The Development Office

Just some info about the specific area of the ASU Foundation that I work in. I'm in the Development Office of the Foundation, which essentially focuses on fundraising. We're on the top floor of the Fulton Center. The Development Office is divided into different teams: Individual Giving, Foundation Relations, Corporate Relations, Constituent Development and Estate & Gift Planning. The team names pretty much explain what they do, but briefly: Individual Giving is made up of gift officers that handle individual prospective donors; Foundation Relations deals with grants and partnerships with other foundations; Corporate Relations deals with grants and partnerships from companies and businesses; Constituent Development deals with fundraising for each of the "units" at ASU (i.e. Law, Public Programs, Engineering etc...) and Estate & Gift Planning mostly handles donors who would like to put ASU in their will or give real estate. My position is designed to support the Individual Giving team, but I've worked with pretty much all of the teams in some capacity or another, not to mention other departments such as Marketing & Communication and Research & Operations.

Why the Foundation?

I've been interested in non-profit work for a long time but never gave foundations or development too much thought. Then I conducted an interview with a non-profit manager for one of my PAF courses.  The manager really stressed the importance of money and fundraising because "if you can't keep your doors open, you can't help anybody no matter how good your intentions are". He told me to take every opportunity I could to learn about grant writing because it's an essential skill to have in the non-profit sector. I took his advice and landed a very short grant writing internship with the Gilbert Education Foundation. It turned out to be a pretty disappointing experience. They didn't give me any sort of guidance. They basically said, "Ok, we'd like you to apply for grants to fund a million dollar project to get digital projectors in every class room in Gilbert, thanks." I didn't have any information to work off of, and had very little access to members of the foundation board.  So I worked on that for a couple months but stayed on the lookout for other opportunities. It wasn't the best learning experience but it definitely made me interested in foundations - I started to think how cool  it would be to be the guy evaluating programs and dishing out money to all these great causes. So when I heard about the Foundation opportunity, I jumped at it.