Education is Not Just for Large Organizations
Several years ago I wrote a letter, with three other colleagues, to the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy (AHP) regarding a choice their board made about the conferences the organization was planning to eliminate. Our letter was not in support but in the complete opposite. It appears the issues we brought up some six or eight years ago are coming to bear for others as well.
AHP used to conduct regional conferences around the United States. They were really managed by a group of volunteers and expenses were kept, most of the time, on the lower end to ensure local, smaller hospital fundraising teams could attend to receive the kind of education that was necessary for growth in the industry without having to travel long distances. Then one year, AHP decided to eliminate all the regional conferences to be replaced with two bigger ones. My concern at the time, along with three other colleagues, was that the smaller hospitals could not travel, because of costs, to larger communities where larger conferences normally take place. Basically, the learning that would occur at the conferences would be eliminated for a huge percentage of smaller healthcare foundations and development offices.
Fast forward to the beginning of April. An article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy brought back many of these sentiments with an article dealing with this exact issue. A lot of smaller nonprofits, well outside of healthcare, cannot afford to go to these larger conferences that are in very large cities where hotel prices can run anywhere from $300 a night up to $400 or $500 a night. Thus, education and the opportunity to meet others are limited to only those organizations that have the largest resource bank for education.
The argument from the associations is that they provide learning online. Webinars. Blogs. And while that has value and is something I embrace, it doesn't replace the individual opportunity for people to gather together, commiserate about life experiences, and learn in a group environment. There's value in that. And that's what the article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy discusses as several nonprofit leaders are beginning to put on local/regional conferences with very reasonable costs.
The letter I co-wrote several years ago articulated our concerns for many smaller nonprofit hospital foundations and after finding the article recently, the arguments are still as true today as they were then. How can we expect the next generation of fundraising professionals to be what they can be if they don't have the opportunity for learning… and not just online learning? I find it fascinating that an article six or eight years later articulates many of the concerns that I had not so long ago.
