Marche 2

1:00 pm - 2:15 pm

Best-in-Class Fundraising: Leveraging Volunteers to Drive Revenue

Bill Kitson, United Way Worldwide

Join experienced United Way Worldwide and local United Way Resource Development staff to learn how to leverage your volunteers to help you stay relevant and engaged with corporate and community donors. Practical application and tools will be shared to scale to any size UW or community!

2:15 pm

Afternoon Break

Marche 2

2:30 pm - 3:45 pm

Best-in-Class Fundraising: It's all about the Data

Annie Davies, United Way Worldwide, Shelley Griffin, Sam Leyvas, and Jhenifer Shipe, Valley of the Sun United Way

Are you using all the data available to make decisions that drive revenue? This session will highlight best practices from high-performing United Ways for overall campaign planning, prioritizing and developing strategies for growing key corporate accounts, developing account plans, and monitoring the results and course correcting. 

Marche 1

Powering Impact by Diversifying Revenue

Eric Glaser, United Way Worldwide, Lindsay Fox, United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties, Patty Gates and Emily Tilton, United Way of Weld County

Making a sustained impact on critical community issues requires sustained resources from diverse revenue sources. This session will explore the practices of United Ways that have woven together support from several different channels to power significant impact efforts. Concrete ideas will be discussed for fundraising and engagement by building multi-dimensional relationships. 

Marche 2

Decreasing Homelessness through Aging Out Foster Youth Housing and Trauma-Informed Care

Mark Young, Mesa United Way

Homelessness and poverty are concerns of every United Way. Efforts to diminish the number of people on the street do not keep up with the number of people finding themselves without a proper place to live. Our attempts often focus on the chronically homeless, but there may be some things we can do to reduce homelessness over the next decade. Statistically, half of all aging out foster kids experience homelessness, abuse, and incarceration. Trauma-informed efforts could be the answer to improving the lives of young people and reducing the number of people experiencing homelessness.

Marche 3

Is your community READY? United we can Alleviate the Risk and Impact from Disasters

Rico Peralta, United Way Fresno and Madera Counties, Kalie Brisbon, Cherish Padro and Melody Proebstel, United Way of Northern California

Join this interactive learning session about the power and impact of integrating emergency preparedness and disaster mitigation strategies across our programs and services. We must accept the reality that it’s not a question of if, but when the next disaster will strike. Thinking of wildfires alone, an alarming new United Nations report warns that the number of extreme wildfires is expected to increase 50% globally by the end of the century and our systems are largely unprepared to manage the crisis. The impact of these larger and hotter wildfire disasters is something United Way Northern California and United Way Fresno and Madera Counties know first-hand. As leaders covering diverse rural, urban, and extremely geographically isolated parts of the state we worked together to support the design and implementation of the successful LISTOS California Campaign. Through this initiative that reached over 2 million Californians between 2019 and 2021, we were able to build resiliency in vulnerable, hard-to-reach communities at high risk for wildfire, earthquake, and flood. There were incredible lessons learned and valuable resources that helped us address disasters of all types, including the pandemic that we would like to share, including innovative ways to engage and protect residents in culturally competent ways; developing messaging that is asset-based; and always meeting people where they are at. Attend this learning session if you want to take away tips, tools, and battle-tested strategies for implementing a successful emergency preparation and disaster resilience strategy in your own community. Whether you’re charged with launching a small city-wide initiative or seeking to serve a larger county-wide or regional movement targeting high-risk residents. We want you to know that there are relevant programs, prototypes, and funding prospects that you should consider no matter what stage of implementation you are in currently. 

