In our rapid-fire lightning rounds, clients take the stage for punchy 15-minute presentations—live demos, clever hacks, and real problem-solving in action. Each presenter tackles a distinct challenge, so you walk away with a toolkit of tactics you can actually use. No fluff, no filler, just tactical strategies to help you lead your teams.

Speakers:

⚡ Intentional readiness planning, stakeholder alignment, and other implementation lessons with Ed Testa, Vice President Information Services, Philanthropy, Enterprise Web Solutions & Digital Platforms, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

⚡ Jill Baltz, Assistant Vice Chancellor VQ Operations, Vanderbilt University

⚡Sunk cost theory and how it affects bad decisions with Linda Hartford, Vice President and Chief Information Officer, The University of Iowa Center for Advancement

Three practitioners. Three solutions. Fifteen minutes each.

In this lightning round, your peers will share the Salesforce optimizations they’ve built and the problems they solved along the way—from inbox automation to event data cleanup. Walk away with ideas you can take straight back to your team.

⚡ Leveraging Salesforce inbox and contact reports with Dean Ernzen, Director, Application Services, University of Notre Dame

⚡ Building a Lightning Web Component to complement SmartBatch with Todd Rheinfrank, Assistant Vice President for Advancement Information Systems, Carnegie Mellon University

⚡ Improving event data in Salesforce with Lindsey Reinstrom, Director of Event Technology and Strategy, University of Tennessee Foundation and Matthew Frank, VP of Technology Evangelism, Blackthorn

Every shop runs differently—but the best ones know how to get the right information to the right people at the right time. In this lightning round, practitioners share how they’re using Kindsight to empower their frontline fundraisers: simplifying reports, surfacing insights, streamlining workflows, and making it easier for gift officers to walk into every conversation prepared and confident. Short presentations, real strategies, and plenty of ideas to steal—whether you’re a prospect researcher, advancement services pro, or frontline fundraiser looking for inspiration to bring back to your team:

⚡ Building actionable development officer dashboards with Jerry Sinning, Managing Director of Development, Data insights, University of Colorado Anschutz

⚡ Communicating implementation updates with Riley Jordan, Director, Solutions Management, Advancement Information Services University Development and Alumni Relations, University of California, Berkeley

⚡ Emily Guy, Assistant Vice Chancellor Prospect Development & Engagement, Texas Tech University System

Prospect researchers don’t just find data—they find signals in the noise. In this lightning round, researchers from across the Kindsight community take the stage to share the innovative ways they’re using iWave and Kindsight to surface better prospects, sharpen portfolios, and give frontline teams the intelligence they need to move faster and more confidently. Three presenters, fifteen minutes each—and you walk away with creative approaches you can take straight back to your desk:

⚡ Integrating iWave live profiles and custom Analytics and Lightning Reports for prospect segmentation with Mattie Snell, Director of Portfolio Strategy & Research, Texas A&M Foundation

⚡CASE engagement data made easier with Julie Domel, Interim Senior Director of Advancement Resources and Affinaquest/Salesforce Administrator, Trinity University

AI is moving faster than most organizations can govern it. For executives, that gap between what’s possible and what’s governed is where risk lives—and where opportunity gets left on the table. This session is a peer-level conversation for leaders who need to move past the hype and make real decisions: What governance structures need to exist at the top before your teams start adopting AI tools? Is your data infrastructure actually ready? And how do you set organizational strategy before your vendors set it for you?

We’ll dig into what boards are starting to ask, where ungoverned AI creates liability, and how leading institutions are building the internal capacity to act decisively. No demos. No hype. Just the strategic conversation you need to be having.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Moderator: Cherian Koshy, CFRE, CAP®, ACFRE, Vice President of Market Insights, Kindsight
• 🎙️ Hemant Kashyap, CPO, Kindsight
• 🎙️ Michelle Bates, VP, Information Technology, Purdue for Life Foundation
• 🎙️ Kevin Vaughn, Associate Vice Chancellor, Advancement Operations at University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences

Manual workflows don’t scale—and when you’re managing a Grateful Patient Program, a multi-system advancement operation, or any large dataset, the gap between your data and your outreach starts to cost you real donor relationships.

