28 Apr AGS at AFP ICON in New Orleans

Last month, three of our staff – our President/CEO, Julie Assel; our VP of Operations, Julie Alsup; and Administrative Assistant, Katie Kendle – traveled down to New Orleans to the AFP ICON conference to exhibit and talk to development staff from across the world about their grant needs.

We connected with these development professionals in four different ways. If they already had a grant professional on staff, many of them were relatively new to their positions, so we talked to them about our professional development opportunities that can help make those grant professionals more effective, more confident, and more successful.

Second, we talked with development directors who didn’t even know that you could outsource grant services, development directors who were trying to do it all. They’re amazing, but they know their grant revenue would increase if they could have a company like ours that had tremendous capacity for grants, and that was dedicated to finding additional opportunities, applying for those opportunities, and working with their staff to ensure that this grant revenue was appropriately managed.

Third, we talked with development directors who had outsourced grant services in the past, but often this was just a single person, and they were finding that person was running out of capacity as their grant program grew. They talked with us about how to either support overflow for that person or potentially switch to us as a company because of our large number of grant professionals on staff.

Lastly, we talked with organizations who, again, had a grant professional on staff but only occasionally needed overflow work or were perhaps applying for a federal grant that was new to them. They were looking for technical assistance, reviewing, coaching, and overflow when their schedule became too much.

In general, the conversations we had at AFP ICON were perfect examples of the calls we get all the time from organizations that know they want to increase their grant revenue, but either do not have the expertise on staff, or their current staff are simply too busy to give additional grants the attention needed to truly benefit their organizations. We really enjoyed talking with the diverse population of development staff who attend AFP ICON, and look forward to attending in future years!