Modena 1

Turning Neighbors into Friends: Making the Case for Increased Impact (and Revenue) via partnerships between United Ways

Lisa Wright, Inland Southern California United Way and Blake Pang, United Way of Linn, Benton, & Lincoln Counties

Are you somewhere between non-speaking terms with to recently merged with another United Way and/or 211? If so, this session is for you! We will provide little known ways to work in partnership with your neighboring (or somewhat neighboring) United Ways and 211s to build a relationship that will increase your reach, your impact, and your resources for your region. We’ll also leave you with proven tactics and new United Way tools, and practical advice to help grow your United Way. Session leaders have seen their organizations grow nearly 3600% over the past two years and are willing to answer all the tough questions you have about this sometimes-touchy topic.

Modena 2

Driving Change Through Social Impact Funds

Jason Riffe, United Way of Greater Los Angeles

This learning session is a presentation and discussion focused on harnessing market-driven approaches to create equity stakes for historically underbanked populations to address gaps in investment opportunities, build collective support networks, and generate unrestricted revenue for nonprofits. The session will center social impact fund structures that are utilized by two United Way of Greater Los Angeles pilot programs: The Affordable Housing Initiative (AHI), a fund that opens access to sub $1,000 apartments for homeless and housing insecure individuals while investing in minority-led affordable housing developers; and the Women’s Investment Network (WIN), a pooled investment fund and mutual aid network that generates double-digit returns for LMI Black and Latina women that were previously only reserved for institutional investors. The presentation will provide insights into how these programs were engineered to have the greatest impact while also generating unrestricted revenue for United Way, and the core fund structure concepts that can be universally applied to different types of programming. It will then open the floor to questions and discussion. 

Modena 3

Government Funding: Securing, Managing & Reporting

Annie Davies and Steve Taylor, United Way Worldwide, Bill Maikranz, United Way of South Central Idaho, Michelle Murphy and Ann Truxaw Ramirez, Orange County United Way, and Kim Starrs, Inland Southern California United Way

Government grants are an indispensable revenue source for both seed funding and sustained efforts. This session will explore what is available, how to apply, the needed reporting capacity, and financial accountability requirements. Ways to allocate expenses across functional areas and approaches to integrating with your impact agenda will be highlighted. 

Marche 1

211 as a Tool to Power Your Impact Agenda

Joshua Pedersen, United Way Worldwide

Using 211 services and the National 211 Data Platform can be powerful tools to advance your impact agenda and drive your United Way’s relevance. This workshop will dive into making the most of the 211 services and data to respond to issues around education, health, and financial stability. Discover how your United Way can harness texting, community resource directories, and impact dashboards to maximize your presence and leadership around social services. 

Marche 2

Building with Amazon Web Services to Better Serve Those in Need

Josh Madfis, United Way Monterey County, Jessica Muroff, United Way Suncoast, Casey Adams, Leslee Stockton, Chris Ticknor, Orange County United Way, Nick Winfrey, Maui United Way, Sangeeta Hardy and David McCann, Amazon Web Services

Four United Way affiliates across the country are leveraging AWS technology to scale strategies that result in deep impact for their customers and raise revenue for their agencies. This workshop will present solutions that: help customers access services and resources efficiently; leverage data to address gaps in services and develop corporate social responsibility partnerships; develop a digital hub for volunteer and philanthropic engagement and a comprehensive tool for serving stakeholders. In addition, participants will learn how affiliates can access these solutions them via a private United Way App Marketplace. 

Marche 3

Shared Service Models, Ideas & Considerations

Annie Davies, United Way Worldwide, Lindsay Fox, United Way of Fresno & Madera Counties, Cecilia Rivas, CLA, Bill Hulterstrom, United Way of Utah County, and Deirdre Sullivan, United Way of Larimer County

Shared services are not only employed to increase efficiency and improve operations but can also be a source of new revenue and a key component of a local United Way’s impact agenda. This session will include: 

• Why United Ways in the west are utilizing external providers for finance and other back-end services;
• Questions to ask when considering hiring a vendor to perform back-end services;
• Sharing programming and back-end support between neighboring United Ways and; 
• How to utilize shared services to diversify revenue and create impact in your community

Modena 1

Building Your Sustainable Funding Muscle

Evelyn Morgner, United Way Worldwide, Melissa Dracup and Madison Jones (United Way of Central New Mexico)

Developing sustainable funding and diversifying revenue channels is a clear priority for our network as noted in the recent network survey conducted by UWW. This session will provide practical guidance on how to establish effective practices for planned giving, endowment building and other long-term, sustainable revenue sources. Moreover with specific examples of how best to build sustainable funding from United Way of Central New Mexico’s experience as well as a description of their bold $20 Million Endowment Campaign to celebrate their anniversary, this session will provide you with ideas on how you can diversify your revenue channels and build your sustainable funding muscle. 