This session is a practical deep dive into data-driven automation: how to move from time-intensive manual processes to intelligent workflows that keep pace with your pipeline. You’ll hear from two organizations that have done exactly that—at scale and across very different contexts.

Hoag Hospital Foundation cut their weekly data processing time from 13 hours to under 15 minutes, reduced a 24-step workflow to 7, and raised $5.1 million in the first six months of 2026 with 12 major gift proposals actively in play.

Washington University in St. Louis tackled the complexity of a multi-system environment—building bidirectional integrations between their advancement CRM and key institutional partners, including the Chancellor’s Office Salesforce org, their event management platform, and their Epic billing system, to eliminate duplicate data entry, enable real-time information sharing, and transform a manual Grateful Patient process into a streamlined identification and qualification workflow.

Drawing on both organizations’ experiences, you’ll walk away knowing how leading advancement shops are connecting their systems intelligently, reducing manual burden across their teams, and making sure no opportunity slips through the cracks.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Alyce De La Cruz, Executive Director, Advancement Services, Hoag Hospital Foundation
• 🎙️ Rebekah Kurisu, Manager, Grateful Patient Program, Hoag Hospital Foundation
• 🎙️ Beverly Bain, Executive Director, Advancement Technology Solutions, Washington University in St. Louis

Who better to lead a conversation about annual giving than the people shaping it from inside the community? This session is co-led by the chairs of Kindsight’s Annual Giving User Group—practitioners who work in the trenches and have spent time listening to what annual giving teams across the community are actually grappling with.

Structured as a panel with plenty of room for open discussion, this is your chance to dig into the strategies, challenges, and decisions that don’t always make it into a polished presentation: what’s moving the needle on donor engagement, how teams are approaching segmentation and personalization, and how annual giving programs are evolving in response to shifting donor behavior. Come with questions. Leave with ideas.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Adam Compton, Executive Director of Annual Giving, North Carolina State University
• 🎙️ More speakers to be released soon!

The first 90 days are the ultimate proving ground for a new Director of Research and Prospect Management. Inheriting legacy portfolios is common, but successfully resetting them requires a blend of data-driven confidence and strategic buy-in.

In this session, U.S. Air Force Academy Association & Foundation’s Amy Modin shares a proven blueprint for navigating this critical transition. We will walk through how to utilize iWave insights to audit “cluttered” portfolios and establish a clear roadmap for success. Beyond the director’s perspective, we will discuss how this same blueprint is being used to onboard and empower three new major gift fundraisers—turning overwhelming data into a prioritized strategy they can actually follow. Whether you are a new leader or looking to accelerate the performance of your frontline team, you’ll leave with a step-by-step plan to make your first 90 days (and theirs) count.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Amy Modin, Director of Research and Prospect Management, U.S. Air Force Academy Association & Foundation

After go-live, the requests don’t stop—they multiply. Enhancement ideas, data concerns, reporting gaps, workflow pain points, bug fixes: they all land at once, from every direction. How do you prioritize? How do you separate urgent from important? How do you land on the right technical solution without creating downstream risk?

The answer is the Golden Triangle: a structured partnership between Business Analysts, Developers, and Subject Matter Experts. When all three are aligned, decisions get made strategically. When one operates in isolation, gaps form.

University of Chicago Advancement built this model into their Technology Change Advisory Council, launched in Summer 2024. The Council brings all three groups together to sequence work, evaluate risk, and ensure technology change is intentional—not reactive. Today’s panelists are founding members who lived through UChicago’s 2023 Ascend go-live and built this framework from the ground up. Leave with a governance framework you can adapt and bring back to your own team.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Ryan Horvath, Director, Systems and Process Improvement, University of Chicago Advancement Technology
• 🎙️ K Shelton, Director, Analytics and Business Intelligence, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business
• 🎙️ Kristine Lo, Senior Director, Analytics, University of Chicago Advancement
• 🎙️ Will Eschleman, Manager, Advancement Systems, University of Chicago Information Technology Services

When gift processing breaks down, everyone feels it. This moderated panel pulls back the curtain on how advancement shops are actually running their gift operations: the staff structures that work, the CRM workflows that save hours, and the emerging trends forcing teams to rethink long-standing processes.

