I build accurate predictive forecasting models? What can I learn about improving access for underserved groups?

In 2021, Oregon Desert Land Trust and The Nature Conservancy partnered to create one of the largest conservation projects in Oregon by purchasing the 16,645-acre Trout Creek Ranch in southeast Oregon. This property includes livestock grazing permits on nearly 500,000 acres of public land and helps connect several established conservation areas, including national wildlife refuges and a wilderness area. This successful project raised nearly $15M in a year thanks to a shared strategy. Our learnings from this project have created the foundation for continued partnerships for decades to-come and teach us much about how organizations can collaborate effectively on a topic that can often divide organizations (fundraising).

Impact investing. Everyone is talking about it, but what exactly is it? As a land trust leader, how do you tap into it? Who among your peers is already doing it? Can we get our existing supporters to invest in our work? Is it right for my organization? In this engaging and interactive session, participants will learn about the investment world and how more and more land trusts around the country are tapping into this relatively new source of funding for bridge loans and other uses to accelerate and achieve their goals.

Maintaining and growing relationships with members, donors, supporters and the community can be a challenge. You’re not alone if you have had to set aside long-standing strategies and test out lots of new methods and ideas to stay connected in recent years. Use all that you’ve learned about what works (and what doesn’t) to create a powerful, effective marketing plan to help your land trust grow membership, participation and support. This session uses the process of creating a strategic marketing plan to integrate your lessons learned with the best practices of marketing and outreach – resulting in a plan, messages and strategies that reach, connect with and engage audiences and reach your goals. Whether your land trust wants to stay connected with long-time supporters, while also reaching a younger, more diverse audience, or attract more members, this workshop provides the steps, tools and templates you need to get started. And we’ll highlight land trust staff and examples to inspire and talk through the real work of refreshing and implementing your marketing efforts.

Bequests can be an important contributor to a land trust’s fiscal health. This is a non-lawyer’s practical guide to handling bequests, particularly problematic ones, to ensure that land trusts of all sizes do not leave bequest dollars on the table. We’ll include what to ask for and when, what to do if you’re ignored, how to spot problems on accountings and tax returns, including avoiding income taxes, effectively collecting IRAs/life insurance/POD accounts, how to (politely) decline a request to return your bequest, when to join in/sit out litigation, with or without an attorney. We’ll include suggested letters and tax and probate forms.

Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast. Look at any struggling fundraising program and you can see that directly. Good plans without strong culture lead to limited action, leading further to paltry results. Despite the best possible fundraising strategy, successful fundraising is an attitude challenge, and the barriers are mostly about culture. This workshop will examine the issues of organizational culture that prevent successful fundraising. It will engage the participants to help them understand their fundraising challenges and begin reshaping their organizational culture to support a stronger, more effective fundraising program.

Many land trusts have started to think strategically about how facilities can help achieve their mission and build on their success with land conservation. A facility is an opportunity for a land trust to engage their community in meaningful discussions on approaches to address climate change, reconnect a community with its key natural assets like a water body and bring diverse elements of a community together in a common shared story. Financing an ambitious building requires different fundraising skills, sources of capital and a lengthier planning process than the typical land conservation project. This workshop will look at two compelling case studies from the Galveston Bay Foundation and the San Diego River Park Foundation in their quest to build facilities that reconnect their communities with their namesake water bodies. Both Living Building Change Standards and LEED Green Build certification will be explored as climate change strategies. Participants will complete an assessment of their own organizations readiness to think about a facility and consider if they have the fundraising prerequisites before starting the process. Participants will walk away with overview of timeline for planning and fundraising for facility that they can adapt to meet their needs.