Modena 2

Financial Leadership: Communicating the Financial Information that Matters

Gregg Indictor and Deanna Peterson, Your Part-Time Controller, LLC

The United Way, like many nonprofits, oftentimes lack dedicated staff with formal finance or accounting expertise and experience. However, it’s vital for United Way executives, staff, and board members to have timely and accurate financial information so they can clearly understand the organization’s financial story. In this presentation, we will identify key pieces of financial information that should matter most to nonprofit leaders and provide tips for how to best communicate it so nonprofit leaders can make better business decisions.

Modena 3

Leading a United Way During Times of Change

Eric Glaser, United Way Worldwide, Steve Ortiz, United Way of Santa Barbara County, and Evelyn Edson, United Way of Albany County

Most United Ways are in the midst of one or more transformational change initiatives including becoming a racial equity champion, strengthening their digital engagement efforts, and framing and unbundling their impact agenda into a set of compelling investment opportunities. Successful intensive change efforts such as these demand a crystal-clear vision for success, empowerment of and effective communications with staff and board, and alignment of functions and workflow. In this session, two United Way leaders will explore the successes and challenges they faced as they navigated the lifecycle of change at their United Way.

Marche 1

Creating a High-Performing Partnership with Your Board 

Alex Fike, United Way Worldwide 

Your board is a critical leadership part of United Way. Collectively, they own and set the mission and direction for each of our organizations. Join in as we discuss how can we best partner with the entire Board for high-performance as we advance the mission of United Way. In this session, we will discuss effective practices related to United Way Boards and hear from staff experienced in Board engagement on what worked and how to overcome hurdles.

Marche 2

Artful Marketing in the Fight for Equity

Haley White, United Way Fresno and Madera Counties

An essential part of marketing is relaying facts and details about your organization’s programs, partners, events, and general-purpose. But oftentimes the WHY of these things is far more captivating for audiences than the WHAT. So how do you make emotional appeals when you’re also trying to get out information, appease grant funders, and grab people’s attention in this fast-paced world? Join United Way Fresno and Madera Counties’ Director of Marketing and Interdisciplinary Artist, Haley White, for a conversation about ways to lead your marketing efforts with storytelling and style. This presentation is interactive so please bring a notepad/journal and a willingness to play.

Marche 3

Practicing and Advancing Equity

Darlene Slaughter, March of Dimes and Nicholas Winfrey, Maui United Way

As you integrate a focus on race, equity, and inclusion, you’ll need to build individual and organizational capacity so you can move the work forward together productively and sustainably. In this session, we will explore the five ways to help you build your organizational capacity and the capacity of individuals in your organizational system. It will touch on the use of data and work toward understanding equity as critical to the work they do every day.

Modena 1

Leveraging Resource Allocation and Grantmaking to Advance Equity - Focus On DEI Strategies

Eric Glaser, United Way Worldwide, and Keisha Browder, United Way of Santa Cruz County

A core part of United Way’s work is fundraising and investing those resources back into the community to create positive change. Join us to learn how your United Way can make your strategic investments explicitly focused on closing gaps in opportunities, access, and resources to close persistent disparities between community residents and build the capacity of community organizations led by people of color. Speakers will reflect on how power dynamics between funders and funded organizations can reinforce and maintain existing inequities. You’ll leave with a better understanding of how to leverage the Framework to strengthen your United Way’s role as a fundraiser and community investor to advance equitable community change.

