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!