Kresge Foundation Visit

Shortly after I started the position I had the opportunity to help coordinate a visit by a major donor, the Kresge Foundation. Kresge has donated over $1 million to ASU, and this visit was to give them a tour of the Phoenix and Tempe campuses as well as to present them with some other programs and initiatives that they might invest in sometime down the road. I helped by creating folders for the Kresge gift officers with program information as well as personal bios of all the people that they would meet throughout their visit. I also helped with the lunch catering order and got to have lunch with the officers and sit in on some of the presentations. The highlight was definitely the presentation that took place in ASU’s Decision Theatre, which I had never seen before. If you ever get the chance to check it out, I recommend it – very impressive, and it definitely “wowed” the Kresge Foudation. Overall, the visit was a good experience as it gave me a chance to see how me maintain and foster relationships with other foundations. 

Scuba Diving

So I thought I'd do a random post about scuba diving. While I was teaching English in Thailand, I also got my diving certification. One of the best things I've ever done! I ended up going on about 15 dives in Thailand and Malaysia. Each one was an amazing experience. I saw some beautiful reefs and a ton of sea creatures. Turned out that I actually swam with the deadliest shark in the world without knowing it! I saw a Bull Shark on my second or third dive and the the dive masters told me that they weren't aggressive - it wasn't until I tuned in to Shark Week that I found out Bull Sharks have attacked more people than any other type, and that Jaws is based on a Bull Shark story.  Pretty crazy. Anyway, I'm totally addicted and can't wait to swim with some Great Whites or whales someday. I've attacked a link to a dive video we made from out trip to Sipadan Island in Malaysian Borneo. There are a few reef sharks at the end. This was one of Jacques Cousteau's favorite dive spots.

MGMT is playing over the video because the song was crazy popular while we were over there :-)

Helping to facilitate a training

One of the things I like most about the Foundation is the people I work with and the fact that I get to collaborate with them on different projects. One major project I had been working on for the past month was to help facilitate a training for all foundation fundraisers about our Endowment spending policy.  If you don’t know, an endowment is essentially a gift that is pooled with other gifts and invested so that it continues to grow and pays out indefinitely.  Part of the reason I liked being apart of this was because I had no real idea what an endowment was beforehand and it was a great learning opportunity. The training included information on how we invest our endowments and how those investments have been performing. This is important info because pretty soon we release endowment reports to all of our donors, and the fundraisers have to be able to explain them and field any questions. This is usually something fundraisers dread because they aren’t finance experts. So myself, along with three other experienced development staff, worked together to put together an informative and fun training. I didn’t handle too much of the detailed investment information, because the other three were experts, but I did put together a pretty sweet Jeopardy review game that everyone got a kick out of! It helped to make the dry material a little more fun to go over. We’ve had a lot of good feedback from everyone who attended, including my supervisors, so that has felt pretty good! 

Football tailgate

Just had my first opportunity to work an ASU football game! One major way that we show appreciation for or try to build relationships with donors is through home football games. The Foundation has three suites in the stadium. Every home game a gift officer is designated as the host of one of the suites and he or she invites major donors from their portfolio (normally those with the capacity to give $25,000 or more). Until now, I just helped coordinate the events: I decorated the suites ahead of time, handled the catering orders and put together bio-sheets with information about each of the guests. Last week one of the gift officers had extra space in their suite, so I got to attend. It was a pretty good time. I got to go to the President’s tailgate, which had some really good food. Then in the suites I got to meet and speak with some very interesting people. A couple guests had their MPA’s from ASU so it was great to hear how they were using their degrees. Overall, it was a great networking experience and it was a fun way to watch a football game…even though it wasn’t much of a game - we destroyed Colorado!