Modena 2

Collaborations And Mergers - Joining Forces for Greater Impact

Bill Kitson, United Way Worldwide

Increasingly United Ways are looking at ways to work better together. Collaborations can lead to increased efficiencies, donor engagement, and innovation. Mergers represent the ultimate collaboration. This session will build off the new Mergers Playbook to explore how to determine if a merger is right for their organization as well as the best and leading practices United Ways have employed in designing their mergers.

Modena 3

Reimagining Community Partnerships with Shared Purpose

Stephanie Santillanes, United Way of Central New Mexico

United Way of Central New Mexico helps companies cultivate and achieve their corporate social responsibility goals. Achieving a stronger, more vibrant, and prosperous community is our shared purpose. Companies partnering with United Way through shared purpose co-create greater value through impact, community engagement, and reputation.

Marche 1

211: Value-Based Evolution from Information & Referral to Resource Access and Navigation 

Penni Belcher and Jarrett Brunny, United Way of Pierce County

To meet our goal of lifting 15,000 families out of poverty by 2028, United Way of Pierce County has evolved South Sound 211 from a traditional Information & Referral line to a more comprehensive resource and navigation center. As community-based organizations, government services, healthcare providers, and others recognize the complexity of navigating multiple service systems for people in our community, more and more collaborative groups and impact networks are being formed to develop client-focused service delivery models. We share lessons and best practices from the creation of adaptable 211 services using navigators who are highly trained to layer enhanced services in areas such as housing, behavioral health resources, transportation, early learning, and workforce development. We show how navigating connected community networks aligned to the social determinants of health with participants improves upon 211 outcomes.

Marche 2

Disaster Response -- Is Your Agency Ready?

Larry Olmstead and Kalie Brisbon, United Way of Northern California, Kelly Batson, United Way Bay Area, and Keisha Browder, United Way of Santa Cruz County

Local United Ways in northern California have unfortunately needed to gain quick and deep expertise in handling natural disasters, especially wildfires. In this energetic and interactive session, participants will quickly rotate through three information-filled discussions focused on emergency disaster relief; disaster recovery, and fundraising for disaster. Participants will explore the realm of providing direct service to fire survivors. They will share their own experiences with emergency situations and will bring home practical tips that can help prepare their local agency for any calamity. 

Marche 3

Investing in our Leaders to Build Thriving United Ways

Alex Fike, United Way Worldwide

Leadership development is a critical component of every professional’s journey. Providing space to invest in oneself is a gift not only to the United Way staff person, but also to their team, their organization, and the people we fight for. Join us for a conversation about how talent leaders provide leadership development opportunities to achieve their goals of engaging employees, retaining talent, and building sustainable leadership for long-term success.

Modena 1

Amazon Business helps Nonprofits Effectively Streamline and Maximize their Buying Power

Juan Ramirez and Alex Corley, Amazon Business

Join United Way’s dedicated Amazon Business advisors for a discussion on how Amazon Business helps nonprofits to maximize their procurement efforts through business analytics, ongoing education, and new programs designed specifically for nonprofits. Included in the presentation will be a demo for Amazon Business showing features that will help streamline your day to day and buy more effectively.

Modena 2

The Virtuous Cycle of Advocacy for Community Impact

Pete Manzo, United Ways of California

This session will engage United Way leaders in discussing the proposition that changing the environment is the highest level of strategic impact United Way – or any philanthropy – could hope to achieve. Is it true that to create large-scale community impact, we need to catalyze changes in attitudes, behavior and policies that will be more supportive of the people we serve? “Give – Advocate – Volunteer” is our call to action, but how central is advocacy, really, as a strategy for achieving community impact? Is advocacy getting into politics that will turn off donors, or does it instead attract allies and drive revenue growth? 

We will explore why United Ways advocate as well as the how (what is United Way’s approach and culture around advocacy). Whether your United Way is just getting started in advocacy or a seasoned veteran, this session will help United Ways improve their advocacy and expand our common understanding of the power of a network approach to regional, state and federal policy advocacy.