Expect a practical, peer-to-peer conversation covering the real stuff—how shops are organizing teams for maximum efficiency, the workflow configurations that reduce manual touchpoints, and how shifts like the rise of DAFs are changing the way payments get processed and recorded. Whether you’re troubleshooting a bottleneck or building toward a more scalable operation, you’ll leave with concrete ideas you can bring back to your team.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Moderator: Caroline Chang, VP Advancement, Kindsight
• 🎙️ Laurie Pung, Director of Gift and Record Management, Michigan State University
• 🎙️ Stephan Pearce, Executive Director, Information Systems & Analytics, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
• 🎙️ Sushmita Seth, Director, Information Systems, University of California, San Francisco

AI is showing up in more fundraisers’ workflows every day—but using it well is harder than it looks. Lean on it too much and your outreach starts to feel generic, or worse, donors can tell. Ignore it and you’re leaving real efficiency on the table.

This session is a practical, research-backed conversation about how fundraisers can integrate AI thoughtfully. We’ll share fresh findings—released for the first time at KindCon—on AI sycophancy: what it is, why it matters for fundraising, and how it shapes the quality of the content and insights AI produces. From there, we’ll build a framework for knowing when to trust AI output, when to push back and modify it, and when human judgment needs to lead entirely.

You’ll leave with a clearer sense of where AI genuinely strengthens the fundraiser’s process—from prospect prep to outreach to stewardship—and a structured approach for making those calls confidently in your own work.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Cherian Koshy, CFRE, CAP®, ACFRE, Vice President of Market Insights, Kindsight
• 🎙️ More speakers to be released soon!

Most prospect research answers the question “who has capacity?” The best research asks something harder: “who has capacity and genuine alignment—and how do we find the ones we’ve overlooked?”

This session is a deep dive into advanced research techniques for major and principal gift work. First, Juli Nguyen, Sr. Director of Prospect Operations & Data Strategy at Pomona College, will share how she transformed a decentralized, relationship-driven research operation into a centralized intelligence engine—using iWave batch screening to build a prospect pyramid, surface hidden gems, re-engage prematurely disqualified prospects, and validate fundraising priorities through affinity modeling before greenlighting them. The result: a 44% expansion of Pomona’s advancement function, including two entirely new teams built on the back of data-driven insight.

The second half of the session broadens the conversation, with additional practitioners sharing their own advanced research approaches. Come ready to go deep—this one is for researchers who want to move beyond capacity scores and build something more durable.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Juli Nguyen, Sr. Director of Prospect Operations & Data Strategy, Pomona College
• 🎙️ More speakers to be released soon!

You’re live. Now what? This room is for teams in the thick of stabilization—building user confidence, tackling shadow systems, and figuring out what “actually using the CRM” looks like in practice. You’ll compare first-year priorities with peers, surface the pitfalls that slow teams down (over-customization, unclear ownership, stalled training), and share what’s working. Leave with a practical checklist for the next 6–12 months: clear milestones, governance models, and role-based training approaches that move your team from go-live to genuinely running.

You’re past stabilization—now it’s about getting more out of what you have. This room runs two connected conversations for teams at different points in the same journey.

At the optimization tables, the focus is on deepening adoption, retiring workarounds, and making the CRM work harder across the organization. You’ll cover how to structure feedback loops with functional users, how to prioritize the backlog, and how to measure whether changes are actually landing. Leave with an optimization playbook you can adapt at home: a cadence for health checks, a way to sequence enhancements, and a short list of automations worth experimenting with next.

At the leadership table, the conversation shifts to aligning CRM strategy with broader institutional goals—what mature governance actually looks like when it’s cross-functional, executive-sponsored, and connected to fundraising strategy at the highest level. You’ll discuss how to set vision, define success metrics, staff a CRM Centre of Excellence, and use CRM insights to inform board reporting and institutional planning. Leave with concrete ideas for strengthening governance and using the maturity model as a shared language for driving long-term value.