Modena 3

Central Valley Equity Partnership: Listening to the Community First

Lindsay Fox, United Way Fresno and Madera Counties, Mari Perez-Dowling, United Way Kern County, Manuel Alvarado, United Way Merced County, Kristen Birtwhistle, United Way San Joaquin County, and Keristofer Seryani, United Way Stanislaus County 

In the Fall of 2020, the seven United Ways serving the San Joaquin Valley (San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Merced, Fresno, Madera, Kings, Tulare, and Kern counties) joined forces to combat institutional racism and cultivate equity and inclusion in their communities. As a collective, these seven United Ways made a commitment to understand the underlying currents of racism in each of their communities, delineate how it impacts their own organizations, and how they, as the largest charity in the United States, can strategically effect change and enhance their influence as a nonprofit organization. 

To this end, they developed a program to gain information about how race affects their individual communities specifically. They released a joint Request for Proposals, entitled San Joaquin Valley United Way Race and Equity Project-Community Feedback. The purpose of the initiative was to help them understand how their organizations are perceived by Black community members in their respective counties, gain insight into how to alter negative perceptions, and identify internal practices they may need to change or adopt that enables them to be culturally relevant and more effectively serve Black members of their communities. They agreed they needed a new lens to combat historic racial injustice and address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion that have persisted for generations in their communities. They believed that in order to effectively serve their communities in the future, they must embrace new paradigms that will allow them to create culturally-centric boards, implement more equitable and culturally-sensitive hiring practices, and become relevant in how they support their Black communities. But first, they recognized that they needed to listen and learn. This session covers all of the process, pain points, challenges, triumphs, and ultimately how each of their organizations have responded to the call. 

Marche 1

Community-Centered Impact: How community members can lead United Way's grantmaking, programming, advocacy, and fundraising

Ena Li, Nicole Harden and Rachel Reese, United Way Bay Area and Coreen Campos, United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties 

United Way Bay Area (UWBA) and United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties (UWFM) have both engaged community leaders to advance their core impact strategies. This learning session will provide an overview of the ways they have led with community first to incorporate community voice and lived experiences in our work. 

United Way Bay Area's Community Ambassadors Council integrates community voice and especially client voice into our programmatic, grantmaking, advocacy, and fundraising efforts. Building off UWBA’s SparkPoint Ambassador program, the council is a diverse group of Ambassadors who have participated in one or more UWBA’s funded programs as clients, staff, or volunteers with lived experience and have deep expertise in UWBA’s issue areas. UWBA’s Ambassadors collaborate in our advocacy efforts, share their stories with funders, speak to media, and provide feedback on UWBA programs. Most recently, they are conducting a participatory grant-making process to lead UWBA in distributing grants to local organizations that advance housing justice and support student success. This session will cover an overview of the Ambassadors program, how the group has advised programmatic decisions, what lessons we’ve learned from participatory grantmaking processes with community members, and how we can all better integrate client and community voice to enhance the impact that United Ways can have in their communities. 

United Way of Fresno and Madera Counties (UWFM) is stepping into year 2 of a 3-year initiative to design a replicable participatory grantmaking process across two counties in Central California. Although grantmaking is typically a conversation in philanthropy, lived experience is integral in the impact work and having this centered in philanthropy moves money toward mission and overall community impact. It is without a doubt that philanthropy focused on generational change must tackle complex social issues and as such must include lived experience and oversight from individuals who can help us understand the everyday experiences and identify the solutions only obvious to the beholder. At the root of participatory grantmaking, residents and community members become the decision-making body and influence community-wide decision-making to tackle critical social justice issues. The concept is simple: recruit community residents to make funding decisions using a clear process to facilitate their leadership development while harvesting innovation and new solutions to age-old problems. Centering lived experience is a proven and effective practice to increase financial success and systems change where residents with lived experience make decisions alongside community leaders.

Attendees can join these two United Ways working across multiple counties in the Central Valley and the Bay Area for a panel discussion con community-centered impact. This session is great for impact and resource development staff alike!

Marche 2

When the Leopard Needs to Change its Spots: A Primer in Change Management techniques to help change organizational culture, diversify revenue, and more

Jackie Hancock, United Way of Northwest Arkansas

Every organization has change resistors that keep them from performing at their best. For example, an organization that is special event-driven now wants to be more major gift-focused. Or, your board wants you to prepare strategies to revamp your revenue. These situations involve change; a change in culture, infrastructure and/or organizational behavior. What do leaders need to know about change management and executing long-term meaningful change while keeping stakeholders happy? 

Learning Outcomes - This session will introduce change management concepts and will demonstrate the 7 key steps that will help organizations identify, plan, and execute change, particularly fundraising changes. Change management is important to nonprofit organizations because if performed correctly, it can help move the organization from where it is today to where it needs to be in the future. The session will discuss differences in organizations that have a culture of embracing change and those that do not. The presentation will also show how leaders can implement change by being strategic and methodical while positively involving staff, boards, donors, volunteers, and others in organizational change.

Takeaways for participants include: understand and Identify opportunities for change in organizations, understand the 7 steps in organizational change management, and creating a culture of continual change.

Marche 3

Election 2022: Optimizing Opportunities for United Way

Steve Taylor, United Way Worldwide

The 2022 political campaign season provides United Way with unique access to candidates. This session will help you navigate the challenging electoral climate to benefit from these new relationship-building opportunities with political leaders. The legislative outlook and potential federal funding opportunities for 2022-2023 will also be discussed. 

Modena 1

Living with Wildfire: United Way's Opportunity to Build Community Resilience

Eric Legvold and Susan Hay Patrick, United Way of Missoula County, Adriane Beck, Missoula County, Pam Wilson, Coalitions & Collaboratives, and Kimiko Barrett, Headwaters Economics

Western wildfires are here to stay, threatening the health and financial stability of our communities. For the past four years, United Way of Missoula County has partnered with Missoula County's Office of Emergency Management and other diverse partners to establish "Wildfire Ready Missoula," an innovative, nationally recognized, cross-sector initiative to help homeowners in the wildland-urban interface make their property more wildfire resilient, thereby helping to mitigate devastating community losses due to wildfire. As wildfire seasons lengthen and catastrophic fire events increase across the west, United Ways have a unique opportunity to forge similar public-private partnerships that increase wildfire resiliency in the "home ignition zone," the area between the front door and the forest. This learning session will describe the innovative cost-share program developed and overseen by United Way of Missoula County and its public-sector partner that reimburses homeowners for half the cost of wildfire-mitigation efforts, forging strong relationships with fire departments and public-land agencies across jurisdictional boundaries. This upstream approach of moving from disaster relief to preventing disasters can improve community resilience while attracting new sources of public and private-sector support. 

Modena 2

Our Brand Is Our Superpower

Bill Kitson, United Way Worldwide

How to capitalize on the United Way brand and leverage it to clearly define your organization, and help develop hyperlocal products that will drive impact, and power revenue growth for your local United Way.

Modena 3

The 211 National Data Platform: A Strong Foundation to Leverage Data for Impact 

Joshua Pedersen, United Way Worldwide

The 211 National Data Platform (NDP) is the most robust repository of Information & Referral Programs and Services in the country. At this session, you will hear how the NDP:

• Provides you access to your data regardless of Information Referral Vendor
• Supports 211 collaboration as a state or regional network
• Enables data exchange with third parties in a secure way
• Includes access to a library of ready-made templates and ideas for using this data

Also discussed will be how the NDP provides opportunities for significant monetization, website embedded search systems, the ability to maintain 24/7 operations if an I/R system unexpectedly goes down, and compelling data visualization and improved disaster coordination and response.