Strong day-to-day usage is the floor, not the ceiling. This room is for institutions ready to push further—deeper integrations, predictive modeling, executive dashboards, AI. You’ll share what innovation initiatives have looked like at your shop, how you built the business case, and what governance structures made them stick. Leave with a sharper innovation roadmap tied to the upper stages of the maturity model, plus criteria for sequencing pilots and sustaining momentum as you move into fully strategic CRM use.

Prospect research spans every maturity stage—so this room runs as its own focused track. Conversation will center on how research and frontline teams operationalize iWave insights , refine scoring and portfolio criteria, and translate data into actionable moves management. Bring your toughest research questions and your best workarounds.

Internal champions are a concrete operational concept, not a soft one. The reason implementations succeed or stall often comes down to whether someone internal owns it with real enthusiasm.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll move beyond the idea and value of a champion, and into the practical work of building one. You’ll walk through a repeatable framework for identifying, empowering, and sustaining internal champions at your organization—whether you’re mid-implementation, preparing for an upgrade, or simply trying to deepen adoption across your team.

Come ready to work. You’ll map your own org’s landscape, pressure-test your current champion structure (or build one from scratch), and leave with a concrete action plan you can put to use the moment you’re back at your desk.

Facilitators:

• 🎙️ Joseph Calger, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer, UCSF
• 🎙️ Jeff Baynham, Associate Vice Chancellor, Advancement Services, North Carolina State University
• 🎙️ Kyle Cadieux, Principal, Attain Partners
• 🎙️ Kora Rea-Alexander, Senior Consultant, Attain Partners

Falling behind on upgrades isn’t just a technical inconvenience—it carries real costs, and leadership needs to understand them. This workshop gives you the tools to make that case and act on it. You’ll start in the full room building the “why”: what a formal upgrade policy looks like, what it costs to not have one, and what the components of a solid policy actually are.

Then you’ll split into CRM-specific groups to get hands-on—mapping your current release against recent versions, identifying what you’re missing, and surfacing the specific blockers standing between you and staying current. You’ll close back together, sharing insights across groups before committing to a concrete next step.

Leave with two things you can use immediately: a partially completed upgrade policy template ready to take back to leadership, and a prioritized blocker list specific to your CRM and actionable from day one.

Facilitators:

• 🎙️ Cameron Aisenbrey, Director of Systems Applications, Iowa State University Foundation
• 🎙️ More speakers to be released soon!

What if your team didn’t wait for the request to land—but was already a step ahead of it? This session is for prospect research, gift processing, data, and advancement services professionals ready to move from reactive support to proactive partnership with frontline fundraisers.

We’ll explore what that shift looks like in practice: anticipating moves management needs before they’re asked, proposing portfolio reviews instead of waiting for an invite, and building feedback loops that make collaboration stronger over time. Real-world examples show how teams have deepened partnerships simply by evolving their own workflows. You’ll leave with a concrete 90-day pilot idea and a one-page proposal ready to bring to a development officer—a real conversation-starter, not just a concept. Whether you’re in advancement services or research, or a fundraiser ready to share your point of view, this workshop has something for you.

Facilitators:

• 🎙️ Caroline Chang, VP Advancement, Kindsight
• 🎙️ Kate Nimety, Executive Vice President, Strategy, BWF Zuri

Prospect development maturity is more than an internal measure—it is connected to fundraising results. Building on this year’s Prospect Development Benchmark Study, developed in partnership with Apra International, this KindCon workshop will help participants understand how increases in Prospect Development Maturity Index (PDMI) scores are associated with meaningful jumps in self-reported revenue influenced by research, even after controlling for organizational size and budget.

Facilitated by Cherian Koshy of Kindsight and Lindsey Nadeau of UNICEF USA and Apra International, this interactive session will guide participants through a practical maturity assessment and help them identify the operational gaps that may be limiting research impact.

Attendees will complete the PDMI assessment; interpret the results to identify gaps in process, measurement, and strategy; and walk away with actionable strategies to improve portfolio hygiene, evaluate tracking practices, and much more.

Speakers:

• 🎙️ Cherian Koshy, CFRE, CAP®, ACFRE, Vice President of Market Insights, Kindsight
• 🎙️ Lindsey Nadeau, CFRE, Apra International President-Elect and VP of Philanthropy Insight at UNICEF USA.